David Holmgren

David Holmgren joins IPC16 as a keynote speaker on the second day of the conference, appearing by video rather than in person. For a gathering of permaculturists that detail matters, because Holmgren is one of the two people who gave the movement its name. With the late Bill Mollison he co-originated permaculture in the 1970s, and the fact that he is speaking from a screen in Australia rather than a stage in Thailand is itself an expression of the ideas he helped create.

The story began in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1974. Holmgren was a young environmental design student and Mollison a senior university lecturer when the two met, shared a house and garden, and started piecing together a system for designing human settlements that worked the way healthy ecosystems do. They set it down in Permaculture One, published in 1978, with Holmgren writing the original manuscript. The word itself, first a contraction of permanent agriculture and later widened to permanent culture, has since reached almost every country on earth. Much of the work on show at this convergence traces back, directly or indirectly, to that small book.

Born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1955, Holmgren took a different path from his more famously itinerant co-founder. While Mollison travelled the world teaching, Holmgren chose to go deep in one place. Since the mid-1980s he and his partner Su Dennett have built Melliodora, a smallholding on the edge of Hepburn Springs in central Victoria, into one of the most thoroughly documented permaculture demonstration sites anywhere. Its passive-solar house, food gardens, orchards, dams and animals are not a showpiece but a working home, refined and recorded over four decades as a living test of whether the theory actually holds.

Out of that practice came the framework most permaculture teachers now use. In Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002) Holmgren distilled the discipline into twelve design principles, from observe and interact to creatively use and respond to change, which remain the movement's shared language across very different cultures and climates. His later writing widened the lens. Future Scenarios (2009) looked ahead to how communities might adapt to peak oil and a changing climate, and RetroSuburbia (2018) brought permaculture home to the ordinary suburb, showing households how to become more self-reliant where they already live.

He has carried this work through Holmgren Design, the consultancy he established in the early 1980s, and through Melliodora Publishing, which keeps his books and the wider body of permaculture writing in print. Recognition has followed without his chasing it: Italy's Il Monito del Giardino award in 2012 and an honorary doctorate from CQUniversity in 2017 among them.

The choice to appear by video deserves a word of its own, because it is not reluctance but principle. For more than thirty years Holmgren has flown only rarely, on the view that burning scarce fossil fuel for speed and convenience sits awkwardly with everything permaculture teaches about living within limits. As he has put it, the less he travels the greater the integrity and the quality of his influence when he does. So a keynote delivered down a wire, from a garden he has tended for decades to a hall full of practitioners thousands of kilometres away, is a small demonstration of the design philosophy in action.

For the permaculture community in Thailand and across the region, his presence at IPC16 is a thread back to the source. The farms, food forests, natural buildings and seed networks gathered here are local answers to a global idea, and the man whose pen helped start it is taking the time to speak to them directly. It is a rare and fitting way to open a conference whose whole purpose is to carry that idea forward.