[permaculture] Why is permaculture more about selling books, DVDs and training courses?
Suraj Kumar
suraj at sunson.in
Thu Jun 25 05:47:59 EDT 2009
I agree with you David and its quite understandable.
On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:02 AM, David Travis<djtravis at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> "I get the feeling that the permaculture movement has morphed into a
> market place to sell books, DVDs and training courses related to
> permaculture than a platform for sharing techniques and allowing
> humans to live closer to nature in a simpler way. Many a material I
> find on the internet are incomplete and keep referring to "Stuff to
> Buy" or "Courses to Take". Just search for permaculture on youtube and
> that's what you find. Any site claiming to be a "permaculture" site
> talks about doing a course.
>
> Or am I mistaken? I'd love to be corrected if I'm mistaken.
>
> I remember some noble soul here who had setup permaculture.info - that
> is great! WTG! But, why do the 'experts' end up locking themselves
> into seclusion and not share their knowledge?
>
> Cheers,
>
> -Suraj"
>
>
> Dear Suraj,
>
> I agree that this is a serious problem. In my experience it is a byproduct of the original process of certification. Permaculture education was originally designed to be a means of certifying design consultants. Even today, the regional groups (in the US at least) seem to be strongly focused on how to add new levels of accreditation, mentorship, and certification onto the PDC process; implementation and verification of permaculture methods seem to be secondary priorities. The most generic goal of a consultant is to make money using his or her certificate, and it turns out that the easiest and fastest way to do that is to promote oneself as a teacher. In addition to this there are landscapers who have used the certification process to "green" their resumes and explore new territory. Often all of this is combined in the permaculture demo/teaching site. The result is what some people (affectionally!) call a permaculture ponzi scheme of certificates, diplomas, apprenticeships, etc. It costs money, but people like to spend money and they have fun.
>
> Part of the difficulty is that permaculture ideas are largely speculative and there is a great deal of risk involved in actually implementing them on any kind of large scale. Perhaps if permaculture had started out as being more centralized and democratic (as opposed to decentralized and autocratic a la Mollison), it would have developed the sort of infrastructure needed to move beyond demo sites and a handful of NGO projects, but who can say?
>
> Anyway, it's easy to see how the initial structure lead the movement there. Most people I've met within the permaculture movement seem to be perfectly happy with it staying on that track; it is satisfying peoples' needs on some level.
>
> - David
>
>
>
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