Get yourself comfortable and settle in for a thorough look at David Holmgren’s latest thinking on the prospects for our future. In this interview Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Collective poses written questions which David addresses over an epic 90 minutes.
For the last few months (and before) David has been absorbed in writing a new book, so there may be hints of some of the book’s contents in the interview. David’s thinking is informed by his daily work in the garden, even while keeping the water up to the food production system, the complex ideas are forming, being reorganised and constantly critiqued. The book is about retrofitting society for a quite different world. It elaborates and extends David’s 2015 Aussie Street Presentation, and Retrofitting The Suburbs essay .
The Aussie St story that traces four adjacent suburban houses and their inhabitants from the “1950s Golden Age of Suburbia” to the “Second Great Depression of 2020” has been particularly powerful at engaging with Australians who live in or grew up in suburbia. The new book will build on this and take a wider perspective.
David will be launching “RetroSuburbia; a downshifters guide to a resilient future” in the new year with a website to match Retrosuburbia.com so watch out for the website going live, a book launch close to you, and associated workshops all over Melbourne.
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4 thoughts on “Samuel Alexander interviews David Holmgren”
Excellent! My only suggestion for those whose first language is not English: post a transcript. I also volunteer to translate it into Spanish as I did with “Crash on Demand” 🙂
Greetings from Canada!
The language David is speaking needs to be translated for city planners, big industrial farms, big fishing industry, and all other BIG Fossil fuel feed industries.
All of which speak a totally language than David does.
Yeah…I would also gladly translate it into Turkish…
I’m glad that Mr. Holmgren took a moderate stance on activism rather than an aggressive one, as it seems to me that activism all too often results in overall negative consequences.
Also am happy that he was not adamant about what the future will look like; the future is never set in stone, nor is it even “set” in any way at all. People tend to project what the future will look like by looking to the past. It can almost be guaranteed that whatever the future brings will look quite different than what anyone can now imagine. The reason being is that the future is not there waiting for us, but rather, it is something that is being collectively created moment by moment by all of us.