Episode 84 - David Holmgren

This week David Holmgren is Passing Through!

In this episode I was honored to sit down with one of the leading voices in ecological wisdom and regenerative culture — David Holmgren.

David is best known as the co-originator of permaculture: a design philosophy that has blossomed into a global movement, offering practical possibilities for living in right relationship with the Earth. In 1978, he and Bill Mollison published Permaculture One, starting the global permaculture movement. Alongside Bill, David helped seed a vision that reimagines agriculture, community, and even economics — not as separate domains, but as interwoven threads in the complex web of existence which makes up the modern world.

Over the past decades, David has deepened and expanded the permaculture lens, authoring works like Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability and RetroSuburbia, which invite us not only to survive the converging crises of our time — climate change, energy descent, social unraveling — but to thrive by reinhabiting our environment with creativity, care, and resilience.

David’s a deep systems thinker, a grounded realist, and a cultural edge-dweller; someone who challenges dominant narratives while offering hopeful alternatives rooted in the patterns of nature.

In our talk we cover what role permaculture plays in the polycrisis, nature as family, permaculture as a political act, the tension between small-scale local solutions and large-scale global problems, anarchy and antiauthoritarianism, the dark side of permaculture and more. 

To learn more about David you can check out his film Reading Landscape With David Holmgren at readinglandscape.org.

You can also find him at holmgren.com.au for articles, videos, courses and other resources on permaculture. 

Enjoy the talk!