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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Why is permaculture more about selling books, DVDs and training courses?

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  • From: Suraj Kumar <suraj@sunson.in>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Why is permaculture more about selling books, DVDs and training courses?
  • Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:17:59 +0530

I agree with you David and its quite understandable.

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 3:02 AM, David Travis<djtravis@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,
>
> Ā -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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