WEBVTT

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[music]

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Permaculture really starts with an ethic.

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Earth care, that’s care of the whole
systems of earth and species.

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So, we actually devise model systems.

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Much of the design is drawn from nature.

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The end result that we aim for is to
produce a system that’s ecologically sound

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and economically profitable. It can get as
sophisticated or as simple as you like.

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[sil.]

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Hi, I’m Bill Mollison.

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I sometimes get very sick of bad news. And I
think we should always look at things like

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that and try to turn it into good news.

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It’s really easy to turn things around.
In five weeks time

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this will be a nice set of potatoes.

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And for me, that’s good news.

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In the late 60s, I was protesting social

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and environmental issues. But by the early
70s, I decided protests wasn’t good enough.

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So, I commenced designing
gardens and positive

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design systems for human settlements.

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[music]

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If people would only realize that everything
they ever needed is right outside their door.

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What you really need is sun,
plants and keep your eye on the

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soil, and of course, we get plenty of
fruits, you’ve got a lot of fruits.

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[music]

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This is my garden in the subtropics. From here to
the Equator, all the fertility is held in plants,

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not in the soil. Therefore, you have to
make an extremely dense plant system.

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And the mulch and fertilizer we put on, is all
up in these plants. If we remove the plants,

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we have an infertile situation.

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In the tropics, plow agriculture is
totally inappropriate for cropping.

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For a few years, we can hold the
nutrient perhaps, but then it will go

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because of the (inaudible) and hot rains.
Even the silica leaves the soil.

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This causes more pollution in streams, more rapid
loses of nutrient, and would be a very rare crop

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that we can grow, which we get the valve
of the minerals lost back in the crop.

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If we produce a system
which doesn’t destroy

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basic resources like soil and
produces negligible pollution,

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then you have something that can go
on forever in which people can live

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for an indefinite period
without destroying the earth.

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And that is the ultimate aim and all… all
our sustainable systems achieve that aim.

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In 1972, there was no
word in English language

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for sustainable agricultural systems, so I coined the
word Permaculture from permanent and agriculture.

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[music]

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And this is where the designer turns into
a recliner. You can rest in your garden.

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If you have it already well planted, you
can pretend to be working in the garden

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and be invisible from the house. Now, only two
years later, I haven’t invisible from the house,

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and before where there were biting ants by
the thousands, there are now only worms.

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And, in fact, I can recline here
and be totally invisible from even

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10 feet away. When you build
a Permaculture garden,

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the nature doesn’t contain such a garden.

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This is incredibly… This situation here, well,
that has a configuration like of forest,

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is yet incredibly rich
in functional plants.

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Plants that have a good relationship to each
other, it’s also incredibly rich in yield,

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much higher than other any agricultural,

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monocultural situation or nature itself.

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So, I specifically built to serve the
needs of human households and community.

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[sil.]

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With most of the garden
perennial are self-seeding,

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your work in planting is almost
finished after you’re sowing,

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basically your foliage, it becomes foliage.
There’s already a

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wide variety of food, because a tremendous
amount of tropical food is root crops,

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the storage.

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Still at most times of year
there’s something good to eat.

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These gardens that we build in the tropics
are very much the disorder of nature.

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This year, I’ve been traveling. I don’t
have a lot of (inaudible) garden.

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Okra.

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There’s capsicum, there’s basil,

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or basil.

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And you have a fairly good base
for salads and… and main foods.

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There’s probably about another 30 varieties
that we could pick. I think there’re 412

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food plants just in this area here.

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If I look around, there’s all fields
and food that I could ever need,

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fibers, mulch to do the
garden, to extend the garden.

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All are here. It took me 30 working
days, over three years to achieve this.

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Once you setup your own home, so you
could leave it for two or three months

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and it just gets better, so
that you’re free to travel,

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then you can go and teach other people.
And that’s why we go to places like

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India and Africa, because a casual
tourist look at those places will show

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that the houses they are, are not
surrounded by all their needs.

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They’re surrounded by crop lands and
they’re surrounded by wastelands.

