Permaculture is a foundational concept in sustainable farming and design today. Bill Mollison, often referred to as the "father of permaculture," led an unconventional life. He dropped out of school at 15 to help with the family bakery, and also worked as a shark fisherman, seaman, forester, mill-worker, trapper, snarer, tractor driver, naturalist, cattle runner and security bouncer before he found his ultimate contribution to the world. . He received a degree in biogeography and became a professor at the University of Tasmania where he developed the new field of Environmental Psychology. At this stage he could have comfortably lived out his tenure, but he felt "increasingly trapped by traditional academia and sought instead to marry his studies in psychology with the natural world." . Mollison writes: "After many years as a scientist...I began to protest against the political and industrial systems I saw were killing us and the world around us. But I soon decided that it was no good persisting with opposition that in the end achieved nothing. I withdrew from society for two years; I did not want to oppose anything ever again and waste time. I wanted to come back only with something very positive, something that would allow us all to exist without the wholesale collapse of biological systems." . "Abandoning a secure academic tenure at the age of fifty, Bill devoted all his energies to furthering the system of permaculture and spreading the idea and principles worldwide. In partnership with student David Holmgren, Mollison started to sketch out the origins of what we now know as permaculture...they introduced concepts from other ecological pioneers, indigenous cultures and peasant farmers, combining them with a keen observation of the natural world." . In a culture obsessed with youth, we can forget that sometimes truly big ideas don’t congeal until later in life- the result of a distillation process of all our prior experiences. So allow yourself a wide berth to explore, experiment, try on different hats and make vital mistakes, because it all will ultimately inform your own path and contribution. . First image from Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual.
