Now, he wants to rescue the suburbs from consumerism and teach others to do the same. “RetroSuburbia” — edited by his friends, published by his company, Melliodora Publishing, and nearly 600 pages long — is aimed at teaching suburbanites how to grow food, produce power and reduce debt.
By example, Mr. Holmgren buys his clothes only at thrift stores.
“Since I was a kid I was interested in fashion,” he said, “so I started sewing my own clothes from 16. I only got them from op shops or my father’s discards.”
Among the skills taught in the book are how to retrofit a home with solar panels, collect and store water, use wood for cooking and warmth, defend against wildfires, raise domesticated animals, preserve food and recycle waste.
The book “removes the fences of the suburbs and the mind,” said Costa Georgiadias, a TV host with a gardening show, “and replaces them with practical and positive solutions.”
Another reader if the book, Louisa Mariana, a 65-year-old artist from the Melbourne suburb of Northcote, has implored friends to buy the book and said she had been inspired to plan a chicken coop and order a beehive.
To print “RetroSuburbia” in Australia rather than China, Mr. Holmgren said, he raised an additional 30,000 Australian dollars, $22,500, by crowdfunding. He has avoided selling the book through large multinational stores like Amazon, preferring to offer it through permaculture websites and booksellers.
For him, the process of developing and advancing permaculture, as well as writing the book, is rooted in soil that is particularly Australian — arid, infertile and unforgiving.
“I am just another Australian trying to work out how we move beyond camping in this land to being rooted to it,” he once wrote. “Permaculture has been my sustained search to find home.”
Source : Nytimes