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Our first course in Southern
Africa was given in 1987.

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And two students came home and setup a
magnificent training center in Zimbabwe,

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the Fambidzanai Center, which contains
most of the examples that Africa needs.

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Who is this one, now?

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Like, you have a culture you’re working with. You have a
culture of method of work and a culture of method of learning.

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In Africa, everyone sings. They sing
the work, they sing the learning.

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They sing the story from village to
village. And to me, the set of people

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singing while they work is… is Africa.
We won’t find that in Europe.

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Many Zimbabweans are poor farmers.

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So everything new we introduce, has
to be able to be made on the farm.

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[sil.]

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Well, this is heap one really quickly does
it. What are we doing? What are you doing?

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Yeah, I’m… I’m just making these
holes here up to the ground so that

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when the air, because on the bottom we put
some branches so that air can circulate…

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Through the heap. Through the heap.

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Yeah, when it’s heats up. You chaps work fast when
you’re singing. Yes, yes. And it seem no time at all.

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Yeah, sure. Very good. Okay. Great. Yeah, yeah. We will enjoy
it, when we’re singing and making the composite at same time.

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Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So,
this is like concrete.

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Yeah. So, it’s like concrete. And you lived
in this house? Yeah. I find the students here

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are excellent and will
make very good teachers.

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(inaudible) who was with me
is one of those teachers.

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He is very fluent. And I find he knows at least
as much as I do about this sort of system.

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This (inaudible) where

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everything work together. And this winged
bean release nitrogen in the soil.

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And the bananadilla collects nutrients,

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nitrogen from the soil released by… by

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winged bean. Then we plant popo
so that it can be a stick for

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these creepers. And we are
also trying to maintain

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a house for frogs, lizards
underneath, so that they can pick

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the pests which come and eat some of
the flowers in the… the vegetable

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we have around. Everything in this system

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or everything in the ecosystem do
help one another in another way

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or in another round. Yes, I’d like
to say that this particular guild,

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I’ve never seen. And the
Permaculture is about… not about

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which species firmly, but
that you have a legume.

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A planted use as a legume. I plant that repels
pests. So, we will see hundreds of different guilds

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made by students. And they will find out
which ones are very successful for them.

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And then that can become more of a standard
and they can teach that one as a success.

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And when we’re trying to do is make a lot of mistakes,
because that tells us which ones are good ones to use.

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So, you can never have a
typical Permaculture.

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Everyone you visit will be very different. So what we’re
teaching is not how to do it, but how to think about doing it.

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[sil.]

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The center has to be appropriate
to small farmers everywhere.

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One of the good ideas which are
efficient is made of local materials

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and can be made by people who are not real
craftsmen. An extremely cheap beehive.

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This is a (inaudible) beehive.

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These are widely used in Africa anyways,
very easy to handle. Yeah. And… Cheap?

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Cheap to make. Anyone can make them?
Anybody can make them.

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You can see, it’s just an ordinary box.
So your honeycombs don’t stick

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to the sides of the hive. See.

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So when you are combing… When you’re combing, you don’t
have a problem. All you need to do is just lift the

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bark up and you lift it
clean with comb, with that

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shape of the box there. This is the starter
for the…? Yeah, this is to start them off.

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You see, it’s a bit of wax, which we use.
We have a good comber here, who’s expert.

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So it’s quite simple
indeed to… to work with.

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But these are African bees, these are killer bees.
No! African bees are very lovely to work with.

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We are… We are not dead, we are working
with the bees, Bill. Yeah. In America…

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In America, we’d tell these are killer bees.
They’ll kill everything that stop them.

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One of the very exciting things

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that has happened in Zimbabwe is
that students from Fambidzanai

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were invited to a local school
to teach Permaculture design.

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The children at Saint Vincent’s come from the farms and
villages of this district, many of their parents are farmers.

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[sil.]

