Bill Mollison


Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison was an Australian researcher, author, scientist, teacher and biologist. In 1981, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award "for developing and promoting the theory and practice of permaculture".
Permaculture is an integrated system of ecological and environmental design which Mollison co-developed with David Holmgren and which they envisioned together as a perennial and sustainable form of agriculture. In 1974, Mollison began his collaboration with Holmgren and in 1978 they published their book Permaculture One, which introduced this design system to the general public. Mollison is also the developer of the herb spiral, a herb-growing structure that allows herbs with different growing requirements to coexist in a small space.
Mollison founded The Permaculture Institute in Tasmania and created the education system to train others under the umbrella of permaculture. This education system of "train the trainer", utilized through a formal Permaculture Design Course and Certification, has taught hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world how to grow food and be sustainable using permaculture design principles.

Life and work

Biography

Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison was born in 1928 in the Bass Strait fishing village of Stanley located in the north-west of Tasmania, Australia. In 1987, he moved from Tasmania to Tyalgum in the Tweed Valley of northern New South Wales, where he lived for the next decade before returning to Tasmania. He spent his final years at Sisters Beach, north-western Tasmania. He died in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2016, aged 88. He was survived by his fifth wife, Lisa, four daughters and two sons.

Career

Mollison left school at age 15 to help run the family bakery. In the following 10 years he worked as a shark fisherman, seaman, forester, mill worker, trapper, snarer, tractor-driver and naturalist.
In 1954, at the age of 26, Mollison joined and worked for the 'Wildlife Survey Section' of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. In the 1960s, he worked as a curator at the Tasmanian Museum. He also worked with the Inland Fisheries Commission, where he was able to resume his field work. In 1966, he entered the University of Tasmania. After he received a degree in bio-geography, he stayed on to lecture and teach and developed the unit of Environmental Psychology. He retired from teaching in 1979.

Development of permaculture

Mollison's work with the CSIRO laid the foundation for his life-long passion: Permaculture. Mollison told his student Toby Hemenway that the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 while he was observing marsupials browsing in the Tasmanian rain forests, because he was "inspired and awed by the life-giving abundance and rich interconnectedness of this eco-system." At that moment, Mollison jotted down the following words in his diary: "I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does." By the late 1960s, he started developing ideas about stable agricultural systems on the southern Australian island state of Tasmania. This resulted from his own personal observations of the growth and use of the industrial-agricultural methods that he believed had rapidly degraded the soil of his native state. In his view, these same methods posed a danger because they were highly dependent on non-renewable resources, and were additionally poisoning land and water, reducing biodiversity, and removing billions of tons of topsoil from previously fertile landscapes. Writes Mollison:
In 1974–75, he and David Holmgren "jointly evolved a framework for a sustainable agricultural system based on a multi-crop of perennial trees, shrubs, herbs, fungi, and root systems" for which they coined the word "permaculture". Holmgren was a student at the radical Environmental Design School in the Tasmanian College of Environmental Education. Mollison was a senior tutor in the Psychology Dept of the University of Tasmania."
Originally intended as a contraction of permanent agriculture, Mollison quickly realised it was a system for permanent culture, as without a productive landscape, a healthy ecology and a circular economy, no culture would survive. Permaculture began as both a positive concept – open to new information – and a practice that could integrate the knowledge about sustainable, ecological techniques from all parts of the world.
Soon after permaculture was first introduced and then put into practice by the public, Mollison recognized that permaculture principles encompassed a movement that included not only agriculture, horticulture, architecture, and ecology, but also economic systems, land access strategies, and legal systems for businesses and communities:
He helped found the first Permaculture Institute, established in 1979 to "teach the practical design of sustainable soil, water, plant, and legal and economic systems to students worldwide." Bill Mollison taught the first Permaculture Design course at Stanley, Tasmania in January 1980. It was attended by 10 Australian students including Max O'Lindegger and Denis McCarthy, Dave Blewett, Ginger Gordy, Kirsten Beggs, John Fargher and Tagari Community members Andrew Jeeves & Simon Fjell. In May 1980 Bill Mollison, his wife Philomena, Andrew Jeeves, Peter Moore and Denis McCarthy began a three month lecture tour of USA and Canada, during which he visited & gave talks at the International Tree Crops Institute, Farallones Institute Rural Centre, Integral Urban House, Village Homes, Appropriate Technology Group, The Tree People, Rural Education Center, New Alchemy Institute, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Office of Appropriate Technology, and The Farm He taught a three-week course at The Tree People in Los Angeles in 1981. In 1981, the first graduates of the permaculture design course that he had helped to initiate, started to design permaculture systems in their respective communities. In this way, the philosophy of permaculture had begun to move beyond its original context in "land management" to cover most, if not all, aspects of human life.
In 1987, Mollison taught the first PDC course that was offered in India. By 2011 there had been over 300,000 such graduates practicing and teaching throughout the world.
He has been called the founder and "father" of permaculture.

Films

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mollison appeared in several video productions that helped popularize permaculture concepts.
  • Permaculture: 50-minute Australian-made documentary from 1989 - see also for this video.
  • In Grave Danger of Falling Food: Another 50-minute Australian-made documentary from 1989
  • The Global Gardener
  • * Part 1 The Tropics
  • * Part 2 Drylands
  • * Part 3 Cool Climates
  • * Part 4 Urban Settings

    Selected bibliography

  • Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements, with David Holmgren.
  • Permaculture Two: Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture
  • Permaculture – A Designer's Manual : has been used extensively as the text book and curriculum for the 72-hour Certificate course in Permaculture Design.
  • Introduction to Permaculture, with Reny Mia Slay. : in this book recognised that his original idea for permaculture had evolved, and a movement had grown, that could "spread to cover all human habitats; and the word was redefined as not just permanent agriculture, but also permanent culture."
  • The Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition
  • Travels in Dreams: An Autobiography
Articles

  • Interviews

  • – where he attended the International Permaculture Conference in Motovun, Croatia
Category:1928 births
Category:2016 deaths
Category:Australian gardeners
Category:Australian psychologists
Category:Environmental psychologists
Category:Organic gardeners
Category:Sustainability advocates
Category:Desert greening conservationists
Category:Permaculturalists
Category:Writers from Tasmania
Category:People from Stanley, Tasmania
Category:Australian biologists