Bill Mollison is part of the group I want to help put to the fore as I calibrate this blog toward popularizing the crying need for an integral approach to creating human, pedestrian settlements to replace our noxious and unhealthy and expensive metrosprawl.

Bill’s Wikipedia Entry — long on links, short on text. I will try to remedy that some by going through and annotating  some of the links. The first thing I notice is no obvious reference to Christopher Alexander, a contemporary. But many minds, I am sure. have essentially similar thoughts — reason being no one’s exclusive property. I am not sure Alexander references Doxiadis.

Here are three Mollison links that I think are useful.

Interview With Bill Mollison Seeds of Change A longish text interview. I detect a stream of naivete in parts which diss folk who have no interest in creating a garden. This is sort of a revival of Frank Lloyd Wright’s false assumption that most suburbanites would develop green thumbs. The sustainable community will draw on practical ideas, of which he has plenty, but also on realistic assumptions about the division of labor and how integral communities can be made and related to one another and to the creation of what we need to sustain ourselves.

Permaculture A 60 Minute Video Well, we see aspects of global awakening but there is an interesting question. Though sustainability is seen as essential to avoid paving the entire world and screeching to a halt, there is also an impulse to progress and a reason for technology. So the solution will come from a sythesis, not the victory of one point of view over another or a process of conversion or even an assumption that there is never a time when there might be too many trees.

An Interview With Bill Mollison This brief interview contains everything one needs to both affirm and critique the thinking displayed. Self-reliance is a wonderful thing and eveyone should read Emerson and Pirsig and so forth. But to think we can develop a practical solution to global problems without recourse to politics is Wright-think — a universal garden in the backyard that ain’t gonna happen sort of thinking  Politics does not exist because we are good but because we are a spectrum from sublime to ridiculous, from self-reliance to slobbery and so forth.  And since the future builds willy nilly on the detritus of the past, we are looking both for doable models and incremental experiments. Mollison is part of a global movement that is working to create both.

I conclude that compared with Christopher Alexander, Bill Mollison is part of the answer that Alexander and his collaborators have moved toward.  But in relation to some of his assumptions, caveat emptor.