Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1: My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
Speaker 1: me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer Paul
Speaker 1: Mission Control decond. Most importantly, you are you. You are here,
Speaker 1: and that makes this the stuff they don't want you
Speaker 1: to know. Today's episode is going to be a little
Speaker 1: bit different from our usual explorations. Were following up on
Speaker 1: a great conversation we had in an earlier Weekly Listener
Speaker 1: Mail segment. Here's the deal. Shout out to drs, not
Speaker 1: the Atlanta DRS. There's a guy named DR's in Atlanta
Speaker 1: who looks like a wizard, like straight up Gandolf. You've
Speaker 1: got to meet him one day. He does excellent postcard art. Totally.
Speaker 1: I will introduce you guys. You may have met him already. No,
Speaker 1: but but here's the deal, folks. Durs fellow conspiracy realist.
Speaker 1: The world as we know it has been around way, way, way,
Speaker 1: way way longer than human beings, a way longer than
Speaker 1: their ancestors. Humans are sort of a fad and kind
Speaker 1: of disrespectful guest. That's not a hot tap, that's just
Speaker 1: objectively true. Earth also doesn't really need people. When their
Speaker 1: population was relatively small, they fit in the same way
Speaker 1: another apex predator would fit into its natural biomerico system.
Speaker 1: But that has changed, and the change is only escalating
Speaker 1: as humanity grows and in Biggins, it's technological pursuits. In short,
Speaker 1: civilization is reaching a bra game point where it's already
Speaker 1: past it, which is my personal belief. So today we
Speaker 1: are looking at a plan, a philosophy, a movement, a
Speaker 1: set of practices that, according to its proponents, may just
Speaker 1: help save the world or at the very least keep
Speaker 1: it going a little while longer. And before we introduced
Speaker 1: this plan, which we can't wait to talk about with you,
Speaker 1: we've got to we've got to give you some of
Speaker 1: the ugly, ugly truths. So here are the facts. Uh,
Speaker 1: the world's in trouble. It doesn't matter who you vote for,
Speaker 1: doesn't matter if you're an atheist or you have really
Speaker 1: you know, deeply held spiritual beliefs up the wrong river
Speaker 1: without the right paddle. That has planet Earth and I
Speaker 1: was hoping everything was fine. This is horrible news. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fine. If you look to especially the American West,
Speaker 1: if you look to Europe, the United Kingdom, areas across
Speaker 1: the world, you can we see the effects that are
Speaker 1: happening now, that are happening throughout the year, every year
Speaker 1: now and ramping up in the cold weather and the
Speaker 1: hot weather, in the dry weather, in the wet weather,
Speaker 1: all the weather. It's just not not doing us any favors,
Speaker 1: um and that's likely because we we haven't really been
Speaker 1: doing the planet many favors. No, we sure haven't. I
Speaker 1: mean we're starting to see, you know, things like water
Speaker 1: and natural resources become the ultimate currency. And if you look,
Speaker 1: you know, down the line to the future, it's not
Speaker 1: that hard to imagine a world where people are literally
Speaker 1: killing each other over these resources as they become more
Speaker 1: and more scarce and climates become less and less habitable. Yes,
Speaker 1: so what's happening here is this is happening in South
Speaker 1: Asia and Southeast Asia. Throughout Indonesia. A lot of places
Speaker 1: that were wet are dry. A lot of places that
Speaker 1: are supposed to be dry are unsea reasonably wet. As
Speaker 1: we record right now, Uh, there is one country that
Speaker 1: maybe the first country ever to go completely underwater in
Speaker 1: the modern days. That is the Maldives or Maldives. Uh. This.
Speaker 1: I've been off the grid, as you guys know, we
Speaker 1: we don't really talk about a lot of stuff on air,
Speaker 1: but I've been off the grid, and I've been traveling
Speaker 1: in places where the weather is famously different from what
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be. Right, I've been in a place,
Speaker 1: um for I've been traveling through a couple of different
Speaker 1: places in a part of the world that's normably sort
Speaker 1: of dismal and wet. And for for a while over
Speaker 1: the summer, people loved that it wasn't raining because they
Speaker 1: could go out and have fun with you know, their
Speaker 1: kids and their pets and stuff. But now they're getting
Speaker 1: to that oh snap moment where they're thinking, oh, right,
Speaker 1: the plants kind of need that water. So what we're
Speaker 1: seeing our short term, short term enjoyment, long term consequences,
Speaker 1: and for while, for a while, people were fine to
Speaker 1: ignore them. The first conspiracy, which I feel like everybody
Speaker 1: should acknowledge these days, is that many of the scientists,
Speaker 1: the boffins, the eggheads, the academics, whatever you want, to
Speaker 1: call them that said the climate was just fine or
Speaker 1: downplayed the extremity of environmental degradation. They were, in fact
Speaker 1: paid to lie. They were paid by large corporations, you know,
Speaker 1: chemical manufacturers, energy companies, to uh to try to politicize
Speaker 1: the problem, to say that, you know, for some reason,
Speaker 1: carrying about water makes you far left or whatever, or
Speaker 1: that if you're far right, you shouldn't care what happens
Speaker 1: to the soil that makes the food that you and
Speaker 1: your family eat. They were very successful about this. They
Speaker 1: were downplaying pollution. They tried to throw a veneer of normalcy,
Speaker 1: the dog and the burning house meme vibe. They tried
Speaker 1: to throw that over an increasingly chaotic climate. And even
Speaker 1: they had to know, right, they had to know that
Speaker 1: couldn't work forever. Yeah, yeah, exactly, And it didn't. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: it's still kind of working today because a lot of
Speaker 1: the messaging that was put out there, as you kind
Speaker 1: of stated there been, was to muddy the message, to
Speaker 1: muddy the science, to make sure people believed that the
Speaker 1: science was always out on climate change. We don't know
Speaker 1: for sure what's happening with it. We don't know for
Speaker 1: sure if humans had anything to do with it. Uh,
Speaker 1: so let's just continue on as we're continuing on and
Speaker 1: not think about it too much. So as of one, Um,
Speaker 1: we've got some pretty good data from the pre industrial era,
Speaker 1: you know, when the you know, kind of the advent
Speaker 1: of like serious pollution. UM to the right. Now, Uh,
Speaker 1: the global temperature has in fact, this is this is
Speaker 1: a thing. This is real. This is not some sort
Speaker 1: of you know, uh, liberal conjecture. Um. It has increased
Speaker 1: by about one point two degrees celsius or the much
Speaker 1: more shocking two Americans anyway, thirty four point one six
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. We had to stop for a second and
Speaker 1: do a double thick and make sure the math was right.
Speaker 1: It is right. It doesn't seem like much, but it
Speaker 1: also it's kind of significant. Um, it's it's a big deal.
Speaker 1: It's quite extraordinary. The world's oceans alone are actually absorbing
Speaker 1: the heat equivalent of five atomic bomb drops like Hiroshima
Speaker 1: atomic bombs dropping into the water every single second. Think
Speaker 1: about the vast amount of energy one atomic bomb generates.
Speaker 1: This is five of those dropping into the water every
Speaker 1: single second, just from atmospheric conditions, just from like ambient heat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just the heat. It's it's getting hot and not
Speaker 1: not in a cool like party on the weekend. Way, well,
Speaker 1: you might it is getting hot in here. You might
Speaker 1: have to as a matter of survival. But well, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about wet bulk We'll talk about wet bulb temperature. Uh.
Speaker 1: We we talked about that in the previous episode, So
Speaker 1: check that out if you want to be depressed. So,
Speaker 1: these conspiracies are real. Don't ever forget. This goes deeper
Speaker 1: than a government's debt. Right. So to add to this,
Speaker 1: a lot of modern industries are only exacerbating the problem,
Speaker 1: and they are doing so knowingly. Logging is a huge
Speaker 1: issue in some of the world's last large green spaces.
Speaker 1: If wet bulb temperature doesn't depress you enough, if you
Speaker 1: still feel like you have a spark of optimism or
Speaker 1: you're having fun one day, then check out what's happening
Speaker 1: to the Amazon. Uh. There's deforestation of course in other places,
Speaker 1: massive massive irrigation projects, pollution, industrial by products. I just
Speaker 1: read recently that if you get uh, if you get
Speaker 1: chicken eggs from a city like you know your friends
Speaker 1: have a chicken cooper or something, they're likely to have
Speaker 1: more lead than eggs out in the countryside. It's saying
Speaker 1: everybody plastics and everything. Yeah, yeah, I mean, uh, mono agriculture,
Speaker 1: you know, like the way people grow bananas, the reason
Speaker 1: the first commercial banana crop went extinct. Ak the reason
Speaker 1: banana candy doesn't taste like the bananas you get now, Uh,
Speaker 1: mono agriculture robs ecosystems of their natural checks and balances.
