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A previow of a television programme (first of four), Channel 4, Sunday
17 June, 7pm

CHANNEL 4’s profile of Bill Mollison, an Australian ‘visionary’, begins
‘Fifteen years ago, he thought up a way of saving the world.’ People with
plans to save the planet show up regularly in New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ’s offices. Now
this series offers us four of them in as many weeks. Crackpots or Messiahs,
it’s often hard to tell, though from memory, we have never shown the door
to any of the four on display here. Nor should we.

All four are, by some definitions, ‘deep green’ with a strong sense
that Western intellectual thought, or at any rate its translation into industrial
and consumer culture, has gone badly wrong.

The ideas of James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and subject
of the third programme in this series, have been reported in this magazine
for the past 15 years. They have spawned a growing industry of publications
and meditation centres, as well as produced some good science.

Manfreed Max-Meef, a high-flying corporate whizz-kid turned ‘barefoot
economist’ from Chile, calls for rural economies to return to production
systems that do not depend on export earnings or outside expertise or capital.

The fourth subject is Jeremy Rifkin, whose angry legal challenges to
the biotechnology industry for what he sees as a dangerous assault on living
systems have angered many scientists.

Aside from Rifkin, all are in some sense designers. Lovelock has designed
his Gaian model of the Earth as a living organism. Max-Meef designs local
economies and Mollison designs complex agricultural gardens, which he calls
permacultures.

At first sight, the ideas of Mollison seem humdrum. His criticisms of
Western farming systems for destroying every plant but one in a field and
then preserving this hugely unnatural state of affairs with chemicals, is
not startlingly original. Nor is his observation that 95 per cent of the
cost of food in city supermarkets arises from carting it there and from
wastage. Important, yes. Visionary, no.

His argument is not helped by some asinine linking statements by the
unseen production team. ‘In 20 years,’ it says of our planet, ‘there will
be one third the arable land to feed twice as many people.’ Cobblers on
both counts.

Much more rewarding is Mollison’s central idea that humans must start
to rebuild complex ecosystems for our own purposes. Forests, he says, are
far more biologically productive than artificial monoculture. So let us
recreate forests that we can farm. He has done precisely this in his own
large Australian garden, which has proved abundant enough to prompt the
ponderous title to his programme, ‘In Danger of Falling Food’.

(Once again, he is not served well by Channel 4. In the programme, he
suggests that a couple of large window boxes could supply a fifth of the
food needed by a couple. This turns up on a press release as ‘enough food
for the average family’.) Mollison’s ideas actually mirror closely recent
discoveries by Western scientists about the state of the Amazon rainforest,
little of which appears to be virgin and much of which is infused with fruit
and other trees planted by Indian communities for their own purposes.

Mollison offers many pleas ing touches. His garden is producing so much
that he plans to introduce a pig and some chickens to gobble up the surpluses.
When the pig grows fat, ‘we’ll have a party’. No vege tarian, he. Confronted
by a surburban garden of mown grass, he pronounces himself a good urban
guerilla and surrep titiously plants a hazelnut.

It would have been nice to hear more about the ecological thinking behind
Mollison’s garden and other permaculture systems that he has inspired round
the world. The key must be the mix of plants, but there is more information
on this topic in a typical edition of Gardeners’ Question Time on the radio.
And we had only a tantalising minute on a place called Crystal Waters, an
$8-million-project to build a ‘community for the future’ based on Mollison’s
ideas.

Instead there were more overpressed assertions from the producers about
eco-doom (Haiti ‘has no soil’) and a ‘permaculture rap’ in an Australian
accent.

The series nonetheless seems set to do a valuable job in making some
links between fashionable environmental concerns and radical thinking on
economics and development. It will come as a revelation to many that real
greens would not spare the pig. They would eat it – and make a purse out
of its ear.

However, the real test of whether the producers are serious in their
pursuit of visionaries will be how they tackle Lovelock. Will they present
him as a green scientist with a cuddly concept to inspire us all – or talk
about his other views, which are often harder for greens to stomach? Will
they let him make his defence of nuclear power or explain why he thinks
that multinational chemical companies may save the world by allowing us
to make all the food we need without the help of nature? While Mollison
wants us to get back into bed with nature, Lovelock wants us to live apart.
Crackpot or visionary?

Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual was reviewed in New
Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ on 16 December 1989.

Fred Pearce is a freelance writer.