Bill Mollison

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, collaborating and developing new ideas, with Local farmer, Mark Pepper, before returning to Tasmania.

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 (CSIRO). He retired from teaching in 1979. 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." 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: After many years as a scientist with the CSIRO Wildlife Survey Section and with the Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Department, 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.

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: As I saw permaculture in the 1970s, it was a beneficial assembly of plants and animals in relation to human settlements, mostly aimed towards household and community self-reliance, and perhaps as a "commercial endeavor" only arising from a surplus from that system. However, permaculture has come to mean more than just food-sufficiency in the household. Self-reliance in food is meaningless unless people have access to land, information, and financial resources. So in recent years it has come to encompass appropriate legal and financial strategies, including strategies for land access, business structures, and regional self-financing. This way it is a whole human system. In 1981, the first graduates of the permaculture design course (PDC) that he had helped to initiate, started to design permaculture systems in their respective communities.

In 1987, Mollison taught the first PDC course that was offered in India.

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 Timestamped study notes for this video. In Grave Danger of Falling Food: Another 50-minute Australian-made documentary from 1989 The Global Gardener (1991) 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. (Melbourne, Australia: Transworld Publishers, 1978) Permaculture Two: Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture (Tasmania, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1979) Permaculture – A Designer's Manual (1988) : 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. (Tasmania, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1991; revised 1997; 2nd ed. 2011) : 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 (1993, Revised 2011) Travels in Dreams: An Autobiography (1996)

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