Speaker 1: These are very old systems that have existed long before
Speaker 1: humans started fussing around under the hood. They make these
Speaker 1: feedback loops where farmers and agribusiness rely increasingly on artificial
Speaker 1: solutions to problems that uh, they themselves have arguably created.
Speaker 1: You know, like thinking neo nicotinoids and pesticides, extinctions running rampant.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, this the generations listening now maybe some
Speaker 1: of the last generations to be around when certain large
Speaker 1: wild animals were still wild. And on this side of
Speaker 1: the ground, there's a ripple effect every time a species dies. Look,
Speaker 1: the game can't go on forever unless we find some solutions.
Speaker 1: And this is where you know, this is the light
Speaker 1: at the end of the tunnel, hopefully for the true believers,
Speaker 1: right they like, we know all these solutions, reduce, reuse, recycle.
Speaker 1: What are the other ones? Oh? Oh, paper straws. I
Speaker 1: sound like a jerk. Sorry, stop drop and roll. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh no, that's different. Yeah, yes, Conserve your energy, use
Speaker 1: your water, use your heat, use everything. Like, just cut
Speaker 1: back as much as you can. Everybody. The thing is
Speaker 1: everybody doesn't always do it. Yeah. Maybe don't water your
Speaker 1: golf course, you know, quite as exorbitantly. Oh you have to,
Speaker 1: and so how else? How else will we have golf courses?
Speaker 1: Hey don't. It's a sunk cost, all right. I bought
Speaker 1: the Altman farm and the golf course, and one day
Speaker 1: I'm gonna learn to play golf. So I need that
Speaker 1: thing ready, I need I need the water. It's a
Speaker 1: sunk cost. It's it's a it's a sunk put baby,
Speaker 1: that's what it is. Get on that green. It's not
Speaker 1: green without water. Otherwise it's the brown. That's not cool.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to put on the brown. Has there ever
Speaker 1: been an exclusive high level astro turf to golf course,
Speaker 1: like the whole thing is like a mini putt put course.
Speaker 1: Surely they've made leaps and bounds in astro turf technology,
Speaker 1: like they could do that it's just a flex to
Speaker 1: not do that. I don't know the answer. I've got
Speaker 1: top golf in places like that, you know, like for
Speaker 1: driving ranges that's probably not real grass. I'm sure it's
Speaker 1: more like those are like the batting cages of golf.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's absurd how many, how much resources and
Speaker 1: energy and you know, landscaping, hand water get literally poured
Speaker 1: into what amounts to like a a playground for the wealthy.
Speaker 1: It's funny you mentioned this because there is a controversy.
Speaker 1: There has been a push to have AstroTurf or artificial
Speaker 1: turf golf courses. But athletes, golfers, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: a lot of the golfing enthusiasts are a bit traditionalists
Speaker 1: in their view. They prefer the natural grass, even though
Speaker 1: it could be used to you know, grow crops stuff
Speaker 1: like that, but when not to yuck someone's you just
Speaker 1: realized there are there. We are of the mind on
Speaker 1: this show that there's almost always a way around a problem.
Speaker 1: There is a solution, and the three of us have
Speaker 1: been in crazy situations where we found weird innovations of
Speaker 1: our own um, which might be a story for a
Speaker 1: live show. All the weird stuff we've gotten into. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, there's a lot of um what people call
Speaker 1: misallocation of things right, miss prioritization of wants and knee.
Speaker 1: There are golf courses of plenty that do suck up
Speaker 1: a lot of water, while there are people dying from
Speaker 1: lack of potable water, lack of clean water. And there
Speaker 1: are these corporate initiatives that come around that purport to
Speaker 1: address these concerns right, reduce, reuse, recycle. Often they put
Speaker 1: the burden of the action on the consumer rather than
Speaker 1: taking accountability as a as the business creating the problem.
Speaker 1: Right now, it's not our fault that we've made so
Speaker 1: many microplastics and seated them in the ocean. It's your fault,
Speaker 1: you dick, because you drink with plastic straws. That's and
Speaker 1: that's the implication. It's not our fault that there's teflon
Speaker 1: falling from the skies and nargica. Why did you buy
Speaker 1: all those pots and pans? Come on, but those other
Speaker 1: straws get all soggy like a pasta noodle. They're weird,
Speaker 1: you know, give me my plastic straw. I'm kidding. They've
Speaker 1: made leaps and bounds once again in non plastic straw technology.
Speaker 1: I keep using this term, and I'm going to keep
Speaker 1: using it. Yeah, I'm gonna You know what I love
Speaker 1: about this one is I can see just the way
Speaker 1: that automobile companies vilify pedestrians back in the day by
Speaker 1: creating the crime of jaywalking. I could see I could
Speaker 1: see some of the big plastic movers of vilifying people
Speaker 1: by creating the crime of slow drinking. The problem is
Speaker 1: not the paper straw. It's all these slow drinkers. You
Speaker 1: know what I mean, slow drink Call this number. You
Speaker 1: could be part of the problem. Report your loved ones
Speaker 1: for slow drinking. Um. Have you seen, you know at
Speaker 1: bars where you get those really tiny straws and like
Speaker 1: it takes like four of them to amount to a
Speaker 1: regular straw. Those are kind of designed for slow drinking,
Speaker 1: if you think about it. Okay, so that's the real problem.
Speaker 1: We're done with this episode. Then it's slow drinking, guys,
Speaker 1: drink faster. Drinking faster is the new drink responsibly that's
Speaker 1: not gonna come back to buy us. Well, Okay, here's
Speaker 1: the thing. There's so many solutions, many of which are
Speaker 1: proposed in good faith, and a lot of them address
Speaker 1: one aspect of this bigger Gordian knot of what the
Speaker 1: hell do people do to continue living on the planet. Um,
Speaker 1: this is where our story. This is where our story
Speaker 1: comes in because there's one solution that we had talked about,
Speaker 1: an approach you could say, of philosophy. It's made a
Speaker 1: lot of waves in recent decades. It comes to us
Speaker 1: courtesy of our friends down Under. It comes from Australia
Speaker 1: and Tasmania. It's something known as perma culture, a portmanteau
Speaker 1: of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. And perman culture is
Speaker 1: going to be kind of confusing to people, I think
Speaker 1: when you first are introduced to it, because it's sort
Speaker 1: of a gastalt whole system them approach, it's a I
Speaker 1: don't know. Um, let's see. It's it's the idea that
Speaker 1: you can create a means of integrating human activity with
Speaker 1: natural surroundings, creating a highly efficient, self sustaining ecosystem, so
Speaker 1: that humans instead of trying to impose change on an ecosystem. Right,
Speaker 1: we only grow bananas here now, even though it used
Speaker 1: to be a very bio diverse jungle. Instead, you say,
Speaker 1: we're going to fit ourselves into this system. We're going
Speaker 1: to become a helpful part of it pretty you know, beautiful, right,
Speaker 1: circle of life and so on. Yeah, well even even
Speaker 1: down to the concept of we don't need grass lawns
Speaker 1: anymore anywhere, we can use the like you said, the
Speaker 1: ecosystem that existed and wherever that place is, and just
Speaker 1: make sure that ecosystem thrives and you can make it beautiful.
Speaker 1: You can grow things on there, like the flowers you
Speaker 1: want or the food even that you could eat. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a really interesting philosophy. Uh that, like you said,
Speaker 1: been really just focused on using what's there and not
Speaker 1: destroying the living system that already flourishes. Is this like
Speaker 1: a biodome type situation? Like are we talking greenhouse like
Speaker 1: hot houses and things like that? Are not at all? No? Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm not quite getting my head around, Like where
Speaker 1: do you well, yeah, a little bit right, like where
Speaker 1: I mean, if you don't have a lawn, what are
Speaker 1: you using and using like planter boxes or you're like
Speaker 1: like raised beds, you know, Like what are we talking
Speaker 1: modifying the it's modifying the existing like plants that grow
Speaker 1: in that area to however you want them, Like you
Speaker 1: could you can change what grows where kind of but
Speaker 1: it's also working. Well, let's get into it. Well, that's yeah,
Speaker 1: here's what I mean. But when I say when I
Speaker 1: say it's kind of like a greenhouse, it's like Earth
Speaker 1: as a big greenhouse. And there are series of interrelated
Speaker 1: sections or neighborhoods we could call them. Uh that that
Speaker 1: sort of edge into one another and overlap edges are
Speaker 1: big in the concept of of permaculture. Uh, it's this
Speaker 1: idea also has some surprising overlap with some precepts carved
Speaker 1: in the recently demolished Georgia guidestones, the notably the idea
Speaker 1: that humanity, one way or another, should strive to exist
Speaker 1: in balance with nature. That gave a lot of folks
Speaker 1: who are worried about population control and eugenics a slight
Speaker 1: eye twitch. And you should have a slight eye twitch, folks. Uh,
Speaker 1: this at heart sounds like a noble aspiration, but we
Speaker 1: have to ask why has it encountered so much criticism
Speaker 1: over the years, over the decades. And pause for word
Speaker 1: from our sponsor, and then we'll dive in. Here's where
Speaker 1: it gets crazy. Okay, we we we said some feel
Speaker 1: good stuff, right we we we talked about the problems.
