David Holmgren

Who is David Holmgren?

David Holmgren is the quieter of the two founders of permaculture, and perhaps the more patient one. Born in February 1955 in Fremantle, Western Australia, he wrote, as a young student in Tasmania, the manuscript from which the first book on permaculture grew. In the decades since, he has done what few thinkers do: he has tested his ideas on a small piece of land, year after year, and written down what worked and what did not.

His great contribution is to have turned a rich but sprawling body of ideas into something anyone can carry with them: three ethics and twelve design principles that apply to a balcony as well as to a farm, in a humid valley as well as on a dry slope.

His path

In 1974 Holmgren moved to Tasmania to study environmental design at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education in Hobart. That same year he met Bill Mollison by chance at a seminar at his college and soon chose him as his mentor. For about two years they worked and lived closely together, and Holmgren later called it the defining relationship of his life. The manuscript he wrote for his studies, edited and extended by Mollison, became Permaculture One, published in 1978. Holmgren was then in his early twenties.

After this beginning the two went different ways within the same movement. Mollison travelled and taught; Holmgren chose the slow path of practice. In the mid-1980s he and his partner Su Dennett took on a neglected block overgrown with blackberries on the edge of Hepburn Springs in central Victoria and began to build Melliodora, their home and demonstration site. He also worked on community projects in the region, among them the Spring Creek Community Forest and the Fryers Forest ecovillage.

The idea

Holmgren's core idea is that permaculture is not a collection of techniques but a way of thinking. In Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002) he condensed it into three ethics, care for the earth, care for people and fair share, and twelve principles. They begin with "observe and interact" and "catch and store energy" and include "produce no waste", "use small and slow solutions", "use and value diversity" and "use edges and value the marginal". Because they describe ways of acting rather than recipes, they can be carried into any climate.

A second line runs through his work: the question of how people can live well with less energy. In Future Scenarios (2009) he described possible futures after the age of cheap oil, and in RetroSuburbia (2018) he turned to the suburbs, showing how ordinary households can grow food, retrofit their houses and share with their neighbours.

A third line concerns nature itself. Holmgren argues that plants introduced by people and gone wild often take on useful work: they protect soil from erosion, hold water, build biomass and fix nutrients, and they offer shelter and food to animals. He speaks of new, recombinant ecosystems in which native and introduced species together form living communities, and he questions the practice of removing all non-native plants regardless of what they do. He set out this view in his paper Weeds or wild nature (2011) and in the foreword to Tao Orion's book Beyond the War on Invasive Species (2015). It is a courageous position, because it asks ecologists to look at what a plant does in a landscape before judging it by where it came from, and it connects with the idea of reconciliation ecology.

The work

Melliodora is the place where all of this can be seen. On a little under one hectare, house, vegetable gardens, orchard, animals and water are designed as one system, and Holmgren and Dennett have documented the site in books and opened it to visitors for decades. Besides his principles book and RetroSuburbia, his writings include Permaculture in the Bush (1985), Trees on the Treeless Plains (1994) and two books on Melliodora itself.

His work has been recognised far beyond Australia. In Florence he received the prize Il Monito del Giardino of the Fondazione Parchi Monumentali Bardini e Peyron, which honours people for their work on ecological awareness, and Central Queensland University awarded him an honorary doctorate.

What became of it

The twelve principles are taught in permaculture courses around the world, and the principles book has been translated into several languages. They have also inspired movements beyond permaculture, among them the Transition initiatives that help towns and neighbourhoods prepare for a future with less energy. Through his steady work and his openness about results, Holmgren has given permaculture a voice that is both visionary and grounded.

What we learn from David Holmgren

From Holmgren we learn that principles travel better than recipes. Sa Medada is a steep, summer-dry slope in Sardinia, very different from Melliodora; yet "observe and interact", "use small and slow solutions" and "use edges and value the marginal" fit our land as well as his. We take from him the patience to start small, to observe over years and to record honestly what happens, the conviction behind our documentation in Project Eden.

We also learn from his look at so-called weeds. Holmgren teaches us to ask what a plant does for soil, water and life before we judge it by its origin, and to see in fast-growing newcomers a force that can help damaged land recover. Terra Humana shares this thought and draws a firm line at the EU list of invasive alien species of Union concern.