4 March

Bill Mollison was a wise man, he knew that it wasn't actually difficult to grow vast amounts of food just about anywhere. But his whole career he was followed around by hippies who thought this was a 'back to nature' message, and that we should all shun the modern world and 'go local' again. I did a Permaculture course with one of the leading designers in the world back in the 1990s, and you could see he was a uncomfortable with the participants doing spirit dances to reconnect with the Earth of an evening (it was New Age bullshit, new ideas and movements tend to attract the damaged). Mollison put the emphasis on 'culture' in the word agriculture. He knew that how we grow our food and sustain ourselves is the core of all culture. And that we had to think beyond massive agriculture, which is easily the most destructive human force in the history of the planet. But at the same time the danger is we interpret this as all retreating to our 'local' humpies to grow veg, as if progress is ignoring most of the last 500 years of human life.