Speaker 1: I think we were pretty realistic. So how okay, background,
Speaker 1: what what is Perman culture? I spent a ton of
Speaker 1: time reading about this and people agree vaguely but not
Speaker 1: specifically all the time. It's it's a philosophical thing, right Ben,
Speaker 1: So much like a philosophy class. It's like, well, nobody really,
Speaker 1: you know, has nailed this concept fully down, but we
Speaker 1: got a vague idea, we got a thought cloud around it. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, well, let's start with the originator perhaps of
Speaker 1: the thought cloud. It's it's a dude, um from Tasmania.
Speaker 1: You sort of mentioned that at the top of the show, Ben,
Speaker 1: that we we're borrowing a lot of these ideas from
Speaker 1: our brethren in Australia and Tasmania. This guy's name is
Speaker 1: Bill Mollison, was born in nineteen and a little fishing
Speaker 1: village called Stanley in Tasmania. Uh it sounds very quaint.
Speaker 1: I love a quaint fishing village named Stanley. Like villages
Speaker 1: named after people always, you know, I like cats named
Speaker 1: after people. Why not villages? Um? Mollison he left school
Speaker 1: early in his life and he took to you know,
Speaker 1: to becoming a tradesman. He worked for a number of
Speaker 1: varying jobs before he you know, found his like true calling.
Speaker 1: He was a baker, He worked in a mill. He
Speaker 1: was a seaman, you know, at sea. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it was a captain. I guess he was just
Speaker 1: like maybe a sailor, you know. Uh, he was a
Speaker 1: trapper even for a little while. He fished, but exclusively
Speaker 1: for sharks. That's that's tough. Are we sure he wasn't
Speaker 1: just jumping into the oceans with a knife to fight
Speaker 1: the sharks, like, are we sure? Or or jumping over
Speaker 1: a sharks on a jet ski like like in the
Speaker 1: Happy Days, uh series finale? Or maybe he was getting
Speaker 1: fish for the sharks. You know, he might have just
Speaker 1: been like the moving moving the prey for the sharks.
Speaker 1: You know, his his demo might have been there's like
Speaker 1: customers might have been great whites. Sharks are apparently not
Speaker 1: super good eating because they're just so sinewy. They're like
Speaker 1: one big muscle. Yeah, they're grilled all dark meat and
Speaker 1: kind of game. Was my understanding. A lot of omnivo
Speaker 1: omnivorous animals don't taste especially great. That's the reason why
Speaker 1: in English people say to eat crow as mean as
Speaker 1: you know, you have to like, uh, you have to
Speaker 1: have some humble pie or whatever. You have to eat
Speaker 1: a trash bird. And you guys know, I love Corvitt's.
Speaker 1: They're very, very intelligent, but they taste like garbage because
Speaker 1: they eat garbage. Same with foxes. Catfish, Yeah, sage in garbage. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: just a catfish though, But you gotta fry the hell
Speaker 1: out of it, right, what's is that like? It takes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta get them small. The bigger they are, at
Speaker 1: least in my experience, the less the tasty they are.
Speaker 1: But let us know your mileage, baby arey. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you describe it so perfectly. He is a jack of
Speaker 1: all trades for a while is Mollison And eventually he
Speaker 1: goes to a place called the Wildlife Survey Section of
Speaker 1: Australia's Science Research Organization something called c s I r
Speaker 1: OH and then he spends time at the Inland Fisheries
Speaker 1: Commission of Tasmania. So he's there for more than a
Speaker 1: decade and this leads him to kind of a bit
Speaker 1: of a walk about. I guess it's a reflective period
Speaker 1: in his life. He spends a lot of time, mostly
Speaker 1: solitary in the wilderness of Tasmania. He learns about the forest,
Speaker 1: he has intimate understanding of the coastal ecosyst stims and
Speaker 1: his life continues, but this leaves a huge mark on him.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty eight, he becomes a tutor at the
Speaker 1: University of Tasmania and then later he becomes the senior
Speaker 1: lecturer in environmental psychology, which sounds pretty interesting if you
Speaker 1: read that on a syllabus. Right. Uh. While he's while
Speaker 1: he's teaching there, Yeah, while he's teaching there, he meets
Speaker 1: up with his padawan, the guy who will become his
Speaker 1: co creator of perma culture. His name is Dave. David
Speaker 1: Holmgren is a student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education,
Speaker 1: and together part in the pun they will sow the
Speaker 1: seeds of perma culture. Because they start asking themselves all
Speaker 1: these questions. They say, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: hold up, pump the brakes, scratch the record. Why does
Speaker 1: humanity impose all these short term goals on fragile ecosystems?
Speaker 1: Why don't we just crib the research that the natural
Speaker 1: world has already done for millions of years. It's created
Speaker 1: these entire systems why don't we just work with what
Speaker 1: already works, makes sustainable ways of creating food with long term,
Speaker 1: less damaging solutions. Why don't we work within the system,
Speaker 1: right and only change it a little when we need to.
Speaker 1: This this really hit me, you guys, because as we see,
Speaker 1: we see that mimic mimicry of the natural world is
Speaker 1: increasingly becoming the forefront of technology in multiple fields. At
Speaker 1: some point in any given number of disciplines, especially in engineering,
Speaker 1: some bright mind says, hang on, the solution to this
Speaker 1: already exists in nature, right. There's a reason eggs are spherical,
Speaker 1: or you know, uh, there's a reason that hexagons are
Speaker 1: in beehives, stuff like that. So why don't we, Like
Speaker 1: spider silk is already a better ingredient for bulletproof vest
Speaker 1: why don't we just do that? So that's what they're doing.
Speaker 1: They're taking this idea and they're saying, why don't we
Speaker 1: just do the stuff that was already well figured out
Speaker 1: before humans came on the scene. Exactly. It's amazing And
Speaker 1: that's not the only thing, right, So they've got nature
Speaker 1: systems and how they work already, why don't we use those?
Speaker 1: And why don't we look to the past a little
Speaker 1: bit to see how humanity has been manipulating the earth
Speaker 1: before we came up with all this industrialization, with all
Speaker 1: these machines that have to do one thing for one
Speaker 1: crop and then get as many, you know, many pieces
Speaker 1: of corn out of the earth as we possibly can
Speaker 1: every year. So these guys ordered their names Molison and Holmgren,
Speaker 1: they're like, they're the modern movement guys, right, But if
Speaker 1: you look a little bit further back to just an
Speaker 1: all around badass guy, George Washington Carver, while he was
Speaker 1: working at the Tuskegee Institute, he developed ways to instead
Speaker 1: of just planting one crop all the time in this
Speaker 1: one plot of land, he was developing crop rotation strategies.
Speaker 1: And the whole point was to make sure the soil
Speaker 1: that the crops were going to be grown in. As
Speaker 1: you rotate crops out, get new kinds of nutrients in
Speaker 1: that soil, and each one that you put in next
Speaker 1: is gaining benefits from the crop that was in there beforehand, right,
Speaker 1: and if you just kind of continue that cycle. And
Speaker 1: this was focused very much so on basically the American South,
Speaker 1: like southern farmlands that were existing and thriving at the
Speaker 1: time when when he was working on this, but they
Speaker 1: needed help. You know what, what do we need to
Speaker 1: add to the soil to make sure that these crops
Speaker 1: are going to be fruitful? Well, hey, what if we
Speaker 1: just cycle crops through? Yeah, making avengers? Right, why don't
Speaker 1: we Why don't we vultry these things up? That's the
Speaker 1: problem with mono agriculture, right, because plant take different things
Speaker 1: from the soil and they bring different things to the soil.
