permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

Awesome thread, great ideas and comments. A few things that have struck me:

Certification will always be a contentious issue in Pc; whaddya need a dumb piece of paper for if ya know the stuff, people will worship it and lose sight of what it means, it doesn't mean anything, etc. All potentially true. I favor certification for a slew of reasons. The one that seems most relevant now is that it's an important device for indicating to those outside of Pc, especially employers, schools, NGOs, etc, that there is something to Pc other than a disorganized bunch of hippies. I would like to see Pc spread, and certification is one of many effective tools for that. If you don't care about a certificate, don't get one--that won't ever prevent you from doing permaculture (though the PDC is a fantastic experience), and it probably won't prevent you from doing anything else you want to do. 

Rob wrote
> At the current moment, I'd describe the Permaculture movement as
> producing "experts", in contrast to "professionals" 

I agree. I don't think Pc is a profession, or a discipline. It is, among other things, a design approach that links many disciplines. People have said variously that it falls between the disciplines, and that it is the "linking science." Here's a question: What does a permaculturist do for a living, anyway? A lot of them teach permaculture (very recursive, yes?) and most of the others do landscape design, for which you need further, non-Pc training to do well, (and which helps cement the perception that Pc is only about gardening; not a great thing). In other words, it's hard to earn a living just being a permaculturist: you need some other skill to leverage it onto. Holmgren wrote a nice article a while back saying that instead of professional permaculturists practicing, say, architecture, he'd prefer to see architects who are trained in permaculture. I agree with that; piggyback onto existing structures and transform them instead of duplicating and competing. 

Marsha wrote:
> now that Bill is moving out of the scene there is a certain maneuvering to  see "who will be at the top now that he is gone"

In the US, at least, it seems that no one wants to be on top; people are running from the position, and those who have the best shot at it are not doing anything with it. Most of the "top" Pc people I know are far too busy doing PC on the ground to want to be an administrator or guru. Frankly, I'd love it if someone with good admin skills would step in; US Pc people are notoriously bad at it, and IMO this is keeping Pc marginalized in the US. Both the UK and Oz have national organizations or centralized offices of some sort, and I suspect that's one reason why Pc is far, far better known in those countries than in the US.

Toby
_____________________________________________
For a look at my book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm