- And I like to explain to my students
with as much clarity as possible, right,
the simplicity of permaculture
It's so easy to just express permaculture
as enormous amounts of complication.
Yeah, you had that problem?
Right.
That's easy.
That's easy, right?
Because it obviously is.
It covers so many things,
and none of us could be an expert in all of them.
You couldn't be.
The best you could be would be a generalist
that at least touches each subject.
You know, you might be a mapping expert.
You might come to the design science of permaculture
as a mapping expert.
Great.
You might come as an architect.
Great.
You might come as a farmer, or a mycologist, whatever.
You might have some specialist expertise.
You might have none.
You might come with no knowledge at all.
It wouldn't matter.
Because it's a connecting system between disciplines.
It's more about the connections than the disciplines.
You must always hold that, you know,
always keep that as your focus.
It doesn't matter that you are not an expert in anything.
As a teacher, you know,
your expertise has to be in communication
and simplifying the system to be understandable.
That's the skill of a teacher in permaculture.
Not over powering your students with all this information
and being the all-powerful, all-knowledgeable.
That's too easy to do in this subject,
it's way too easy to do.
The ultimate teacher produces
better students than the teacher.
The only testament of your teaching is your students
are very active, and they become better designers
and better consultants and better teachers than you are.
That's the ultimate, your redundancy, you know?
That's the ultimate achievement of aid, aid redundancy.
Which aid should be redundant now already.
So the devil's in the details.
And the devil just got created and it's called AI.
(laughs) Right?
Don't ask Google anymore.
Ask bloody AI.
It's quicker, right?
You know, you leave a permaculture course,
I think with a million questions you're uncertain about,
and all of a sudden most of them
can be answered reasonably well already.
And it's only just kicked in.
And it isn't going to stop, is it?
It's not something to say like,
"Oh, you know, nobody's going to use mobile phones anymore."
Yeah, sure.
The skill is in getting the conciseness
of a mainframe design.
You know, what is permaculture?
What is it about, if you ask like really simple,
what is it about?
It's about science and it's about ethics.
That doesn't answer a lot of questions, but that is true.
Quote Bill Mollison, right?
That's all it's about.
It's not about metaphysics,
because that's the sciences that aren't proven.
Belief systems are metaphysics
and other things that we can't prove.
And I'm not saying I don't like,
I'm not slight bit concerned
if you want to believe in unproven sciences.
At all.
That's entirely up to you.
But like the world is falling apart out there,
and that's reasonably obvious.
It's on a very fast downhill slide.
And that's obviously what we don't want, right?
Obviously, that has to change.
We can't afford not to have a different approach.
And that approach is most sensible if it's proven.
And in fact, since the 1980s,
we've been throwing genetically modified organisms
at the world, not really knowing what could happen.
And you could describe it like playing Russian roulette.
Luckily it doesn't look like
the bullet's come round in the chamber,
but it could have done.
We could have stopped the world's rain in 1980s,
because we nearly released
a genetically modified cloud-seeding organism
to stop frost on strawberries.
We'd have had some wealthy strawberry farmers
and a dead world, potentially.
And we nearly potentially killed all soil life
by genetically modifying a soil organism
to produce alcohol as a byproduct
of decomposing organic matter.
You know, you can't easily capture microorganisms
that have been genetically modified
if they get out and go aerosol
or go across whole soil systems, you know.
You haven't got a lot of choices in that micro world
that's so huge but so small, that we discount it.
But it's probably the most powerful living system.
But we've discounted it in many ways.
And look what just happened
with the pandemic, (laughs) you know, et cetera.
We have to have ethics in the way we behave.
So we've just got very basic ethics.
But you're really a design science based in ethics,
an ethical design science.
And it's really about connecting disciplines.
So the core of each discipline,
we need to just see if we can get
a good grasp of the middle of it.
You don't have to know how to be an architect
and produce architectural plans.
But you need to be able to understand
what a good architectural design is for a climate.
You do need to be a meteorologist, basically.
If you don't understand the basic climates of the world,
you're designing without being able to see properly.
It's like you need glasses
and you haven't got 'em on, right?
Like, it's like you're trying to,
I now have to use reading glasses.
I can't read without 'em.
I can see the page, but it's all blurry, right?
That's how it would be
if I didn't realize you guys have a continental climate.
Yeah.
Looks like England out there, you know, doesn't it?
I mean, I grew up in England.
It looks like England in springtime very much.
Smells like it too.
But boy, we don't get your cold
and we don't get your heat either.
We're at the same latitude.
But you have an orographic effect
by the size of the continent.
You have to understand that stuff.
And it goes right across, you know, it goes right across.
So with my maps, our maps, we put climate data with the map
because your client won't know that either.
Most permies a lot, not most.
A lot of permies don't take the climate data
seriously enough.
We talk about climate every day.
It's cold, it's hot, it's wet, you know, whatever.
We talk every day about the damn thing.
And yet a lot of people don't even know
which side of the house the sun comes up or goes down,
you know, or what the sun angle is,
or what the moon variation angle is.
And most people dunno where the vertical sun occurs on earth
or where the sun never comes up one day
of the year or doesn't go down one day of the year.
What latitude is that?
We don't even teach our kids that stuff.
You want to be a global citizen?
You want to, you know, act locally and think globally?
You better learn that, all right?
It's not going to change.
Well, the Inuit are saying it's changing a bit. (laughs)
23.3 north or south of the equator
or 66 North or south of the equator, those lines,
you know, there's just stuff.
Your clients aren't going to know that
when you're designing for 'em.
So you have to have some information with the map,
you know, this is kind of important.
So, you know, there's a very good reason
that Bill did chapter five in the manual
is climatic factors.
And now there's this,
I'm not saying I don't believe in climate change, right?
I've lived through some.
But I'm not sure that I haven't lived through some
that other people have lived through as well.
I mean, yeah, yeah, we're getting, you know,
wetter and drier and hotter and colder and windier
for every day, everywhere at once, at any potential day.
That's actually what's happening.
And generally it's warming up, generally.
But we're getting a lot more variation,
and I have my theories about that, and other people have.
But you need to understand why climate is very relevant
after a classic chapter called pattern understanding.
You know, why did Bill put that chapter next?
It like, if we had complete climate change,
we probably wouldn't be sitting here.
If your Hungary turned into a new climate
from what it has been, which it isn't.
It's got variation, weirding, but not change yet.
If it changes, well we're probably
global economy time finish, you know.
It's not going to be something we're easily going to survive
if we have a rapid climate change.
If this suddenly became the tropics
or this suddenly became a desert next year, in one year,
you know, you had one year with, you know,
evaporation over rainfall for 12 months,
it would be a different world.
Like just this.
So, you know, you don't have to be a meteorologist.
You got to get to the core of like
A, B, C, one, two, three of meteorology, you know?
And really, like, 100% have it in your head, very clear.
And it's not easy.
It's not easy, 'cause you grew up in one climate,
you lived with one set of sun angles,
and suddenly you go into the tropics
and the sun goes to the other side of the sky half the year
or something, or three quarters of the year,
and it rains in summer instead of in winter.
You cross the equator and it's weird what it does to you
just having the sun on the other side, you know?
You really got to stop and think.
I've had to live through it.
International consultancy work.
Surprising what it does to you.
You would think that was so simple.
Like it's just not much.
It isn't, you know?
This is what I try and teach,
and this is the way I try and teach.
(mysterious music)