Speaker 1: So if you have one crop taking the same thing
Speaker 1: all the time and giving the same stuff all the time,
Speaker 1: eventually the dirt's gonna go bad. Which sounds so Southern Gothic,
Speaker 1: but that's part of where it comes from. The soil
Speaker 1: is sour. Yes, yes, in Maine as well. Always hear
Speaker 1: that in the Fred Gwyn voice. Yeah, but it's true.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it. It can be depleted, you know,
Speaker 1: the the dirt needs to have these nutrients, and if
Speaker 1: you rotate them out, like you're saying, man um, one
Speaker 1: thing is depleted in one cycle and then it's renewed
Speaker 1: in the next, and vice versa. And that's why that's
Speaker 1: important to that crop rotation is like a really, uh,
Speaker 1: absolute game changer. In agriculture when this was kind of
Speaker 1: you know, figured out. Yeah, and the game was changed
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of years ago in places across the
Speaker 1: plant Yeah, people figured crop rotation. Uh. In the over
Speaker 1: in the United States for millennia, multiple multiple Native American
Speaker 1: communities knew about this. I'm thinking particularly of something always
Speaker 1: fascinated me at least the It's a concept called intercropping,
Speaker 1: which is a little bit different from crop rotation. UH.
Speaker 1: Inter Cropping is where these folks would grow things at
Speaker 1: the same time because they figured out these crops complement
Speaker 1: each other's strengths and weaknesses, the stuff they give and
Speaker 1: the stuff they take. So the most famous of these
Speaker 1: are the Three Sisters Corn basically beans and squash. Maize
Speaker 1: or corn is infamous for being a nitrogen vampire. It
Speaker 1: will take it wants all the nitrogen out of the dirt.
Speaker 1: But beans, on the other hand, put nitrogen back into
Speaker 1: the soil. And so when you plant these and you
Speaker 1: plant these long with squash, what you're doing is you're
Speaker 1: making up for a disadvantage of one, right, and you
Speaker 1: get a little bit of insurance because hey, your squash
Speaker 1: crop goes bad, don't worry, You're growing. You're growing corn
Speaker 1: and beans and the same acre, so you're gonna be okay,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have something to eat. And modern scientists looked
Speaker 1: back and said, actually, this intercropping, this growing stuff at
Speaker 1: the same time instead of switching, you know, year to year,
Speaker 1: season to season. This is way better than modern mono
Speaker 1: agricultural practices. You get more energy, more protein, get more
Speaker 1: bang for your landscaping buck. So again we see that
Speaker 1: not every solution need be brand spaking new and just
Speaker 1: maybe ancient civilizations knew more than modern society likes to
Speaker 1: give them credit for. Uh and this is something big
Speaker 1: in perman culture. Like you were saying, if we may
Speaker 1: be the best way to explain this idea without its
Speaker 1: sounding to like preachy or pr ish or vague and
Speaker 1: woo woo, is for us to just enumerate the principles
Speaker 1: or the axioms, the guiding tenants or ethics of permaculture.
Speaker 1: They're just three. It's pretty simple until you get to
Speaker 1: the third one. Yeah, and they really do. We We
Speaker 1: mentioned this when we when we talked about uh unders.
Speaker 1: There's there's uh as email um. They are very guide
Speaker 1: stone z kind of philosophical tenants and it is possible
Speaker 1: to enter the wu uh if if if you're not careful. Um.
Speaker 1: But but they are also very sensible, like you said,
Speaker 1: been up to a point. When then it starts to
Speaker 1: maybe generate a few questions. But first one care of
Speaker 1: the Earth, you know, that's that some classic day one
Speaker 1: Earth day stuff, provision for all life systems to continue
Speaker 1: and multiply. Um. Then we cover you know, people who
Speaker 1: live on the earth, and the care of people. Provision
Speaker 1: for people to access those resources necessary for their existence
Speaker 1: so they can also you know, continue and multiply presumably um.
Speaker 1: Then then there's stones bit that's the one maybe sending
Speaker 1: limits to population and consumption. By governing our own needs,
Speaker 1: we can set resources aside to further the above principles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Melissa and Homegrin are like stop banging, stop banging each other.
Speaker 1: Not they're they're not really, I mean, they're they're saying,
Speaker 1: they're saying, let's let's not treat humanity as this Ponzi
Speaker 1: scheme that always has to expand, right, And they're they're,
Speaker 1: you know, they're thinking of this in the late nineties seventies. YEA,
Speaker 1: always shoot for a surplus, right always, and and when
Speaker 1: you have surplus spread around, don't just take it for
Speaker 1: whatever profit or whatever you're thinking about using it for.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, that doesn't sound very American. That sounds
Speaker 1: like communist talk there, what share the surplus? That's not
Speaker 1: how we do business in this country. Read, you guys
Speaker 1: are getting a little bit read it's I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's true. And we'll we'll run into one of that's
Speaker 1: one of the issues that critics have. Actually, But this
Speaker 1: if we just look at it structurally, like we apply
Speaker 1: structural thought to this in an objective way, then what
Speaker 1: we're gonna see is this is an example of what
Speaker 1: is sometimes confusingly called whole system thinking a gastalt effect. Right.
Speaker 1: So um. An example of this would be, or a
Speaker 1: counter counter example of this would be in a lot
Speaker 1: of modern farming techniques, you're going to see one kind
Speaker 1: of plant being grown, right, one kind of crop. Anything
Speaker 1: that anything else that's growing there is a weed or
Speaker 1: it's counter to that purpose. And maybe further, maybe you
Speaker 1: are a farmer who's growing a crop and you only
Speaker 1: want the edible part. You say, I don't really have
Speaker 1: a use for these stems and these sticks and whatever, right, uh,
Speaker 1: And that is an example of kind of single system thinking,
Speaker 1: I want this one thing, I will move all the
Speaker 1: variable such that it produces this one thing I want
Speaker 1: and the rest be damned. Uh. The idea of perman culture,
Speaker 1: at least as advanced by Mollison in his book perman
Speaker 1: Culture one, is this. It's a kind of beautiful idea.
Speaker 1: It's the idea that you can watch closely over time
Speaker 1: how the system already works, and if you do that,
Speaker 1: you can find ways to help it work for you
Speaker 1: without breaking the whole crazy Rube Goldberg esque mouse trap
Speaker 1: that is every ecosystem, right, without accidentally triggering a domino effect.
Speaker 1: You can say, this is what this animal does, this
Speaker 1: is how it affects these other things in the chain,
Speaker 1: and this is what this plant does and how it
Speaker 1: affects these other things. And here's where I fit in.
Speaker 1: I can get in here as a human being, meet
Speaker 1: my needs and then also maybe ideally help the system overall. Right,
Speaker 1: I can play a part in this cycle instead of
Speaker 1: just saying, well, there's been going okay for millions of years,
Speaker 1: but I want to grow corn. Nothing to see here,
Speaker 1: nice ecosystem you got there would be a shame if
Speaker 1: something happened to it um. It makes me think of
Speaker 1: this film I think you guys have both seen we
Speaker 1: may have talked about a fantastic fungi or fungi um
Speaker 1: just about like you know, it's about psilocybin and psychedelic mushrooms.
Speaker 1: But the thing that's most fascinating to me abou out
Speaker 1: it is just how complex the system that mushrooms are
Speaker 1: a part of is that they are designed to return
Speaker 1: decaying matter back into the system and turn them into
Speaker 1: like fertilizer that then enriches the soil and then it
Speaker 1: comes back around and they communicate through this like crazy
Speaker 1: subterranean networks of like fibers, you know, and all this stuff.
Speaker 1: And it really is kind of like kind of psychedelic
Speaker 1: and of itself just to how this this stuff works
Speaker 1: so well without us. It doesn't need us. If anything,
Speaker 1: we're like a wrench in the works. So I do
Speaker 1: like this idea of like, look at these incredible complex
Speaker 1: systems that that do not require us at all, and
Speaker 1: they work better than anything we could have ever like
Speaker 1: you know, figured out on our own. So why not
Speaker 1: just play nice and be a part of the solution
Speaker 1: instead of always trying to play god and change things.
Speaker 1: You know, agreed. I mean you can tell already to
Speaker 1: that this pursuit, this concept of perma culture is then,
Speaker 1: by its very nature, it's multidisciplinary, meaning it incorporates all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff. It's it's it's grabbing. Um. It's like,
Speaker 1: if you are a perma culturist, you're sort of like
Speaker 1: that guy girl Talk who remixes all these parts of
Speaker 1: various songs right into a seamless coherent narrative. A perma
Speaker 1: culture practitioner takes pieces of meteorology, biochemistry, integrated farming, organic farming, uh,
Speaker 1: agro forestry, even physics, and they put it all together
Speaker 1: to say, what can I apply to this context? And
Speaker 1: perma culture is very much all about context. We're gonna
Speaker 1: see one of the main criticisms of it depends on this.
Speaker 1: Uh there's we can get into this a little more too.
