permaculture

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Hi Paul,

GlobalCirclenet writes:
 > 
 > One of those free places is the big list of PC links at
 > http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/Links.html . I rather imagine that people
 > getting $700 a pop don't advertise all the free PC information out there.
 > But if they can rake in that kind of money, no concern to me, I can't
 > afford it. 
 > 
 > My concern is this: to spread more PC information and experience it needs
 > to be geared to the vast majority who are working people, small farm
 > families just scraping by, and so forth. Because those who can afford the
 > price of these seminars, the travel expense and overnites, and afford the
 > time off work to attend, comprise a very small fraction of the
 > sustainability-minded population. Sometimes the goal gets confused with the
 > objective. They think, ok, permaculture is good, I teach permaculture and
 > get paid for it, so the more people I get to my seminars the better.
 > Getting people to paid seminars becomes the goal instead of an intermediate
 > objective. The original goal was to spread knowledge and practice of
 > permaculture. I'm committed to the goal in my own work. I charge for
 > bedding plants and produce. But I give information out for free. I want
 > everybody to compete with me.

In many ways, you really speak my mind here.  Being committed to
living a very low impact lifestyle, most permaculture courses are more
than 10% of my annual income.  Coming from a *geek* mindset of Open
Source <http://opensource.org> and holding a general belief that
information should be free, I think a lot of good can be done by
making permaculture information freely accessible to anyone who has
interest (and Internet access, also a subset).

I also think that different sorts of people have different ways they
learn best.  I have never really experienced the formal style of
education with an instructor instructing to be that helpful to me, but
I think most people really do benefit from a face to face style of
instruction.  In short, I think both are necessary and that folks
should support as many options as they are able.  The important part
is that creating a better world starts by knowing what it takes to
create a better world.  If you know what it takes to do this, maybe
you should pass it on.

I also think that a really solid deep permaculture website, with free
helpful information to truly educate does not yet exist.  Fortunately
there are a number of projects out there (including our own) trying to
fill this gap.  

Cheers,
Chad

-- 
Chad Knepp
perl -e 'print pack"H*","7079674067616c617465612e6f72670a"'