permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Thought I'd repost this to the list. - worth reading to see how some 
othes think about PC.
Wondering what  planet this fellow is from (says there's no need for PC 
certification or to be concerned about "one's
survival and meeting one's basic needs in the US").-
===+++===


 [Permaculture International] The debates

*farmerdave at permaculture.com* farmerdave at permaculture.com 
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/Tue Mar 29 18:28:11 CST 2005/

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Just another couple of thoughts on certification etc.  The original plan by 
Bill
was to have a flat hierarchy where once you learned pc at a course AND THEN
APPLIED IT TO YOUR HOME SITE, or village or whereever, then you could be
considered somewhat competant to teach a course.  This works pretty darn well
in developing countries since the techniques and guilds that are going to work
well in a given locale will quickly distill into a few main designs with
endless small variations.

But in the United States where the issue is not survival and meeting real life
needs, but instead wants, you get different results.  Our culture's love of
celebrity took Mollison and made him a god and a lot of young boys and with
dysfunctional fathers and a few highly competitive women sure wanted to be
celebrities like Bill whether they were conscious of it or not.

Bill and Scott's original proposal in 1997 to create a teacher's certification
and to try and patent the word permaculture (and charge everyone a biennial 
fee
for use of it)were not devised so much to guarantee a high level of
qualification but to create a caste system in which as Scott put it "you had 
to
earn your chops at the feet of a master."  The other goal was to exclude 
people
who they felt were either a threat to their head of cult status or who they
didn't like.

Luckily the people who were invited to the meeting in which they pitched these
schemes had good heads on their shoulders and rejected "taxation without
representation" and a heirarchy they rightly felt went against everything Bill
had said in the past about the structure of permaculture.

But in every "industry" there is always someone ready to farm the wallets of 
the
constituents with trade organizations, certifications, ever higher levels of
qualification for which they charge a fortune to do not much of anything
useful.  It is to permaculture's credit that it has resisted this sort of 
thing
for as long as it has.

So let's get on with the work, out design and out delight the established
competition and show them that we can produce more surplus and live well on
what each of us considers enough.  In so doing we withdraw our life energy and
capital from Transnational capitalism and when there are enough of us to just
stop it from growing, it all falls in on itself. We don't even need to tear 
the
multinationals down or fight them face to face; just bleed them to
non-existence  with thousands of people using whatever part of permaculture
they resonate with.

Certification? Pshaw! The only "certification" we need is the respect and
admiration of our neighbors. Especially now that oil is running out.

Remember what Darwin really said, organisms that compete for a scarce 
resources
(fame perhaps) both die out and nature replaces them with cooperaters.

Farmer Dave

www.earthsite.net
> > / This email sent by the wind
/


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