Speaker 1: In addition to those three ethics, Um, there's another book
Speaker 1: Perma Culture Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, where Dave I
Speaker 1: guess I shouldn't call him, we haven't met David Holmegrin
Speaker 1: lays out twelve more specific principles. I don't know if
Speaker 1: we want to list them. All, but they're they're they're
Speaker 1: pretty basic stuff and there's still kind of high level
Speaker 1: systemic things. It's all about observation when intervening. How I
Speaker 1: think we should put this in at least to some extent,
Speaker 1: Maybe we could just read it really quickly because this
Speaker 1: is the stuff there DS was focused on with the
Speaker 1: company that he created and we talked about in that
Speaker 1: listener Mail episode. So I think that I think this
Speaker 1: could be important. Well, let's round robin him. Then, Uh, Matt,
Speaker 1: why don't you do the honors? Sure? Number one is
Speaker 1: to observe and interact, and that just means taking time
Speaker 1: to engage with nature in whatever place you're you're looking at,
Speaker 1: you know, changing and using permaculture on to design solutions
Speaker 1: that suit a particular situation it's need to. Some of
Speaker 1: these can be applied philosophically to other disciplines to to
Speaker 1: speak to the whole interdisciplinary nature of the thing, like
Speaker 1: this one. Catch and store energy, develop systems that collect
Speaker 1: resources at peak abundance for use in times of need,
Speaker 1: like you can apply that to you know, um solar
Speaker 1: power and the idea of being able to store solar
Speaker 1: power in a grid and Earlan batteries or whatever to
Speaker 1: use later, which obviously it's difficult, but it is you know,
Speaker 1: a concept that could be applied to broader things other
Speaker 1: than just you know, crops or in this case often water,
Speaker 1: right likely capturing water in a rain barrel or things
Speaker 1: like that. There's lots of things that you can do
Speaker 1: that would be very helpful. All right, So I would
Speaker 1: just uh blaze through the next two because these are
Speaker 1: kind of short. Obtain a yield, emphasized projects that generate
Speaker 1: meaningful rewards that can apply to anything in your life.
Speaker 1: For apply self regulation and accept feedback. Discourage inappropriate activity
Speaker 1: to ensure that systems function well. No inappropriate activity here, right,
Speaker 1: anthrocentric aspect right where you could say, hey, buddy, stop,
Speaker 1: I know you love unias or something, but they don't
Speaker 1: belong here, and stop planting them just because you think
Speaker 1: they're pretty. But it also has a structural implication where
Speaker 1: you could say, for instance, um, we need to discourage
Speaker 1: the growth of this thing because it is maybe invasive
Speaker 1: or it's not helping the ecosystem. Right. I'd be very
Speaker 1: interested to see what permaculture experts think of kadzu in
Speaker 1: the American South, which is just or what is this
Speaker 1: starlings like? Wasn't it like some like Shakespeare aficionado or
Speaker 1: mega Shakespeare fans that introduced starlings and it was a massive,
Speaker 1: massive mistake. Yes, sorry, So let's move on, guys. Uh,
Speaker 1: Number five is using value renewable resources and services makes sense?
Speaker 1: I mean we we get that reduced consumption and dependence
Speaker 1: on non renewable resources. Done at this one, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go to the next one. Guys, produce no waste value
Speaker 1: and employ all available resources waste nothing, pretty standard tenant.
Speaker 1: We've got next design from patterns to details. I like
Speaker 1: this one. Um, observe patterns in nature and society and
Speaker 1: use them to inform designs later adding details. This is
Speaker 1: so neat, Like I've always been fascinated by just the
Speaker 1: the nature of complex systems and what are we if
Speaker 1: not like in a web of like one of the
Speaker 1: most complex systems you know in all of creation, which
Speaker 1: is like the natural world. Um, And if you pull
Speaker 1: back and zoom out and take a look at how
Speaker 1: the systems work, like with the mushrooms and the decaying
Speaker 1: and all of that, you can kind of get a
Speaker 1: sense of how you can apply these systems to like
Speaker 1: other things. Yeah, and then next there would be integrate
Speaker 1: rather than segregate, which I quite like. Uh. The concept
Speaker 1: is proper to designs allow relationships to develop between design elements,
Speaker 1: allowing them to work together to support each other. So
Speaker 1: in agricultural terms, that's saying, don't have one field for corn.
Speaker 1: Do the three sisters approach, Try some intercroppy. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a rising tide carries all vessels sort of philosophy
Speaker 1: applied to ecology, which is pretty brilliant in my opinion,
Speaker 1: And it even has to do with design elements what
Speaker 1: it even says in there, which is really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, guys that I have such a small scope
Speaker 1: on this, but I just went to Dura's website and
Speaker 1: looked at some of the projects he's worked on, and
Speaker 1: this concept of of integrating even in the design right,
Speaker 1: not even the actual crops or or the plants that
Speaker 1: are being put in certain places. It's just how it looks,
Speaker 1: where where the earth is moved up and where it's
Speaker 1: moved down, and how water actually flows through the system
Speaker 1: when when it rains. Now, because of how it was designed,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating stuff. The next one is used small and
Speaker 1: slow solutions. Small and slow systems, it says, are easier
Speaker 1: to maintain, makes sense, and they make better use of
Speaker 1: local resources and they produce more sustainable outcomes. Next we
Speaker 1: have use and value diversity. Diversity reduces system level of
Speaker 1: vulnerability to threats and fully exploits its environments. And then
Speaker 1: we have h I had mentioned this earlier, use edges
Speaker 1: and value. The marginal, the border between things is where
Speaker 1: the most interesting events take place. Any amphibian can assure
Speaker 1: you that's me editorializing. Is that like a liminal space. Ben,
Speaker 1: It very much is. Matt is very much like a
Speaker 1: liminal space, thank you. These these are often the systems
Speaker 1: most valuable, diverse and productive elements. And again this like
Speaker 1: you could be an interior designer and you could hear
Speaker 1: these things and think hundred percent yes, this is what
Speaker 1: I aim for. Because we're talking high level uh structural
Speaker 1: systemic analytical thought here. So I would love to hear
Speaker 1: people fellow conspiracy realists from different disciplines to talk about
Speaker 1: tell us how this applies to some of your work.
Speaker 1: I think this also counts for engineering designing a car, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want to figure out all of these things? Um,
Speaker 1: maybe let's let's end on the last one. There there's
Speaker 1: one more, uh twelfth commandment. Well there's there's you know,
Speaker 1: they call it design principle, but this is an important one.
Speaker 1: Creatively use and respond to change. A positive impact on
Speaker 1: inevitable change comes from careful observation followed by well timed intervention. Listen, twice,
Speaker 1: speak once. That's pretty much what this means, right, So
Speaker 1: it's our measure twice cut once. Alright, So these are
Speaker 1: these are things that we can all agree are good ideas.
Speaker 1: Perhaps outside of the bounds of agriculture and sustainability as well.
Speaker 1: These can work for any number of disciplines. Here's the
Speaker 1: coolest part though. If you look around the world around
Speaker 1: the planet since humans have been there, which isn't you know,
Speaker 1: the longest time, you'll see that in almost every civilization
Speaker 1: there are examples of techniques that have later been folded
Speaker 1: into the concept of perma culture. It goes far past
Speaker 1: the Three Sisters. It goes far past Carver and the
Speaker 1: idea of proper rotation. We're talking rainwater harvesting, vermic composting,
Speaker 1: using you know, the creepy Crawley's to do some of
Speaker 1: the some of the breakdown for you. People have been
Speaker 1: thinking about this concept independently across the span of time
Speaker 1: and across the span of geography for again thousands of years.
Speaker 1: This isn't a new idea. And with all that in mind,
Speaker 1: perma culture doesn't seem too unreasonable. Right as the Georgia
Speaker 1: guidestones once said, leave room for nature. Uh, unfortunately twice,
Speaker 1: right twice, they hit that one twice. Unfortunately, perma culture
Speaker 1: does have its fair share of critics, and not all
Speaker 1: of these critics are um coming with reasons that might
Speaker 1: be immediately apparent to you. We just want to make
Speaker 1: sure you know. Not all of them are captain planet villains.
Speaker 1: Not all of them are huge corporations saying mono agriculture
Speaker 1: and slash and burn is the only way to grow stuff.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a pause for word from our sponsors
Speaker 1: and then return with critics and controversy of perman culture.
Speaker 1: We're back, all right. So, to put it bluntly, just
Speaker 1: to rip this band aid off real quick. A lot
Speaker 1: of the criticism comes from people in those specific scientific
Speaker 1: fields that from which perma culture extracts a little bit, right,
Speaker 1: And they'll they'll tell you that there is either a
Speaker 1: lack of scientific basis for this and saying that, you know,
Speaker 1: really get some perma culture experts up in arms, or
Speaker 1: to put it bluntly, they'll say it's not very practical.
