[permaculture] Trends in America
Toby Hemenway
toby at patternliteracy.com
Wed Oct 29 23:45:35 EDT 2008
A story I may have told before: On opening day of a PDC, the venue was
kind enough to put out mugs, each with a participant's name on it. They
asked that each person be responsible for rinsing and putting away their
own mug. The system worked beautifully; the classroom stayed free of
scattered mugs; each was back in the rack at the end of the day. Then,
come our mid-class day off, the mugs were put through an industrial
sterilizer and the labels were removed. They went back to the classroom
unlabeled. Within a few days, mugs were everywhere--under chairs, on
shelves, left outside, many full of molding tea leaves, and another
couple of dozen mugs had been commandeered from elsewhere since no one
could find a clean mug and it was easier to grab another from the stash.
Soon almost every mug the place had was in our classroom, dirty and
haphazardly stuck anywhere.
I was pretty surprised, since the participants seemed like decent folks.
The lesson I took home was twofold: private ownership is one way to
encourage responsibility toward resources, and, a culture that is used
to private ownership is liable to behave irresponsibly toward resources
held in common.
Toby
http://patternliteracy.com
Nancy Frank wrote:
> Steve -
>
> I think it will be awhile before we get as far as we've come and
> return to common land.
>
> Nancy
>
>
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