In 1974, Mollison began his collaboration with Holmgren and in 1978 they published their book Permaculture One, which introduced this design system to the general public.

Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison was born in 1928 in the Bass Strait fishing village of Stanley located in the north-west of Tasmania, Australia.

In the following 10 years he worked as a shark fisherman, seaman, forester, mill worker, trapper, snarer, tractor-driver and naturalist.

[10] Mollison told his student Toby Hemenway that the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 while he was observing marsupials browsing in the Tasmanian rain forests, because he was "inspired and awed by the life-giving abundance and rich interconnectedness of this eco-system.

This resulted from his own personal observations of the growth and use of the industrial-agricultural methods that he believed had rapidly degraded the soil of his native state.

[13] In his view, these same methods posed a danger because they were highly dependent on non-renewable resources, and were additionally poisoning land and water, reducing biodiversity, and removing billions of tons of topsoil from previously fertile landscapes.

[11] Writes Mollison: After many years as a scientist with the CSIRO Wildlife Survey Section and with the Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Department, I began to protest against the political and industrial systems I saw were killing us and the world around us.

Permaculture began as both a positive concept – open to new information – and a practice that could integrate the knowledge about sustainable, ecological techniques from all parts of the world.

[11]He helped found the first Permaculture Institute, established in 1979 to "teach the practical design of sustainable soil, water, plant, and legal and economic systems to students worldwide."

In May 1980 Bill Mollison, his wife Philomena, Andrew Jeeves, Peter Moore (photographer) and Denis McCarthy began a three month lecture tour of USA and Canada, during which he visited & gave talks at the International Tree Crops Institute (Miles & Libby Merwin, Winters, CA), Farallones Institute Rural Centre (Sonoma, CA), Integral Urban House (Berkeley, CA), Village Homes (Davis, CA), Appropriate Technology Group (Professor Isao Fujimoto, Davis CA), The Tree People (Andy Lipkis, Los Angeles, CA), Rural Education Center (Samuel Kaymen, Wilton NH, in 1983 called Stonyfield Farm), New Alchemy Institute (John & Nancy Todd, Woods Hole, MA), Institute for Local Self-Reliance (Washington, DC), Office of Appropriate Technology (Scott Sklar, now Professor Scott Sklar, Director George Washington Solar Institute, Washington, DC), and The Farm (Summertown, TN) He taught a three-week course at The Tree People in Los Angeles in 1981.