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That was January. Yeah. You can see the whole
thing improved since… They and the teachers

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and the headmaster, Meg, who is every
enthusiastic, brought in seedlings and seed

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from their gardens. Really it’s time to go with the
rains. Yeah, right. In the beginning of the rain

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is just nothing. How come did they get learning?
About two minutes, we started here. Yeah.

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And we… we went…

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It’s not just an exercise for the kids,

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in two years the garden will be
producing all their lunches.

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The students worked out their site design and
began by putting in hundreds of meters of

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water harvesting ditches on contour.

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We dug a pit so that most of the water can
collect in there and we put the mulch in there.

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And this tree has worked as to support
the tree which will then grow.

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(inaudible). Did you
design this idea or? Yeah.

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I make the same thing at my home, that’s why
I recognized it. I think you’ll all come

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to the same conclusion. Yeah. To you throw
your old school books and waste paper.

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In Africa, we’ll see most people as fairly
healthy with access to a pretty good education.

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But in densely populated India, we
don’t have that level of resources.

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[sil.]

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The problem with the world may not be what
it appears to be just too many people.

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It may be that all investment goes to further
consumption and expansion of the city without any

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expansion of the resources, trees, forests,
clean water and air that the people need.

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As we stop we’ll hit an absolute shortage
of water, absolute shortage of air quality,

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absolute shortage of soil.

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The cities of India are at breaking point, because
they are being flooded with rural refuges.

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The resources could have been directed
to strengthening traditional methods

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and the great variety in traditional
crops, which fed everybody in India.

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But instead of that, resources have been
directed to a green revolution type

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of export agriculture, which has actually
taken away from real food for all of India.

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[music]

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We’re in India in the southern Deccan about
two hours by road north of Hyderabad.

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This whole area is covered with flat barren

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rock that’s been eroded over the years.
And it was here,

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that the first Permaculture course in
India. And this place, which is the

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Deccan Development Society’s headquarters is where
we started to spread Permaculture in India.

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And one of my students was Dr. Venkat.

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[sil.]

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Hello Venkat. So, this is the first
banana plant I planted here. Yeah.

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And it was all like hard like this in those
days. I remember the students helping me. We…

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We had to use picked seeds. I’ve always been
amazed at the good branches from this plant.

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How much have we got off it?

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About 80 to 90 bunches. In how many years?
One and a half years.

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That’s pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah.
And we’ve got a lot of bananas of it.

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This was the first banana circle,
I think, on the Deccan. In India.

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In India, yeah. In India, it’s the first
circle. Yeah. It stood up very well. Yeah.

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But what I’d really like to do is have a look at the system you’ve
put in because this is all we did in the first place. That’s right.

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And nothing in here would be older than what?
Two… Two and a half years. Two and a half years.

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Nothing… Nothing that you see here is more than two and
a half years old. And other interesting part about

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what you are seeing in this particular
area is that the foot below this

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is a bedrock of laterite. Towards
the end of December 1987,

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this is our farm looked like
- no trees, not even shrubs,

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not even grass. I remember that a lot.

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I remember using the pix, you know, we couldn’t…
we couldn’t have planted some of them.

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We couldn’t just plant at that time. This
is astounding, you know, the jackfruit.

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Pomegranate here. Pomegranate.
We have… Cherry. Cherry.

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Cherry there, and mango. Mango. God this
place is good with enough food here,

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bananas, coconuts. I never thought
this soil would produce like this.

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Yeah, that’s true. In the summer of 1988,

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in this area, our well was… had gone dry.

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Now… We have now got about

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2,500 to 6,000 trees and shrubs

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any many number of groundcover.

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So that you find here, on this farm,
there is not one square meter of

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barren area. Something or other is growing.
If no useful thing

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is growing, at least something which we
call a weed is going, but it is covered,

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the soil is covered. Now, all this growth
results in harvesting the rainwater.

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Now, where will this rainwater go,
it will definitely go into well.

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So much so this year, the level in our well after the
monsoon is the highest ever recorded in this district.

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[music]

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I think it must be mouse. Yeah.

