Back in 2004 I interviewed permaculture co-originator David Holmgren about a whole manner of things relating to peak oil and permaculture. This was before the release of the breakthrough peak oil documentary The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream. Before the interview I suggested to David that he read some of the writing of James Howard Kunstler, who is the central figure of the film. And so this snippet below turned out to be a good counterpoint to the film, as David briefly outlined his vision of an organic post-peak suburban retrofit.

Rob Hopkins explained it neatly in an interview earlier this year:

Well, I think although “The End of Suburbia” is a fantastic film and really totally transformed my way of thinking about this, I think the title is somewhat misleading. Suburbia, as James Kunstler says, is ‘the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world’ but, at the same time, it’s there. It’s what we have. David Holmgren’s approach, rather than being about the end of suburbia - or as the sequel is called “The Escape from Suburbia” - it’s more about retrofitting suburbia, redesigning suburbia, and rethinking suburbia.

David’s paper Retroffing the Suburbs for Sustainability goes into more detail.

The rest of the interview is available here: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/106