permaculture

["Knutson, Linda" <knutson@middlebury.edu>]

Meg in KS wrote:

ps  - As to the whole cup washing story.  Really interesting.   I
believe, though,  that that doesn't really say as much about ownership
and/or responsibility as it does about people not liking change.  People
didn't wash the cups without their name on it because that wasn't what
they were accustomed to doing.  I'm quite sure that given enough time,
they would have either come up with another system (everybody take turns
washing all the cups, for example), or found a sharpie and rewritten the
names and returned to the system they were used to.


I have a different theory about the cup story.  If the cups were limited in 
variability, (and why would you bother to write your name on a cup that was 
unique) the participants may have been confused about who last used a cup 
(including their OWN) and hesitated to pick up a cup for fear that they would 
be sipping out of a cup that someone else had used. 

We recently had an all-day meeting at the college where I work (I am not a 
professional permaculturist) there were identical cups provided for coffee 
and juice in cans (all one kind).  Since we moved around a lot during the 
day, I would tend to put my cup or can down and then forget exactly where I 
put it.  Looking around, I was seeing several abandoned cups or cans and 
didn't know which was mine or even if the others were truly abandoned - 
perhaps everyone else was less scatter-brained and knew exactly which was 
theirs and which was not.  Not wanting to appear profoundly stupid, I simply 
got another drink.  I don't think I was the only one who was feeling like 
this, because at the end of the day, the number of 'abandoned' drinks was 
astounding so we had a lot of wasted resources and a lot of clean-up to do.

This does not happen at my house...I don't have the same budget as the 
wealthy college I work for and I have no two cups that are alike.  The small 
number of identical wine glasses that I splurged for have little "charms" 
around the stems - all different - and no one forgets which wine glass was 
theirs anymore - used to be a big problem before I got the charms.

Linda in Vermont