…fi­nally I drew a pic­ture of Don Quixote’s don­key. On its back were a blind Bill and a deaf Wes both rid­ing back­ward, and me hang­ing des­per­ately on to the don­key’s swish­ing tail. The three Don Quixotes, hop­ing to re­turn to na­ture, were try­ing to stop the don­key from rush­ing wildly to­ward the brink of dis­as­ter, but it seemed hope­less. Some­one asked what was go­ing to hap­pen, so I drew Pres­i­dent Rea­gan sit­ting front­ward on the don­key’s back dan­gling a car­rot in front of the don­key’s nose. When I asked, “What do sup­pose the car­rot is?” some­one cor­rectly an­swered, “Money.”
 
The In­ter­na­tional Per­ma­cul­ture Con­fer­ence was held in Au­gust 1986, at The Ev­er­green State Col­lege in Olympia, Wash­ing­ton, a quiet cam­pus with a dense growth of large trees. The ar­chi­tec­ture of the main hall where the large gath­er­ings took place was ex­tremely orig­i­nal, a suc­ces­sion of tiers. More than seven hun­dred peo­ple at­tended the con­fer­ence.
 The open­ing re­marks were de­liv­ered by one of the uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors, who was a Na­tive Amer­i­can. He wore a feath­ered head­dress, and his stately cer­e­mo­nial at­tire was breath­tak­ing. I was very im­pressed with his ad­dress in which he cited an­cient Amer­i­can In­dian leg­ends with re­gard to the re­la­tion­ship his peo­ple have with na­ture. It re­minded me that I truly was in Amer­ica.
 On the first day there were in­tro­duc­tory re­marks given by peo­ple from many coun­tries. The main event con­sisted of talks given by Bill Mol­li­son, the co-cre­ator of per­ma­cul­ture, from Aus­tralia; Wes Jack­son, the founder of The Land In­sti­tute in Salina, Kan­sas; and me.
 Mol­li­son’s per­ma­cul­ture is a no-tillage sys­tem that uses peren­nial plants and trees to cre­ate abun­dant farms and re­silient hu­man com­mu­ni­ties de­signed af­ter nat­u­ral land­scapes. The farms are meant to per­pet­u­ate them­selves in­def­i­nitely with­out bring­ing in ma­te­ri­als from the out­side. It is based on or­ganic agri­cul­ture and ap­pears to have quite a fol­low­ing in Aus­tralia, the United States, and around the world.
 Jack­son aims to de­velop farm­ing meth­ods that use as lit­tle fos­sil fuel as pos­si­ble. If we do not limit the use of fos­sil fuel, he be­lieves, there will be no fu­ture for agri­cul­ture. He is work­ing to de­velop na­tive peren­nial grasses into food crops that will elim­i­nate the need for plow­ing. It ap­pears that, while Jack­son fun­da­men­tally ac­cepts the sci­en­tific ap­proach, he is search­ing for the be­gin­nings of a new agri­cul­ture.
 I was in­tro­duced by the mod­er­a­tor as “an ad­vo­cate of nat­u­ral farm­ing, which is founded on the phi­los­o­phy of mu (noth­ing­ness) and dis­avows the value of sci­ence.”
The idea was to find com­mon ground from our three dis­tinc­tive view­points and set a new, bet­ter course for agri­cul­ture in the fu­ture. On the fol­low­ing day, the three of us held a panel dis­cus­sion. We were lined up to­gether on the stage, and the dis­cus­sion took place in a ques­tion-and-an­swer for­mat, de­bate-style.
 The ques­tions had been given to us the day be­fore, and the dis­cus­sion was pro­ceed­ing smoothly in ac­cor­dance with the gen­eral out­line, un­til it un­ex­pect­edly dis­solved into a slap­stick com­edy that had ev­ery­one roar­ing. Mol­li­son spoke Eng­lish with a strong Aus­tralian ac­cent, so Jack­son teased him, say­ing he could not un­der­stand a word Mol­li­son was say­ing. To top it off, I had three trans­la­tors, and when­ever I said some­thing, they would give three dif­fer­ent in­ter­pre­ta­tions. Some­one in the au­di­ence joked that they had no idea what Fukuoka was re­ally say­ing. The au­di­ence be­came aware of how dif­fi­cult it is to pen­e­trate the heart of Ori­en­tal lan­guages and ex­pres­sions. Peo­ple were both per­plexed and in­trigued, and the ex­change of strange ques­tions and even stranger an­swers con­tin­ued amid gales of laugh­ter.
 Fi­nally I drew a pic­ture of Don Quixote’s don­key. On its back were a blind Bill and a deaf Wes both rid­ing back­ward, and me hang­ing des­per­ately on to the don­key’s swish­ing tail. The three Don Quixotes, hop­ing to re­turn to na­ture, were try­ing to stop the don­key from rush­ing wildly to­ward the brink of dis­as­ter, but it seemed hope­less. Some­one asked what was go­ing to hap­pen, so I drew Pres­i­dent Rea­gan sit­ting front­ward on the don­key’s back dan­gling a car­rot in front of the don­key’s nose. When I asked, “What do sup­pose the car­rot is?” some­one cor­rectly an­swered, “Money.”
 from “Sawing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka”