Bill Mollison

Who was Bill Mollison?

Bill Mollison was a naturalist who looked at forests, coasts and rivers and asked what farming could learn from them. Born on 4 May 1928 in Stanley, a small harbour town in the north of Tasmania, he developed permaculture in the 1970s together with his student David Holmgren: a way of designing farms, gardens and whole settlements on the model of natural ecosystems. Few ideas in the history of ecological land use have travelled so far in a single lifetime. When he died in 2016, permaculture was being taught on every inhabited continent.

What made him a pioneer was not one technique but a way of looking. He saw that a landscape works as a whole, and that water, soil, plants, animals and people belong in one design rather than in separate departments.

His path

Mollison grew up close to the sea and the bush. He left school at fifteen and worked for years with his hands and on the water: at sea, in the forests and as a trapper. In 1954 he joined the Wildlife Survey Section of CSIRO, Australia's national research organisation, and spent long periods in the Tasmanian wilderness. In the 1960s he worked as a curator at the Tasmanian Museum, and from 1966 he studied at the University of Tasmania, where he later taught.

In 1974 a young student of environmental design, David Holmgren, met him by chance at a seminar in Hobart and soon chose him as his mentor. From their work together, and from the manuscript Holmgren wrote for his studies, came the book Permaculture One (1978). At the end of the 1970s Mollison left the university, founded the Permaculture Institute in Tasmania and from then on devoted himself entirely to teaching.

The idea

At the heart of Mollison's thinking was a simple observation from the wild: stable natural systems are diverse, perennial and largely self-sustaining. They need no ploughing and no outside inputs, and they build soil instead of using it up. Mollison wanted to design human land use in the same way, as a web in which every element serves several purposes and the output of one becomes the input of another.

From this came the tools that still shape permaculture design: careful observation of a site before any intervention, the arrangement of elements by how often people need them, the use of edges where different habitats meet and where life is especially rich, and a constant attention to water and energy. He later widened the word itself, from "permanent agriculture" to "permanent culture", because in his view economy, law and community belonged to the design as much as trees and ponds. He liked to say that many of the world's problems look complicated, while the answers often lie in living systems and are surprisingly simple.

The work

Mollison's books gave the idea its form. After Permaculture One came Permaculture Two (1979), and in 1988 Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, a large handbook covering climates from humid tropics to drylands, with chapters on water harvesting, soils, food forests, plant guilds and settlements. It remains the reference text for many teachers today.

His second great work was teaching itself. At the start of the 1980s he developed the Permaculture Design Course, a course of about two weeks that covers the whole system. Graduates were encouraged to teach it in turn, and so the knowledge spread from person to person. Mollison taught and advised in many countries; the Right Livelihood Foundation names projects in Brazil, Hawaii, Fiji, the Seychelles, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the Permaculture Academy he set up in 1994 and initiatives for ethical investment and tree planting.

In 1981 he received the Right Livelihood Award "for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture" (Right Livelihood Foundation).

What became of it

Bill Mollison died on 24 September 2016 in Hobart, aged 88. By then permaculture had become a worldwide movement of gardeners, farmers, planners and teachers. The Guardian's obituary estimated that it was practised in more than 140 countries by more than three million people; there is no official count, but the order of magnitude shows the reach of his work.

David Holmgren, in his farewell, described their meeting as the defining relationship of his life. What Mollison had shown him, he wrote, was how to build the world one wants instead of fighting the one one rejects. Many of the techniques found in this TerraWiki, from rainwater harvesting and polyculture to keyline design as part of whole-farm planning, reached a wide public through the movement he started.

What we learn from Bill Mollison

Terra Humana owes Mollison more than a set of methods. We take from him the habit of looking at a place for a long time before changing it, and of starting with water and soil rather than with a list of plants. At Sa Medada, a steep slope in Sardinia with long dry summers, this means asking first where the rain arrives, where it runs off and where it can be held.

We also take his conviction that knowledge grows when it is shared. A design course, a demonstration site, an open handbook: Mollison built his life's work on passing things on. That is the spirit in which we document our own work in Project Eden, including what does not yet succeed, so that others can learn from it as we have learned from him.