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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Food Not Lawns book

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Subject: permaculture

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  • From: Paul Cereghino <paul.cereghino@comcast.net>
  • To: grahamburnett@blueyonder.co.uk, permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Food Not Lawns book
  • Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 19:51:24 -0800

Alas.. teaching is a hard profession all over... and 'lifestyle training' may never be a hot ticket item.

...trying to
bring in a living wage as a permaculture instructor is such a
sustainable tactic", I'd say the exact opposite, or at least that trying
to make permaculture teaching PART of a polycultural income is in fact
the only way that most of us CAN be sustainable...

We are teaching skills and knowledge that are not profit-producing and so those skills have less market value. That said, in true permaculture fashion, a permaculture approach to teaching permaculture could be to synergistically stack permaculture theory with other more in demand commodities... a guild of concepts... capturing a flow of capital?

...even if its not the students, it will either
be funded by somebody else (grants the Shell Greenwash fund? tax
payers?)...

Isn't this classic 'tragedy of the commons'. It is no one person's business to care for sustainable habitat, and so yes... access whatever capital flow you can to reshape our world and god speed.

In a 'functioning' market system (albeit one that systematically degrades the ecosystem), teaching permaculture to the landless and disadvantaged, who already live a low energy lifestyle, may have less value than helping them get a piece of the existing economic action so they have resources to invest in a permanent culture that can't be ripped from them by the loan collector. That being said there is something for everyone in permaculture, and creative land use can prop up quality of life for the poor (as long as you adequately consider what it's like to have 2-5 jobs per household and live on frequently contaminated soils.)

I've also taught on a 'free' permaculture course that was ostensibly
aimed mainly at working class, non-white women in South london a few
years ago. In fact the course attracted in lots of white, middle class
folks...

One variation on this theme that is common in Washington USA is offering white middle class folks 100 hours of training in exchange for 100 hours of community service. Then you can take the white middle class folks and use them and their network of privilage to build food forests for people trying to hold down 2-5 jobs. A similar approach is commonly used to get people working in zone 5 (AKA ecological restoration). For zone 5, we are focussing on endowments to create economic incentives to steward habitat, ownership and financial models should be considered as a vital part of permaculture (not just personal economic survival)... and certainly we should consider a number of transitional states and successional pathways to our utopian never-never land. I bet you our colleagues in world-shaping at the Project for a New American Century have a plan in mind and know how to put our capital to work.

Just some thoughts to stir up the hornet's nest between the idealos and the realos.. :)

Paul Cereghino
Olympia, WA





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