Speaker 1: And we'll get to that last idea in the moment,
Speaker 1: but maybe we talk about the scientific evidence or perceived
Speaker 1: lack thereof first. Okay, So first, um, let's talk about
Speaker 1: one of the dings on perma culture in the idea
Speaker 1: that it lacks scientific basis, it lacks scientific evidence. Uh.
Speaker 1: Mollison was by many accounts, not particularly interested in the
Speaker 1: academic side of perma culture. Uh. You know that obviously
Speaker 1: would require peer review and data and you know, things
Speaker 1: like science e. Stuff. That was not really his bag.
Speaker 1: He was much more into the philosophy of it all. Um.
Speaker 1: He did create the Perma Culture Design Course, uh, the
Speaker 1: PDC UM, but he wanted it to be super accessible.
Speaker 1: He actually was against kind of the lucivity of academia.
Speaker 1: He wanted it to be accessible to you know, average people,
Speaker 1: because these are the people that that you know, he
Speaker 1: thought would be the most valuable in instituting this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. It needed to be widely accessible. Um, you
Speaker 1: didn't want to lock it up behind some sort of
Speaker 1: like institutional paywall. But according to the Perma Culture Research Institute,
Speaker 1: this is a problem to some and possibly likely a
Speaker 1: reason that it didn't catch on in a greater you know,
Speaker 1: um educational kind of framework, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: like being taught at schools, because it had this air
Speaker 1: of pseudo science about it, which doesn't fly in in
Speaker 1: institutions of higher learning or even like medium learning. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is weird the way that the term perma
Speaker 1: culture means so many different things to different people if
Speaker 1: you look at online forums and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that's one of the things I think I was
Speaker 1: always winging about what always are here? Yes, what is
Speaker 1: what is permit culture? Is a rose as a rose
Speaker 1: as a rose, right, uh whatever, So yeah, one of
Speaker 1: the one of the issues here. And I say this
Speaker 1: is someone who is not a fan of gate keeping
Speaker 1: knowledge in any way. And I have a profoundly deep
Speaker 1: conviction that the concept of an ivory tower often does
Speaker 1: more harm than good, right when you think about the
Speaker 1: advancement and the spread of knowledge. But one thing academia
Speaker 1: does really well is to impose standards, hopefully uniform standards,
Speaker 1: so that everybody can grow together, right, and it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not just a matter of opinion anymore. That's a
Speaker 1: beautiful thing about these sorts of institutional structures and perma
Speaker 1: culture acknowledges that this could be a problem because if
Speaker 1: it's if it doesn't have those same rigorous controls and
Speaker 1: that same sort of uniform methodology, then it can that
Speaker 1: that very diversity that is prized can become a stumbling block.
Speaker 1: This lack of like this lack of buttoned up to
Speaker 1: have a tie on officialdom about it is part of
Speaker 1: the reason why people can glom onto an idea of
Speaker 1: permaculture and use that term to describe things that Mullison
Speaker 1: and Homegrin themselves probably wouldn't agree with. They probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: agree with this idea of some pseudo scientific stuff. But
Speaker 1: because there's not, again, an academic discipline around this, there's
Speaker 1: not really a way to stop them. It would be
Speaker 1: like if astrophysics was just whatever you described astrophysics as
Speaker 1: outside of a couple of vague fortune cookie sentences, you
Speaker 1: could also just sort of improve it and say, yeah,
Speaker 1: astrophysics is the study of like movements in astronomy, but
Speaker 1: also reading palms. You know what I mean, Like, there's
Speaker 1: not really a way to stop it other than you
Speaker 1: say not really though, and then saying, well, that's what
Speaker 1: astrophysics means to me, and you're being a jerky Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it brings in Perman culture does have a tendency,
Speaker 1: and I think in our experience upon researching this, uh,
Speaker 1: it brings in a lot of belief So maybe one
Speaker 1: group's belief one like movement within per Perman culture, sub
Speaker 1: movements within Perman culture. The beliefs are shared amongst everybody,
Speaker 1: so then you can take a couple and then really
Speaker 1: run with them. Yeah, and this, you know, this happens
Speaker 1: in other places, right. To be fair, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of astrophysicists who disagree with each other, but their
Speaker 1: arguments are evidence based, right, and their arguments are subject
Speaker 1: to the check and ballot system of the scientific method,
Speaker 1: which doesn't always apply to some of these things that
Speaker 1: are Again, I don't know, there's like, like outside of
Speaker 1: those principles, outside of the foundational books and outside of
Speaker 1: the three core ethics. There there's not a lot of
Speaker 1: canonical perma culture stuff other than that in the statements
Speaker 1: of big players in the field, So it could be
Speaker 1: a problem. It's true that the term perma culture is
Speaker 1: nebulous many times. Uh, and people chosen their own yes
Speaker 1: and definitions and takes on it. Um, what's another example, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like how Uh, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: how a sandwich might mean thousands of different things depending
Speaker 1: on where you are in the world, Right, and that's
Speaker 1: why not a hot dog definitely not technically it's a
Speaker 1: Technically that's a sandwich too, you know, if an open
Speaker 1: face sandwich is a sandwich? Right? Exactly this old thing?
Speaker 1: What are we exactly? What what are we judging the
Speaker 1: sandwich on? Is it just about containing a piece of
Speaker 1: meat contained within bread to shape enter into it? Is
Speaker 1: it all about portability? Like? Where do we I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I got I get really worked up about them. No, no,
Speaker 1: I remember this then? Yeah, technically, But I think another
Speaker 1: more interesting thing that whish people will talk about more
Speaker 1: is what is a salad? Technically a salad is just
Speaker 1: a mixture of disparate elements, so harring salad. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know anyway. That's permaculture is having the same problem,
Speaker 1: is what I'm saying. There's no like, there's no PhD
Speaker 1: in sandwich there's no PhD in case of DA, But
Speaker 1: if you took one of these courses or like Doug
Speaker 1: a little deeper, I mean, there are like specific procedures
Speaker 1: and recommendations and ways of going about this stuff as
Speaker 1: per there philosophy. I mean, you can look at it
Speaker 1: on the purely philosophical level, and I think it's really
Speaker 1: neat and useful in that respect. But if you dig deeper,
Speaker 1: I'm asking, like, if you took the class, are they
Speaker 1: going to teach you how to how to do it?
Speaker 1: Like how to actually do things procedurally. That's what he
Speaker 1: took several classes before he began his own company. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And again because context is key, Like any perma culture
Speaker 1: practitioner will tell you that the solutions you would need
Speaker 1: for sustainable development of a tropical ecosystem are going to
Speaker 1: be different from the solutions you might need for a
Speaker 1: more savannah or prairie land ecosystem. So that's something they're
Speaker 1: very cognizant about. There's not necessarily a silver bullet, right
Speaker 1: and saying that there's a silver bullet saying that there's
Speaker 1: one set of plants or one set of practices you
Speaker 1: can use for any biome or any ecosystem. Excuse me.
Speaker 1: That is misleading and it's incorrect, and I think every
Speaker 1: perma culturist from Mollison on down is well aware of
Speaker 1: that fact and very open about it. As a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, Mollison's main criticism of conventional agriculture was that
Speaker 1: it wasn't sustainable because nothing about it was permanent. He
Speaker 1: said that we need to find things that fit the
Speaker 1: places right. This is about observation. It's not about creating
Speaker 1: a new space. It's about helping improve the existing space.
Speaker 1: It was again working way before humans got here. So
Speaker 1: he is trying to create feedback loops. I know I've
Speaker 1: been mentioning feedback loops a lot. Often. Feedback loops are
Speaker 1: not necessarily bad. They can be good, especially in these
Speaker 1: kind of closed systems. So let's table that. Like like,
Speaker 1: we've acknowledged that there are concerns about the rigor or
Speaker 1: the approach to becoming canonical parts of the perma culture philosophy.