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Under this the soil is very beautiful, they’re sweet
potatoes. Sweet potato. You have enough (inaudible)

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thousands of them. Just about
a foot with two nodes,

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we use it as a ground cover
and you get a good yield.

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You know, this is a fantastic mulch. Yeah, it is a fantastic
mulch. You can use can use this instead of paper.

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This is… This is your paper. This is our
paper. I use newspapers, you would use these.

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Newspaper in India is not feasible. Not common. Not common
or feasible. Isn’t that good for toilet paper, is it?

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No, no. It has acids pecules in the leaves.
True, true, but we don’t know the effect there.

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[sil.]

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Uh… So, just being making the
deposit on my cup of tea.

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Uh… These toilets flush across to a
dome, which is over a biogester,

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which sends the gas off, which goes to the
kitchen and then we light the gas there

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and we make a cup of tea. So, you if want a cup
of tea here, you have to make a deposit there.

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If you don’t have enough people, you can
put manure down this part and it goes down

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into the septic tank. After it’s digested,

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then the manure slides and comes up here.

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And here it’s full of yeast and bacteria, and
we can sow grass in it and feed it to cattle,

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because it’s got a lot more
protein than it had originally.

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And additionally we can mix it one to ten
with water and put it on the garden,

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because there is no fertilizer
lost in the digestion process.

00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:43.000
[music]

00:20:45.000 --> 00:20:49.999
The Deccan Development Group have been
a tremendous catalyst for change.

00:20:50.000 --> 00:20:54.999
They’d setup women sangams or
councils in every village.

00:20:55.000 --> 00:20:59.999
So from Venkat’s garden in Pastapur the ideas are
spreading throughout India with his students.

00:21:00.000 --> 00:21:04.999
[music]

00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:09.999
He alone is working with 120 villages in the
Deccan and the students in total would be working

00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:14.999
in more than a thousand villages. They’ve
had a tremendous affect of one were to

00:21:15.000 --> 00:21:19.999
health of the people and their… their spirit,
the way they feel about their lives.

00:21:20.000 --> 00:21:24.999
[music]

00:21:25.000 --> 00:21:29.999
Until the green revolution just a few years ago, all the
plants in his garden would have been growing in the field,

00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:34.999
but then the fields have become monocultural,
their landlords are putting in single crops.

00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:39.999
There is no food mainly in the fields for people
here, so these gardens are really necessary.

00:21:40.000 --> 00:21:44.999
[music]

00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:49.999
I first went to the Deccan about three years ago when the drought was
severe. People were selling or giving away their plough animals.

00:21:50.000 --> 00:21:54.999
Everybody was listless and
sitting in the shade,

00:21:55.000 --> 00:21:59.999
just trying to survive
until the rains came. So

00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:04.999
we had a great sense of urgency. We know that most
of the emphasis has been on the green revolution

00:22:05.000 --> 00:22:09.999
of annual crops and it just
won’t feed people in drought.

00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:14.999
They go in for cash crops
like sugarcane, cotton,

00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.999
then rubber, then tea, at the
expense of their own food.

00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:24.999
That is food has become a commodity now.

00:22:25.000 --> 00:22:29.999
And if we want to build a
sustainable system of food,

00:22:30.000 --> 00:22:34.999
we have got to reverse this trend, that
is take food out of the commodity market,

00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.999
make it a non-commodity. Not
for export and not for market,

00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:44.999
but primarily for consumption.

00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:49.999
One of the things which we’ve got to go against the
present agricultural system is the economic stranglehold,

00:22:50.000 --> 00:22:54.999
you see that the landlords have put on the poorer
sections of the people and of the country.

00:22:55.000 --> 00:23:03.000
[non-English narration]

00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:09.999
He had to get the seed for the potatoes,

00:23:10.000 --> 00:23:14.999
he had to purchase in the
market the seed for sugarcane,

00:23:15.000 --> 00:23:19.999
and he had to buy the fertilizers.

