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pcplantdb - Re: [pcplantdb] [Fwd: Invitation to New York, Spain, and Italy; c/ba]

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  • From: Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>
  • To: pcplantdb <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] [Fwd: Invitation to New York, Spain, and Italy; c/ba]
  • Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 09:16:29 -0600

Stephanie Gerson wrote:

Sounds fascinating, Rich.

The grant has been disseminated, Scott is in charge of distributing funds. How much does the conference cost? Should we all meet at one of them? I'm
completely serious. I'd rather work for free and spend our grant money on
travel for us to meet each other ;)

Which reminds me of something I've been meaning to say. Chad made the point
recently that he'd like to take a break if we run out of money, because it was
more fun to work for free anyway. I'm with you, pal. I don't enjoy
grantwriting. And I *do* enjoy helping out with QA, UI, information
visualization, outreach...all of which I would gladly do unpaid. So it seems
pretty ridiculous to spend time grantwriting just to pay me back for
grantwriting. Especially if Chad doesn't mind volunteering.

I would Love to discontinue grantwriting efforts, and just depend on donations
and volunteer effort. (If you feel you'd like to be reimbursed for your work
thus far, you are welcome to send Scott and me an invoice.) And then use the
rest of our funds to travel somewhere and meet each other?

What does everyone think?
*s

I think that I would have a hell of a time trying to justify the whole group getting together to the grant makers when I send in my annual report. I am interested in the trip that Rich speaks of if it can be justified in terms of the work being done on the db. While I appreciate Chad's sentiment of working for free, I expect that he needs funds occasionally to pay for something - unless he has managed to get off the grid entirely, and if so would you please tell me how you did it Chad.

While on a rant I would like to respond to L.L.'s idea of expanding the db.
The original idea, if I remember right, was that while permaculture is a strong advocate of guild planting and food forests with stacked function and diversity that we had precious little information on guild formation or food forests. I don't think that I have seen over twenty different contructed guilds in my twenty years of teaching and practicing permaculture. Since the ideas of guilds comes from observing that plants in nature seem to accumulate the associate plants ,
mammals, invertegrates, and microorganisms that they need to maximize their productivity and health - so the obvious thing would seem to look at apple trees in Kazakistan forests and identify the associate life forms and their functions and then replicate that system by using the same biota or analogs that perform the same function. Further I know botanists, farmers, biologists, etc that have spent their lives observing and they could contribute to this collection of information - saving us all the trip to where ever to observe ourselves. This in my mind was the original impetus for our current effort. It certainly wasn't a small task - and I am frankly amazed at how far down the road we have progressed, and the cumulative crowd of participants is awesome in the breadth of their knowledge and experience and their willingness to work so hard to make this project a first class product out of the goodness of their hearts is truly inspiring to me.

Now to the chase, I don't think that this db should take on any additional fields of interest such as horticultural practices, composting techniques, or community building , not that I don't think that all of these are critical to our survival on the plantet but because I think that they should be addressed in another forum and another db, that could be, perhaps, linked to the current effort at a later time. For now I find that most of the information that Lawrence would like to include already exists in some form on the web. I certainly use information from SARE all the time. I understand that the information is scattered around and needs organizing a bit but it exists. There is no source for the kinds of information we are soliciting and collecting for the db we are currently developing and it is critical information if we are to survive the end of the petroleum economy and culture

I, personally, think it would be a big mistake to change our focus at this time.

my 2 cents,
Scott Pittman





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