permaculture

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Knutson, Linda writes:
 > 
 >  > 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.

Although systems can help I think Toby was refering to problem of
'tragedy of the commons' which can occur when something is 'free' it
is often devalued and sometimes abused.  Think of the oceans and the
ozone layer for example.  The cup example is sort of a subcategory of
the commons in the sense that it is about tasks held in common.
Without systems or expectations (and followup), communal activities
are very susceptible to this kind of thing... esp. the less pleasant
sorts of tasks.  If you collectively gardened with 25 people can you
imagine the possiblity that the garden may not be as weed free as you
would like?  On the other hand, if you had 'ownership' over a
particular crop in this example garden, it's quite likely the level of
weed pressure would more likely meet your expectations.  I don't mean
to advocate our [mine anyway] inculturated western/N. American
indvidualism over collective efforts but we should be aware of
potential issues in both.

 > 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.

Sounds like you figured out a good system.

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