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  • From: kris kaul <kriskaul@yahoo.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America
  • Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:50:12 -0700 (PDT)

Toby,
 
I'm not sure this was the lesson you had to take home, although I am in
sympathy with it.  It's just that I remember from reading about commonly-held
property in the past that such systems were made to work well through having
individual responsibilities and, more importantly, individual accountability. 
Members would monitor each other's use of the resource (of water, for
instance, or a community woodlot).  So in that sense, the labels on the mugs
were functioning at least as much due to their ability to assign individual
accountability as actual ownership - if someone found a mug sitting on a
shelf, they'd know exactly who left it there!
 
Kris

--- On Wed, 10/29/08, permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org
<permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:

Message: 9
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:45:35 -0700
From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID: <49092DDF.9070104@patternliteracy.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

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




>From steveread@free.fr Thu Oct 30 12:23:10 2008
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Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:23:11 +0100
From: "Steve Read" <steveread@free.fr>
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America
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Hello, Trudie Redding,

Maybe your bus stops are de facto communal property but if they are not seen
as such by the majority of people using them then in practice they belong to
the municipality or whatever authority structure 'the them', people chose to
consider as being 'in charge' of the 'communal property', and I imagine you
will have beard the argument "well I pay my taxes, community charge whatever
to have someone clean it up". A dirty bus stop installed and run by a bus
company or local authority doesn't, imo provide evidence that private
property is a viable solution, the weight of evidence, the ravaged and raped
Earth we live upon would, I humbly suggest, seem to repudiate any and all
such arguments. People educated one way can be educated another if they start
posing themselves questions about their lives/environments, whilst they stay
treated as mindless autonomata, producer/consumer, to be lead along the
righteous path because they too stupid to do it for themselves then thos
e same people will tend to treat others/their environment/children in a
similar way.

Sewage, people in many countries have been brought up, educated and
propagandised with certain ideals of hygene, as you mention, flush toilets
and urban hygene has in the past meant the end of outbreaks of epidemics,
that was then, today we can find better practice than flush toilets perhaps
but the need for effective and hygenic cycling of such wastes is not
something that can be designed lightly. Yet we are talking surely of
designing communities that taking lessons from the past reach into the
future? Such entities, whether dispersed rural or urban village
agglomerations would be installed to effectively cycle everything, human
wastes included, so where's the difficulty there, a new generation grows up
taking responsibility for its wastes. I still contend that private property,
mine, mine, mine, is an ineffective and destructive situation that promotes
greed, fear and social division.

When we look at strategies that one might use to get a place to live in this
private property world they all tend to lead to working in the machine to
earn the money to buy something to live differently, or loans which burden a
new business or project with debt and repayment. Where is the place for those
who don't want to work in some eco-destructive industry, don't want to squat
and don't want to spend the best years of their lives trying to get planning
permission for the piece of land they did manage to buy?

Germs? As Pasteur pointed out late in his life "its not the germ which is
important but the soil onto which it falls"

Buy the land and then free it.

whats a nabor?

SteveR

======= At 2008-10-30, 15:29:44 you wrote: ======
>Communal property-bus stops, trash all over, many nabors join hands
>clean up, plant stuff, city puts benches, roofs, the fact is even though
>it is loosely termed communal property, or city property it is filthy
>day after day no matter how many times we clean it up, so many people
>have been involved and finally some just had to let go, this is an
>example of even though it belongs to me , I will not think that I am a
>part of the net that keeps it clean.
>
>And the major issue I think is sewage, I can't say it's a separate
>issue, having found some human excrement at one bus stop
>
>But anyway-communal living and sewage, that, I think is the deal
>breaker, you will have some who just do not take care of this carefully
>and consistently. I had a nabor like this in another city once for
>years, I never knew for the longest time till I had to go in her back
>yard helping her look for her child who had not come home after dark
>My sister had a nabor uphill like this, I got sick when I came to visit
>We in the US did not start out as children taking care of our own body
>wastes, nor our pets, nor our livestock. That is the major issue I
>think, in communal or shall I say cooperative living.
>The issue of the cups could be "taking care of what I borrowed" vs
>taking care of what is mine. Or the more direct, "I better take care of
>this. Everybody can see that I am supposed to because it has my name on
>it"
>Or "well at least I know it only has my germs, I will stick with this
>cup"
>
>Trudie
>512-471-8044
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
>[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Steve Read
>Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 2:26 AM
>To: permaculture
>Subject: [permaculture] Trends in America
>
>Hello, Toby Hemenway,
>
>Interesting approach to extrapolte from one PDC and its mug praxis to
>principles and strategies of land tenure; It reminds me too of the
>platitudinous arguments that Thatcher & Co. put forward to justify
>selling off the council owned housing, frankly I rarely saw a run down
>council house except on estates that had been designanted as 'problem'
>estates by the local council and were then therefore following some
>strange logic of their own refilled with more 'problem' families. And
>then of course council blocks that fell into disrepair and misuse becaus
>ethey were simply so badly designed.
>
>Your argument also belies the fact that for prbably millenia humane
>societies have enabled land tenure strategies that allowed sustainable,
>durable use of commonly held assets. Th
>e fatuous book 'Tragedy of the commons' has been massively instrumental
>in creating a mythology around this subject...
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>

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Best regards.
Steve Read
steveread@free.fr
2008-10-30






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