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  • From: christopher nesbitt <christopher.nesbitt@mmrfbz.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Lion Kuntz on Permaculture | RE: Permaculture design systems
  • Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 17:26:43 -0600

Toby,

Thank you, as usual, for such a well written and reasoned response to this perennial slur on permaculture.

C

Toby Hemenway <mailto:toby@patternliteracy.com>
August 23, 2015 at 10:57 AM
I realize that Lion’s post is 15 years old, but it’s instructive in that he makes the same mistake that so many others still make: he thinks permaculture is a set of techniques rather than a design system. Hence his tirade that he was exposed to some of the techniques before Mollison wrote about them, thus there is nothing new in permaculture. If you can’t make the paradigm shift to whole systems thinking, you won’t get what permaculture is. You’ll get stuck at sheet mulching or selling tomatoes, like Lion did.

And the claim that permaculture is a pyramid scheme to sell PDCs is an old and false one too. I wrote up something about that in another forum, so I’ll reprint it here, in case any of you want ammunition the next time someone makes that claim.
________
The label of “pyramid scheme” for the PDC and permaculture makes no sense for two major reasons. The first is that in a pyramid scheme, profits flow upward to the early adopters. This doesn’t happen with PDCs; in fact, the opposite occurs. If a PDC teacher creates new teachers, those new teachers are competition for the senior teacher, potentially reducing his or her income. No income flows upward. Thus the PDC fails to meet the most basic criterion of a pyramid scheme, sending resources up the pyramid.

The idea that the PDC is principally a vehicle to create more PDC teachers is also belied by the facts. I have given out roughly 2300 PDC certificates, and, to the best of my knowledge, roughly 15 of those 2300 have attempted to teach at all, and only 3 are teaching PDCs regularly. That’s 3 out of 2300, or less than 0.2%. In 15 years of teaching PDCs, I’d estimate that the 60+ courses I’ve taught have spawned perhaps 10 PDCs taught by others. If I have to teach 6 courses to generate one taught by someone I subvert into my pyramid scheme, that’s the opposite of a pyramid scheme. To qualify as a pyramid each PDC of mine needs to generate several PDCs, and they don’t do that. It’s not just me. Geoff Lawton, who has said that he measures his success by the number of teachers that result from his PDCs, claims that roughly 1 in 250 of his students go on to teach. Other teachers report about the same. A pyramid scheme with a conversion rate of 0.25% or less is an utter failure.

What the PDC does, much more effectively than turning out teachers, is to turn out designers. Roughly 10-15% of my students either become designers of some sort or take the PDC to further their design careers. That points to the real intention of the PDC. Since permaculture is a design approach, the PDC is meant to create designers.

Thus the claim of pyramid scheme is multiply false, in that the PDC fails to meet the most basic function of the scheme—enriching the early adopters—and its conversion rate is dismal. To my mind, making the claim reveals more about the ugly mental state and inability to reason critically of the claimant than about permaculture. They’re both misanthropic and confused.

I think what bothers those who make the claim is the evangelical nature of the PDC. The PDC exists to spread permaculture’s knowledge and system. But that’s what any educational program does. We don’t call engineering school a pyramid scheme, even though some of its graduates go on to teach engineering. But engineering school exists to create engineers. The PDC exists to create permaculturists, and I suspect that any enterprise that blatantly attempts to recruit converts to a new world view will attract criticism. But I believe in the usefulness of the permaculture approach—we are attempting to replace a dysfunctional, ecologically disastrous culture with a regenerative, healthy one via permaculture design, and that seems worth doing.

Toby
tobyhemenway.com

Just out: my new book on urban permaculture, The Permaculture City. Order it at your favorite bookseller or get a signed copy from me at http://tobyhemenway.com/book/the-permaculture-city/









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Lawrence London <mailto:lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
August 21, 2015 at 11:42 PM
Lion Kuntz on Permaculture | RE: Permaculture design systems
LIONKUNTZ/lionkuntz-plenty-3/
plenty.150m.com/Archives/SANET_Archives/44-0269.html
RE: Permaculture design systems*From:* Lion Kuntz (*lionkuntz@email.com*
<lionkuntz@email.com?Subject=RE:%20Permaculture%20design%20systems&In-Reply-To=%3C384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01%3E>
)
*Date:* Thu Apr 20 2000 - 20:50:58 EDT


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------------------------------

<A.LEE> ------Original Message------
<A.LEE> From: "Andy Lee & Pat Foreman"
<mailto:goodearth@rockbridge.net?Subject=RE:
Permaculture design
systems&In-Reply-To=<384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01>
<goodearth@rockbridge.net?Subject=RE:%20Permaculture%20design%20systems&In-Reply-To=%3C384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01%3E>>

<A.LEE> To: mailto:sanet-mg@cals.ncsu.edu?Subject=RE: Permaculture design
systems&In-Reply-To=<384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01>
<sanet-mg@cals.ncsu.edu?Subject=RE:%20Permaculture%20design%20systems&In-Reply-To=%3C384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01%3E>
<A.LEE> Sent: April 18, 2000 9:15:56 PM GMT
<A.LEE> Subject: Permaculture design systems

<old> > Permaculture is most noted as being a
<old> > system designed to sell very-high-priced seminars on how
<old> >to permaculture. Each
<old> > owner of a permaculture course graduatation certificate
<old> > becomes a new sales
<old> > pitchman for permaculture without necessarily ever having
<old> > sold one tomato ever
<old> > to anyone. Agriculture is more than private home subsistance
<old> > gardening. Agriculture
<old> > is the feeding of the population who is not farmer/gardeners.
<old> > Permaculture has made
<old> > no contributions to agriculture which did not already
<old> > previously exist in
<old> > the public
<old> > domain, and which already public property did not require
<old> > expensive seminars or a
<old> > cutesy name to use.

