permaculture

[Pacific Edge Permaculture <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

on 7/8/00 9:23 PM, Judith Hanna at jehanna@gn.apc.org wrote:

> Lance Roseman wrote:
> I find this whole topic (who owns what and who gets what from whom when) to 
> be
> quite a big put-off.  I might as well just use the techniques and call the
> whole thing 'lancescaping' and just ignore all of this gibberish. We are too
> far along the pathway of no return to squabble about ownership and 
> copyrights.
> PERIOD.  .. Permaculture is about_____, .... Sign
> me off Lance 
> 
> What I find valuable about this international list is the digging into the
> complications and inner messiness of permacultural concepts.


If there's one thing which this conversation has revealed, it is that
permaculture certainly does have the 'inner messsiness' which Judith
describes.

But that's to be expected and I'm sure that other new systems have
experienced something analogous. It's a way of the concept finding its way
in the world, of negotiating a role for itself amid the plethora of
legislation and what that allows and disallows.

Perhaps it is the outcome of the loose way in which the permaculture concept
evolved in the late seventies and early eightees. Then, the idea might have
been that copyright and verbal agreement between the comparatively small
number of practitioners would keep permaculture on course and control how it
was used. This discussion has revealed that rather than copyright, it would
have been trademarking which was necessary to control use of the word
'permaculture'.  

Lance writes that 'we are too far along the pathway of no return to squabble
about ownership and copyrights.' I know that legalistic discussion over
these issues can be tedious to people without a keen interest in it. For
others attempting to make use of permaculture in their livelihoods, however,
the discussion is central and critical.

Surely this international forum is the right place to discuss such issues
openly and in detail, even if some of us find it tedious. Other topics are
probably found tedious by other people, but we do not let that put us off
use of the list. Tedious subjects are part of the baggage on an
international discussion list. The discussion over copyright, teaching
standards and so on have been going on several years, without resolution, so
it is good that a serious, intense discussion has happened at last, a
discussion between colleagues carried out in a mostly calm, objective,
professional, solutions-oriented manner. This is the critical role of an
intremational discussion list.


...Russ Grayson

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