Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

permaculture - Re: [permaculture] It's free on the web/ was question about PCDcourseprices

permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: permaculture

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] It's free on the web/ was question about PCDcourseprices
  • Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 21:56:58 -0500

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"'





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page