00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:24.999
And after all these inputs, he had
borrowed a loan of 4,000 rupees

00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:29.999
from a group in the village, but the group charged four
rupees per month per cent, that is it works out to

00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:34.999
48% per year. So after paying
back all these things,

00:23:35.000 --> 00:23:39.999
he was not left with anything whatsoever.

00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:44.999
He has got a 10-year-old boy,
who was sold to a landlord

00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:49.999
as a bonded laborer for
a loan of 1,400 rupees,

00:23:50.000 --> 00:23:54.999
that’s all, that is his life,
his life as cheap as that.

00:23:55.000 --> 00:23:59.999
So, we also paid back that
1,400 rupees to the father,

00:24:00.000 --> 00:24:04.999
who paid it back to the landlord and
the boy has started working here.

00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:09.999
He is excellent, very intelligent, sharp.
And possibly,

00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:14.999
he is going to be the first Permaculturist

00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.999
of this village in his own language.

00:24:20.000 --> 00:24:24.999
He will be able to practically
lay designs for farms.

00:24:25.000 --> 00:24:29.999
We are confident about that. And
coming from people like him,

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:34.999
it will be much more effective rather
than coming from people like me.

00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:43.000
[non-English narration]

00:24:45.000 --> 00:24:49.999
He says, he had a talk with his parents, and they say
that they will have to continue to see the present

00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:54.999
question of sugarcane and other cultivation
which they are doing for their livelihood.

00:24:55.000 --> 00:24:59.999
But then they have absolutely no objection for
trees to be incorporated on their farmland.

00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:04.999
And he has said, you see that we will plant the trees in
such a design that it will not interfere with your tilling,

00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:09.999
with your plowing and with
your harvesting activities.

00:25:10.000 --> 00:25:14.999
He says, that is only in the initial stages there
is excess work, you see, because most of the things

00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:19.999
were going is for trees. So in the beginning there
will be extra work. And also he puts the question,

00:25:20.000 --> 00:25:24.999
without working how can we live?

00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:29.999
In the first year, the village just ignored me and they just didn’t
know that there was something going on here, there were not a thing.

00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:34.999
But this year, for example, quite a good
number of marginal farmers have been visiting

00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:39.999
on their own, on their own.
And first they just go around

00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:44.999
the entire farm and see what are all the things
that are growing, then they come back and tell us,

00:25:45.000 --> 00:25:49.999
”Well, there seems to be
something worthwhile doing it.”

00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:54.999
Then they say, “We are faced with the
problem that our livelihood depends

00:25:55.000 --> 00:25:59.999
upon our present method of food
production.” Then we tell them that,

00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:04.999
”Look, you don’t have to stop
totally what you are doing now,

00:26:05.000 --> 00:26:09.999
but to starting at say 10% of your land, you
get into Permaculture principles and design,

00:26:10.000 --> 00:26:14.999
functional design, then add on
every year about 10% or 15%.

00:26:15.000 --> 00:26:19.999
And in the course of about five or seven years,
you will have passed through the transition

00:26:20.000 --> 00:26:24.999
from an unsustainable system to a sustainable system,
which will definitely keep you above all and

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:29.999
you will not have to starve.”

00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:34.999
[music]

00:26:35.000 --> 00:26:39.999
This is edible. And then the seeds are
boiled and eaten if you got any chest pain.

00:26:40.000 --> 00:26:44.999
Yeah, that’s nice. It’s magnificent,

00:26:45.000 --> 00:26:49.999
lot of weeds hanging. They’re
everywhere when you look up.

00:26:50.000 --> 00:26:54.999
Yeah. You will be have to eat them
on your own. How much you’ll eat?

00:26:55.000 --> 00:26:59.999
You find that there’s a clear potential

00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:04.999
that we don’t have to starve for food. Okay, most
probably. Absolutely, we don’t have to starve.

00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:09.999
[music]

00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:14.999
So here we leave Venkat in his Garden
of Eden in the tropics. We know,

00:27:15.000 --> 00:27:19.999
he can turn any wastelands back into food
forests. But next week we will look at deserts,

00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:24.999
and that’s a much tougher proposition.

00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:30.000
[music]