THE PLOWBOY INTERVIEW BILL MOLLISON

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Just look at all the ways you produce energy in this system: the chickens' body heat, the direct sunlight that reflects off the pond and hits the greenhouse, the radiation of the trees at the rear, the decomposition of chicken manure, and on and on. If you sit down and sketch this system out, you'll find that it's fantastically complex — with thousands of functional interactions — and will run itself . Operating on its own energy, the system automatically switches on and off. As the sun gets high in the sky, the greenhouse absorbs more heat . . . so the chickens get hot and go out, thus removing the source of animal heat. While they're outside, the birds forage in the forest and leave their manure to enrich the soil. After dark, of course, they'll go back inside to keep warm . . . taking their body heat with them.

Look at each chicken by itself and the variety of functions it's performing in this one simple model: In the coop the hen operates as a radiator, an egg producer, and a manurial system. In the forest the bird acts as a self-forager, a tree-disease controller, a fireproofer, a fertilizer producer, and a rake. One can use chickens to do quantities of useful work . . . in fact, I don't know what you can't do with chickens, once you get started!

PLOWBOY: The idea, then, is to design an ecosystem carefully . . . and once it's established, let it function almost entirely on its own?

MOLLISON: Exactly. The ideal, of course, would be a system that requires no maintenance, which is a really difficult possibility to accept. You know, when the explorers and missionaries first landed on this continent, they were shocked to find the natives sitting indolently under trees . . . but the idea that you have to work to live is a strange one to aboriginal people.

PLOWBOY: But what about such concerns as pest control?

MOLLISON: Well, most of that problem is solved by the very design of the system. Broadly speaking, the diversity that is so important in permaculture is its own most effective pest control. The greatest cause of pests in monocultural cropping is the fact that farmers set out a whole field of corn or soybeans, alone and unprotected from the plant's natural predators.

But the functional diversity of a permacultural ecosystem insures the operation of certain controls, since the designer turns the naturally antagonistic and competitive relationships among plants and animals to advantage. A complex system — with a great variety of species — is simply less susceptible to pest infestations than is a single-crop system.

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