Awesome Post by Heloisa Dinsmore. Thankyou. Mollison: Make the least changes that you need to achieve what you want. Don’t cut a tree down unless you have to. . . and I’ve never had to since I’ve adopted that as a principle. Vlaun: You’ve never had to cut a tree down? Mollison: Never. I’ve never had to. Vlaun: But you said the first place you went to, you said you went to the forest and cleared an acre and a half. Mollison: Oh, now, this was before permaculture. I was hatching permaculture in that hole in the forest. In fact, I am a logger. I’ve logged forests as a profession and broken down the logs with Canadian twins and sawed them up into six houses every day, six days a week. So I’ve cut up a lot of timber for housing. Vlaun: What would someone in a situation like I’m in do? I live in a forest, more or less. Mollison: There are things I call type- one errors. The first one is I say is, for Christ’s sake, don’t move into a forest if you want to feed yourself because you’re going to have to destroy the forest to feed yourself. That’s a type one error. Once you make that error, error after error will follow. And the other thing is, don’t put your house up on a high bluff or on a ridge. We find it impossible to save you from fire. We find it very difficult to get roads to you and it will cost you much more for your roads than your house. We can’t get water up to you. We can’t keep getting it up to you in emergencies. Don’t go there. Don’t make the error of selecting that site. Vlaun: In my case, this place used to be a farm 200 years ago. It was abandoned. Trees grew up in the fields. Somebody came and cut all the big trees and cleared a couple of acres for a landing. They left this huge mess, holes where the stumps were, piles of slash, piles of stumps. We’re committed to restoring the forest ecology as well as producing our own food. Mollison: I know what you’re talking about. You want to farm there so you’ll have to clear some of it and so you’re caught in a bit of a bind. And you want to farm there so you’ll have to control the animals. You’re gonna have raccoons and possum and God knows what after your corn ears, aren’t you? So you’re gonna eat raccoon or shoot raccoon or set out wire fences against raccoon or something. So you’ve forced yourself into a situation where you’re not sure that’s where you want to be, you know, shooting deer and cutting down trees. The whole of the peninsula of northeast Australia runs right up into the tropics, it’s called Cape York. When we first got photographs of it, it was solid rain forest. In Sydney, though, we’re noticing little holes appearing in the rain forest all along the coast and in the end, they turned into quite large holes with buildings in them. So, they went to have a look, and the hippies were escaping the city by going to Cape York, finding a nice waterfall ten yards from a beach, cutting themselves a clearing, putting in a garden and building a house and then getting a bigger house and asking their friends to come. So the hippies were actually eating the rain forest. And they’re the very people who turn up in thousands to stop all forests being cut anywhere. But they themselves, at home, were the main cause of the disappearance of a very uncommon tropical rain forest because they like to live in a beautiful place. What they don’t like to do is build a beautiful place to go and live in. They like to go to a place that is already very beautiful. That’s very typical of rich people and hippies. You’ll hear hundreds of hippies say, “Oh, I’ve found this marvelous place. It’s got a waterfall; it’s got beautiful trees. It’s got thousands of birds, you know. I’m gonna build there.” It’s right in a national park! You’ll hear that a million times, right? And I think, “You stupid bastard. You’re a type one error yourself!”(laughs) The hippie should go somewhere where there’s no forest, like I did, where there’s just cattle-trodden grasslands and build that beautiful place, which I did. I put lots of lakes in it with 50 good dams, so everywhere there’s water, and I created paradise. It created itself even more than I did; I gave it a three-year start. It built itself amazingly fast. read the whole thing here: therongolianstar/2012/09/22/a-quiet-revolution-bill-mollison-on-permaculture/
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:34:26 +0000
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