Speaker 1: But past that to the second thing we mentioned, some
Speaker 1: scientists will tell you the entire aim of perman culture
Speaker 1: is missing the mark. I want to introduces to a
Speaker 1: plant biologist named Ken Thompson Kenson, author as well, had
Speaker 1: this interview with the British outfit, the Telegraph, and he's
Speaker 1: very British about this. Uh. He had a quote that
Speaker 1: stood out to me where he said, the trouble is
Speaker 1: that the average modern gardener has little use for basketry materials, fodder,
Speaker 1: game or sap products, right, because you're not wasting anything
Speaker 1: in perma cultures. So you're growing, you're growing something. You're thinking,
Speaker 1: how can I use this? Can I use this to
Speaker 1: weave baskets later? Can I use this to make sap
Speaker 1: that I can somehow refine? And his thing is some gardeners,
Speaker 1: you know, they just they want tomatoes right there. They
Speaker 1: just they want they want lilies. They don't need to
Speaker 1: in their minds, they don't need to use everything. The
Speaker 1: one good thing is that you could just turn anything
Speaker 1: you don't use back into soil if you have enough time,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna be that garden for long enough time. Right. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a really good point. And and time horizon is
Speaker 1: a huge part of perma culture to right. So that's
Speaker 1: what sustainability means. It's long term. So folks like Thompson
Speaker 1: and people who agree with him say, okay, perman culture
Speaker 1: is well intentioned, but overall it's kind of naive or
Speaker 1: maybe overly ambitious, or it might not be effective for
Speaker 1: the needs of a lot of people. In practical terms,
Speaker 1: he said that the idea of a forest garden fails
Speaker 1: in terms of scale and usefulness, as you might imagine.
Speaker 1: Perman culture enthusiasts disagree with him, but if you read
Speaker 1: his comparison, he's objecting specifically to the proposition that, when
Speaker 1: managed correctly, a forest garden could feed four to five
Speaker 1: people per acre, which is again a lot of bang
Speaker 1: for your buck in terms of um car in terms
Speaker 1: of caloric output, right, calories people need to eat to
Speaker 1: stay alive. Do you know the chef. I think his
Speaker 1: name is Magnus Favcan. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
Speaker 1: his last name right, but I think he's Icelandic or
Speaker 1: some Nordic region. He's all about foraging. He's all about
Speaker 1: like all of his dishes are created using like foraged
Speaker 1: you know, vegetables and things. And he has like a
Speaker 1: root seller and uses all these very like old kind
Speaker 1: of techniques that are very much in line with what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here. Um. But it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a philosophy, but it's also like it it adds
Speaker 1: a certain creative spark in a certain connection to the
Speaker 1: land and to the region, you know, with his cuisine
Speaker 1: and he's like he was on one of those episodes
Speaker 1: of The Chef's Table on Netflix. I believe it's magnus
Speaker 1: but really interesting the way that that can be used
Speaker 1: almost like as as a part of an art form
Speaker 1: and also like a communication kind of like with your
Speaker 1: environment and then to your your diners. You know, it's
Speaker 1: it's I think it's neat. Well, I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: very cool thing, and it's awesome for you know, a
Speaker 1: restaurant or even a couple of restaurants that one person owns,
Speaker 1: but it's probably not for feeding the entire population of
Speaker 1: the country that that chef is in, right if you.
Speaker 1: I mean, you couldn't just forge for all the food
Speaker 1: to feed everybody in Iceland. No, it has to be scalable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the issues, is the idea of scale.
Speaker 1: You know, feeding three hundred and twenty three million people
Speaker 1: is different from feeding a community of thirty. But anyway,
Speaker 1: when when Thompson's walking through this concept, he says, okay, well,
Speaker 1: maybe you could try to do something like that, but
Speaker 1: will it be It'll be edible, but will it be palatable?
Speaker 1: Meaning will you enjoy it? Will you be happy living
Speaker 1: off these uh, these tubers, these trees, these boiled plants
Speaker 1: for the rest of your life? And then he goes
Speaker 1: back and forth on some examples, including one chuckle worthy
Speaker 1: response to UH to an idea about density of orangutans.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to ruin it for folks, but
Speaker 1: check out the Telegraph thing. Again. It's very British in
Speaker 1: the way he talks about it, not necessarily mean, but
Speaker 1: but snarky. And Thompson is basically saying that what we're
Speaker 1: talking about is editing nature the way you would edit
Speaker 1: a manuscript or a video, and that farmers and gardeners
Speaker 1: themselves are already editing nature just the way permaculturists do
Speaker 1: with a slightly different editorial eye. And he says the
Speaker 1: world right now at this point it just might not
Speaker 1: be easily or reasonably fed via gardens. Before we move on,
Speaker 1: I'd also like to note, for anybody's really mad about
Speaker 1: Thompson from that introduction, he wrote a book with a
Speaker 1: hilarious title that I plan to read. It's called do
Speaker 1: We Need pandas The Uncomfortable Truth about bio diversity? Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, what do they? What do they? What
Speaker 1: do they ever do for us? I was going around
Speaker 1: karate chopping everybody, you know, like I'm just joking. That's
Speaker 1: kung Fu Panda. I've never have you seen the Kung
Speaker 1: Fu Panda films that I haven't seen them? Um, you
Speaker 1: know what this does reminder the philosophical side of this
Speaker 1: is is the panda, uh you know bamboo? Is it
Speaker 1: grows wild, like it goes out of out of control
Speaker 1: if you don't, you know, cut it back or take
Speaker 1: care of it. You gotta wonder is the panda in
Speaker 1: some small way helping keeping the world from being overwhelmed
Speaker 1: by bamboo? I don't know. UM, A lot of the
Speaker 1: kind of philosophical or even spiritual side of this permaculture stuff,
Speaker 1: UM reminds me a lot the way it can be
Speaker 1: like adapted like to like lifestyle and just kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, bigger picture thinking. There's a film called
Speaker 1: Being There where Um Peter Sellers plays this character who's
Speaker 1: a gardener. His name's Chauncey, and he's basically like he's
Speaker 1: lived in this old man's house as long as he
Speaker 1: can remember. And the old man dies, and uh, Chauncey
Speaker 1: just kind of like goes off on his own. And
Speaker 1: he's sort of this like simple kind of character. He
Speaker 1: does really understand the outside world, but he speaks everything
Speaker 1: he talks about he relates back to gardening, and in
Speaker 1: the film, you know, he's making all these everyone thinks
Speaker 1: he's speaking in metaphors um and he like ends up,
Speaker 1: you know, stumbling into these like elite political circles. You'll
Speaker 1: say things like as long as the roots are not severed,
Speaker 1: all is well, and all will be well in the garden,
Speaker 1: and the presidents like in the garden, Yes, in the garden,
Speaker 1: growth has its seasons. First comes spring and summer, but
Speaker 1: then we have fall and winter, and then we get
Speaker 1: spring and summer again. And then the President's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's genius, so insightful, you know, he's but he's really
Speaker 1: just talking about like, you know, actual gardening. But it
Speaker 1: is a system that is incredibly complex and fascinating and
Speaker 1: can be applied to the way we think about just
Speaker 1: life on Earth. So you could argue that some of
Speaker 1: the criticism of Perma cultures, more fringe e associated beliefs
Speaker 1: comes from this democratization of knowledge. That's that's something that
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier. One of the issues here is that
Speaker 1: critics will say perman culture has become more of a
Speaker 1: religion or more of a cult than a collection of
Speaker 1: scientific beliefs. And they'll say, hey, this home grewn guy,
Speaker 1: this molesten guy. They're starting to be treated more like
Speaker 1: profits rather than innovators or leaders in the space, as
Speaker 1: Corporate America likes to say. But that's not a problem
Speaker 1: with perman culture, I think not really not what its
Speaker 1: founders articulated. It's a social issue. Perman culture champions diversity.
Speaker 1: It's a design principle, and this means that includes a
Speaker 1: diversity of ideas. It likes edges, so it welcomes some
Speaker 1: edgy ideas, and when people add their own concepts to
Speaker 1: those pre existing thoughts, it means that it's often people,
Speaker 1: not process that creates the problem. And guys, here, I
Speaker 1: just think we have to point out. In an earlier episode, uh,
Speaker 1: we looked at some of the kind of nasty origins
Speaker 1: of some very good environmental movements like the Sierra Club
Speaker 1: had some racism tied up into it when it was
Speaker 1: talking about conserving the natural environment. It was talking about
Speaker 1: or at least its founding fathers were talking about conserving
Speaker 1: it for a specific type of person rather than everybody eugenics. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then more recently old Dave sorry we don't know him,
Speaker 1: be right. Then David Holingern was in the news and
Speaker 1: there was a public statement that he put out, uh
Speaker 1: about why he purposely chose to not get a COVID vaccine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's uh, he he was. If you read his statement,
Speaker 1: which is on his blog, you'll see that, uh, he
Speaker 1: was persuaded by something called the f l C c
Speaker 1: C Alliance and that's an outfit that was promoting iver
Speaker 1: Mecton instead of the proven COVID vaccines. And he's really
Speaker 1: clear that this is his personal opinion. I think he
Speaker 1: writes very fairly about it. Honestly, he just says it's
Speaker 1: not for me. But the problem is, he is again
Speaker 1: a leader in the space. He is a luminary in
Speaker 1: the world of perma culture. So, like an author named
Speaker 1: Terry Leehy points out in the politics of perma culture,
Speaker 1: he has a transference phenomenon occurring around him. He has
Speaker 1: a lot of unquestioned credibility that goes far past his
Speaker 1: stated areas of expertise. It's sort of like when a
Speaker 1: we talked about this in our upcoming book. It's like
Speaker 1: when a celebrity who's been in films that you like
Speaker 1: says something about I don't want to keep picking on astrophysics.
