Fresh Ways to Think About our Environment

David Holmgren

I welcome this opportunity to join others in thinking and acting creatively for our collective future whether in or outside local government. As a contribution to the mix, I want to very briefly frame fresh ways to think about our environment as a foundation for our common and more local future.

I have four points framed as questions that range from the enticing to the challenging.

First point: Can we focus on how we, as individuals, households and communities, can help Mother Nature in her most fundamental priorities, since she first came out of the sea 400 million years ago to make the land beautiful and abundant?

She did this by “Catching and Storing” water and essential nutrients for life in soil and living biomass. These are the foundations that allow her to spread and diversify wealth to all her life processes and member species. In the process of doing the same we contribute to her abundances and diversity, that will in turn and over time, provide for the needs of our descendants and inheritors.

So can we all support this as enlightened and long term self interest? Could this appeal to all in our community for whom “The Environment” is not their current priority?

Second point: Can we take more direct responsibility for our current provision of needs and wants from both nature’s local abundances and society’s wastes? In the process can we accept that there are downsides to every action, but that it is better that those downsides are local rather than global?

Third point: When adhering to whatever version of environmental ideology (including permaculture), can we recognise that, in Australian society at least, our wider adverse impact and footprint are, on average, directly related to our level of monetary income but has no recognisable relationship to our politics?

Fourth point: Can we humbly accept that understandings of how the society and nature work (and don’t) are increasingly divergent and that environmental crusades all reach limits to the numbers of adherents?

I believe we have already reached and passed peak belief in climate change and that all that is happening is a combination of intensification of certainty by most but not all current adherents, and that more power players and institutions are using the climate cause to drive their respective agendas without acknowledging those agendas.

Working for community benefit demands that we accept diverse interpretations of the wider world beyond what we can see and work with.

David Holmgren is the co originator of Permaculture. He lives in Hepburn Springs.

This article is based on one of the lightening talks presented at the Hepburn Shire Future Forum organised by local community members on August 4th.