permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

I'm in full agrement with Graham's sentiments about (anti)copyright. These
laws were instituted at the request of artists and authors--not big
corporations--whose work was being pirated, depriving them of compensation
for their work. I make my living in part as a writer, and I'm just finishing
a book that's taken me 18 months of hard work. I'm grateful there are laws
to prevent some publishing conglomerate from stealing it and keeping the
payment from sales; I really need that income. I'd be flattered if people
quoted or copied parts of it--I'd like attribution  because they didn't do
the work and thus have no right to claim it as theirs. Sure, I'd like my
name to be associated with my own works, though I'm happy if the ideas get
out without me. We each have varying degrees of ego, and it's not up to
others to say that some people are evil for wanting recognition.

I used to be of the "property is theft" school, believing that ownership was
a cause of evil. But over the years I've seen that if people don't have a
personal stake in something--own it in some way--that thing gets abused.
It's Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons. Rental housing gets beat up by
tenants the way their own place never would; public land is overgrazed and
logged while the big ranchers and timber companies are often in the
forefront of good land management on their own property; public housing
projects get vandalized by their own residents; we litter roadsides but keep
our front yards clean. The environmental problems in the former Soviet bloc
show what happens when no one feels a sense of ownership. The problems
attributed to ownership itself are deeper problems--insecurity, greed, and
desperation. I think it's simple human nature to take better care of what we
have a stake in. 

In a perfect world, we'd all understand that we have a stake in everything.
But most people don't understand that, and concepts like property and
ownership have come about to insure, in an imperfect way, we find a way to
care. It's a system that takes into account the realities of human nature.
If communism or anarchy, in their true senses, could work, that would be
wonderful. But in the real world they have always, every time, become
perverted by the powerful and degraded by the many resulting
disenfranchised.

Toby