Speaker 1: They say something about macro economics, and they have not
Speaker 1: studied macro economics, but because you liked them in a film,
Speaker 1: you are more likely to take their opinion as fact.
Speaker 1: This is a trap of charisma, and it happens pretty
Speaker 1: often across the world. And when we say this, we're
Speaker 1: not saying, of course, that anybody is dumb at all.
Speaker 1: It's just your brain wants you to agree with entities
Speaker 1: that you have agreed with in the past. That's what's happening.
Speaker 1: So his words, just because they come from him, can
Speaker 1: be taken his statements of fact, even when he is
Speaker 1: very again, the guy is very careful to say this
Speaker 1: is my opinion, this is why I don't want to
Speaker 1: this is why I am not getting vaccinated. He doesn't
Speaker 1: vilify people who choose to get vaccinated, or is the
Speaker 1: British say get the jab But his critics are rightly
Speaker 1: concerned that his followers might endanger their lives or others
Speaker 1: by taking his word as gospel, regardless of how carefully
Speaker 1: he caveats it. I mean, it makes sense. Think about it.
Speaker 1: If you truly believe you are hearing from a guy
Speaker 1: who came up with a way to save agri culture
Speaker 1: as we know it, then you're probably, for better or worse,
Speaker 1: going to treat his other statements and opinions with the
Speaker 1: same high regard. Uh. And then again, the people problem
Speaker 1: goes beyond just just this idea of whether a public
Speaker 1: figure like what degree of responsibility they have to the
Speaker 1: public right. It goes beyond this. The third principal tenant
Speaker 1: of perman culture setting limits to population and consumption. This
Speaker 1: is by far the most controversial that you just yelled
Speaker 1: it out earlier. Eugenics. This conjures up the specter of
Speaker 1: oover population and uh, yeah, I don't know. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody who has I think at least
Speaker 1: the vast majority of perma culture practitioners would say, no,
Speaker 1: I am not a eugenicist. I think, yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 1: It's weird to or rationally go through it because it
Speaker 1: certainly feels as though there are too many humans on
Speaker 1: the planet and way too many cars on eight five
Speaker 1: that's a highway here in Atlanta, Um. But of course
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean we need to you know, wipe out
Speaker 1: a bunch of humans so we can make enough food
Speaker 1: for the smaller amount that now exists. There's some also
Speaker 1: really some interesting observations from the more right leaning side
Speaker 1: of politics, who really do think that that permac culture
Speaker 1: is what we kind of mentioned before, it's too close
Speaker 1: to something that would be considered not socialism necessarily, but uh, communism.
Speaker 1: I mean it we already kind of joked about in
Speaker 1: the episode that it has shades of communism. It sounds
Speaker 1: like communism, right, yeah, we will they all like, they'll
Speaker 1: distribute the surplus back to the people, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a good idea, I would argue, but
Speaker 1: it's just not the capitalist way, so it's easy to
Speaker 1: throw the C word around at it, you know. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: and if there was government control over the you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a mass permaculture system, that it would be socialism, right,
Speaker 1: a government deciding who gets that surplus, right yeah. But
Speaker 1: also if we're if we're engaging in structural thought. If
Speaker 1: we're analyzing systems here, then we can see very similar
Speaker 1: things happening in a community of two dozen people as
Speaker 1: well as a community of a million people. So there
Speaker 1: would still possibly be a threshold at which a government
Speaker 1: or a hierarchy. Hierarchy forms, meaning that there could be
Speaker 1: a group of of four people in a community of fifty,
Speaker 1: and those folks, whether they're called like the council or
Speaker 1: the elders or you know, the big elbows or whatever
Speaker 1: silly name people come up with, in those situations, they
Speaker 1: could still institute the same inequalities you see in larger systems.
Speaker 1: I would propose that for many people who say, oh,
Speaker 1: this is socialism, or for many people who say, oh
Speaker 1: this is too ideally, I would propose that the the
Speaker 1: problem really is not the application of perma culture techniques.
Speaker 1: The problem is the human piece of the equation. The
Speaker 1: human brains hardwired limits on what it is able to
Speaker 1: conceive of as society. But that's maybe a story for
Speaker 1: another day. We do want to air some responses to
Speaker 1: the idea of socialism from Perma culture. Going back to
Speaker 1: the perman Culture Institute itself, they say, quote, perma culture
Speaker 1: isn't socialism, practitioners aren't required to live on a commune,
Speaker 1: work for free, or give away their excess. Perma culture
Speaker 1: doesn't preclude you from earning a decent living. In fact,
Speaker 1: perma culture can bring practitioners all kinds of benefits, including
Speaker 1: financee ntil wins. So it starts to feel a little
Speaker 1: bit like a marketing pamphlet towards the end. But they
Speaker 1: are dispelling I think some some myths. This is not
Speaker 1: some Orwellian new world order where you exist as a
Speaker 1: peasant under the boot of the of the ruling class,
Speaker 1: at least not the way they're thinking of it. I'd
Speaker 1: go back to Durs one more time. The guy started
Speaker 1: a company on his own in a capitalist system to
Speaker 1: you know, work setting up perman culture projects for other people.
Speaker 1: So I mean, there's nothing communists or socialists about that, No,
Speaker 1: not at all. And then there's this This is where
Speaker 1: we get to the end, folks, and where we pass
Speaker 1: the plow to you. So perma culture is fascinating. Yes,
Speaker 1: it can have some really great benefits in specific situations, right,
Speaker 1: because it depends upon context and diversity. However, it is
Speaker 1: not some sort of silver bullet, some sort of panacea
Speaker 1: to the problem of environmental degradation. Perma culture is heroic,
Speaker 1: but it is not messionic. And would the widespread application
Speaker 1: of these practices help more than it would harm. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: probably most likely. But it's not going to fix things
Speaker 1: like the Great Pacific garbage Patch. It's not going to
Speaker 1: reverse global warming anytime soon, you know, because this is
Speaker 1: not a ding on perman culture. This is just a
Speaker 1: matter of how far down the slope the planets systems
Speaker 1: have already gone. Instead, I think it's best for us
Speaker 1: to regard perma culture itself the way mullis in regards
Speaker 1: natural systems. Let's observe, Let's consider these practices and these
Speaker 1: philosophies as part of a greater whole. To think in
Speaker 1: terms of analogy, perma culture is like one tool in
Speaker 1: a bigger box of tools, including things like nonprofit actions,
Speaker 1: god or man initiatives, activism, personal efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So maybe the best way to end it is like this.
Speaker 1: In the right situation, permaculture can be a fantastic tool,
Speaker 1: like the best hammer you could ever buy, the perfect screwdriver,
Speaker 1: what have you. But it is crucial for everyone to
Speaker 1: remember that when you want to build a house, you
Speaker 1: need more than just a hammer. You need more than
Speaker 1: just a screwdriver. You cannot build a house with a
Speaker 1: hammer alone. And in this case, that house happens to
Speaker 1: be Planet Earth, the only place humans live so far
Speaker 1: as we record this episode, I hope that age is poorly.
Speaker 1: I hope someone is listening to this on the Moon
Speaker 1: or on Mars. Yeah. I feel like you could build
Speaker 1: some kind of log cabin, maybe not a perfect one,
Speaker 1: but a log cabin if you just had a single ax,
Speaker 1: I think you could do it. Yeah, Abraham Lincoln did it.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows that Lincoln logs. Well, you would need to
Speaker 1: because you would you would need to fill the gaps
Speaker 1: in between the logs right with a kind of sap um.
Speaker 1: It really goes down to what, doesn't it. Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you need an actually mud. Well, let us know.
Speaker 1: Send us photographs, yeah, cent us photographs of the house
Speaker 1: you're built with one tool, whatever it is, one tool
Speaker 1: other than money, okay, smart Alex in the crowd, other
Speaker 1: than cash, a tool that you use your hands or
Speaker 1: your tentacles with, and just that tool, you built a domicile.
Speaker 1: Let us know. We can't wait to hear from you.
Speaker 1: Thanks to DIRS, Thanks to all our fellow conspiracy realists
Speaker 1: working in urban agriculture, working out on farms, all our
Speaker 1: folks who are currently studying the fields of biology, the
Speaker 1: fields of agriculture. The world needs you, uh, and you're
Speaker 1: doing an awesome thing. We can't wait to hear your
Speaker 1: thoughts on permaculture. We try to be easy to find online,
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