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

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • 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 13:41:38 -0700

This whole thread reveals more about people's head-worms around money than it does about the actual state of permaculture training. And thanks to Michael B, Larry S, and Paul W for having more patience than me in dealing nicely with this perennial issue. It reminds me of the Creationists; you show why their arguments make no sense and reveal ideological bias, and then they just keep on spouting the same wrong-headed statements.

David Travis wrote:
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.
This is just silly. I'm not sure that there is a single person on Earth who actually earns a living teaching Pc; we all need other jobs to make ends meet. And it takes 5 years or more of hard work at little or no pay to earn the reputation to attract enough students to courses to make them run. Easy and fast? It was and is the hardest work I've ever done by far and only after 12 years of it are my courses consistently successful, and that's the case for every teacher I know. Please do some thinking and research before making knee-jerk assertions like this.

As for more layers of accreditation being gratuitously added, I am bombarded, as are other teachers, by countless requests for ways to continue in permaculture learning in a formal way. I'd rather not set up further programs, as it's a lot of work for almost no personal return, but the demand for them came long before the advanced programs did. If all this is a Ponzi scheme, it's a terrible failure of one. Few design courses make money; I've been around enough to know.

No one seems to remember that Stewart Brand's great quote, "information wants to be free" was only the first half of what he wrote. The 2nd half was, "information wants to be expensive," and he then gave potent reasons why that is also true. TANSTAAFL.

If I never see this kind of thread again, it will be too soon, but it's good to know that fewer and fewer people are hanging onto these uninformed views.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com




"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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