<old> > Signed by Lion Kuntz

<A.LEE> Dear Lion, the above could not be farther from the truth. Indeed,
<A.LEE> Permaculture (and yes I am one who holds a design certificate
<A.LEE> as well as a graduate certificate from the Permaculture Institute)
<A.LEE> is the basis for your so-called micro-farming scheme. The
<A.LEE> difference is, that there are tens of thousands of permaculture
<A.LEE> practitioners around the world, and so far as I can tell, based
<A.LEE> on your bashing of everyone else, you are the only
<A.LEE> micro-farmer. That alone speaks volumes as to which system
<A.LEE> is most sustainable thereby most attractive to
<A.LEE> small-scale agriculturists.

<A.LEE> Your tirades are becoming a bit tiring. We are all willing to
<A.LEE> learn, but your message is getting lost in your spew.

<A.LEE> With all due respect,
<A.LEE> Andy Lee

Thank you for making public a previously undisclosed fiduciary relationship
offering a profit-minded
motive for you prior criticisms of my writings. Had you mentioned that you
were a "Permaculturist" I
might have realized that you would not have enjoyed my ranking of
Permaculture in my
comparisons.html webpage:
http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/comparisons.html

My very first microfarm essays had the address to the gateway page, and
there near the very top is a
comparisons (from my point of view) of major small-mini-micro farming
brand-names. Other systems are
ranked higher than Permaculture from a species salvation viewpoint. There
is some justifiable
criticism of "Permaculture" recorded there.

I like Bill Mollison's writings. I have read several of his Permaculture
books, and would recommend
them to people. But I do not think this is a species-saving concept, and in
fact it is very forward
in it's selfishness. The first book I picked up made a point that one
should be self-sufficient
before being a commercial producer.

I don't believe in self-sufficiency, and I have never met the man or woman
who can smelt their own
ores and bake their own ceramics to make their own sparkplugs. What
"permaculture" graduate can do
their own open-heart surgery? Self-sufficiency is not a requirement for
micro-farming, and I have
said I would buy your milk and beef in the stores because it doesn't make
sense to me to buy the
land and equipment needed to raise my own beef and milk.

Because there is a profit-motive associated with your attachment to the
Permaculture paradigm, which
I have criticised, you do not have clean hands and pure heart when your
choices of adjectives
pointed at me are reviewed.

I have made some inventions. Microfarming is not actually one of them.
According to two books on the
market by authors of systems of competitors to "Permaculture" (and whom
could also be considered to
be competitors to "Ecological Synergy(tm)"), most of the subsystems were
developed and perfected by
the Chinese over 3,000 years ago. I will pay homage to the Chinese
ancestors ingenuity, as does
Leandre Poisson author of the "American Intensive" growing system, and as
does John Jeavon's author
of the "Bio-Intensive" growing system. The "French Intensive" growing
system is also mentioned by
both authors, and whom I too will credit with discovering the highest-yield
farming system ever
discovered up to that time.

"Permaculture" did not provide the basis for the "so-called microfarming"
because I cannot find a
replicable system within "Permaculture". If anything, Permaculture is a
do-your-own-thing system. As
such it can (try to) lay claim on anything and everything which has any
resemblence or similarity to
the design principles of Permaculture.

However, my record on microfilm in public and university libraries around
the country dated 1972 to
1974 show that I was writing essays, reporting news, and reviewing books on
alternative energy,
solar orientations, gardening and back to the land. The published record
shows I was exposed to
these ideas long before Mollison wrote his first book. Lucky for me I have
such microfilm evidence,
so I can survive an attack on my credibility by a financial competitor in
the marketplace of ideas.
My record is probably in the Library of Congress, and I will shortly check
to see if the microfilm
by Bell & Howell Corporation was ever converted to computer accessable form
on the web or ftp
archives. I am more than happy to give credit where credit is due, but
Permaculture really did not
bring forth anything new to me.

It also does not have the virtures of some of its competitors, like
"Biodynamics", "MOA" and
"Kyusei" Nature Farming, or J.I.Rodale's "organic" systems. All of these
have books, videos,
seminars, classes, etc., just like Permaculture. I chose to rank them
higher than permaculture based
on the five questions of part 2 of the microfarming essay series partially
published on SANET-MG.
Archived at URLs: http://www.efn.org/~lkuntz/microfarm2.txt
http://lifesaviors.nav.to/microfarming/microfarm2.txt

These are my criteria for ranking a system, and they speak more to what
preserves the most habitat
for endangered species the quickest, than they speak for personal profit by
promoting any
competitive agriculture regime or system.
Sincerely, Lion Kuntz
Currently in Eugene, Oregon, USA.
http://lifesaviors/nav.to/microfarming/
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http://www.ipermie.net
Avant Geared https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared/
https://plus.google.com/+Avantgeared
Permaculture: -- portal to an expanding global network of landtech pioneers practicing and teaching permaculture
while designing ecological, biointensive land use systems with integrated elements for synergy, sustainability, regeneration and enhanced nature-compatible
human habitat --


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Christopher Nesbitt,
Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia
PO 145, P.G.
BELIZE, Central America

501 630 4386

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