permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

At the risk of seeming a bit of a crank, I want to revisit those sobering
stats once more. So in our village of 100 people,

>1 would own a computer

  I was idly leafing through a copy of Forbes yesterday, and read that
"over 300 million computers are in use today." That means, given a
population of 5-6 billion, that not 1, but 5 or 6 of our villagers would
own a computer. Nitpicking? Hardly; that's a 500-600% error. I'm sorry that
the anti-Western political agenda of the author is so strong that he's
willing to ignore the facts.
   How is this relevant to permaculture? Since we're in the world-changing
business, it's important for us to be willing to see the world as it is and
not distort it due to anger or optimism. And if we don't have our facts
right, no one will take us seriously, as I no longer take the author
seriously (this of course doesn't reflect on Guy for forwarding it). A
couple of my favorite quotes are relevant:

Mark Twain (via Disraeli): "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned
lies, and statistics."

T.H. Huxley: "The great tragedy of science-the slaying of a beautiful
hypothesis by an ugly fact."