permaculture

[Richard Morris <pfaf@scs.leeds.ac.uk>]

> Ava, I'm pretty new to PC. Tell me, how do academics and Ag Schools view
> Permaculture? I can't understand why there aren't more people on board. Why
> do youy suppose that is?
> Does PC have a bad rap? and if so, why?

A few musings.

1) Some academics do quite like the permaculture idea.
At Plants For A Future we have had quite a few academics make contact
and I'm still in contact with a few. Having a large database online
does help to establish our cred and I've had good feedback from
a lot of the other plant database people round the world.
Admittedly much of this is more for the botanical side rather than
the permaculture content. Hay I've got oodles of free web space
courtesy of a university department.

2) Lots of alternative stuff does happen in academia. I've heard
of people doing project on the Zapanistas, Veganism, the Direct Action
Movement and a lot on sustaniability issues. I recently saw an MSc
thesis which analysed the inputs and outputs of a chap who lives by
coppising
a woodland). We'll no doubt see more
as the Governments take sustainability on board (which is happening 
very fast in the UK). Its probably worth looking away from just the
AG schools try talking to town-planning/architecture depts 
(have you all seen "A Pattern Language" which came out of MIT ten or
so years back this is full of the design type ideas).

3) The permaculture movement does need to prove that it actually works.
I've yet to see any proper analysis of a permaculture project in terms
of what was produced against the input to the system. Something like
        Input Output for the last year
        from 1 acre of land, 100 kilos of produce was produced
        which consisted of 50Kg spuds, ...
        at current market prices this was worth 1000 pounds
        0kg of fertilizer was used
        1 full time worker
This analysis needs to be compared with that from more conventional 
systems. We need this sort of info to convince the wider world that
permaculture is more than glorified gardening. 
Hopefully we'll start seeing a bit more of this sort of stuff
in the UK as Permaculture Association are having to
concentrate more on the research side. If your apply for a grant
make sure you include at least 10% of the time and money for evaluation,
most grant awarding bodies would love this.

4) We need to be clear what audience were aiming at. Is it
academics, governments, farmers, gardeners or the alternative movement?
There is not enough time to aim at all of them at the same time
and very different strategies are needed for each. PFAF are going
to the Gardeners World Show in a couple of weeks and it will be
interesting
to see how we go down.

5) However academia does leave a lot to be desired. Now days
the whole focus is on getting as many papers into conferences and
journals as you can. This means doing the type of work which 
the conferences and journals want to print and also the type of work
the funding bodies want to fund. The whole focus seems to be on taking
small steps backed by lots of evidence. But this does not have to
mean reductionist, complex systems are very in vogue at the moment.
Myself I'm getting out of academia as fast as I can!

        So don't see academia as a horrible monster it is open to
change, but you do need to talk to it in the right way.

                Rich

p.s. could we try to cut down on the amount of stuff quoted in posts
I'm having to do a lot of scrolling down these days. HTML doesn't
go down well with my mail reader either.
-- 
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