permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

A story I may have told before: On opening day of a PDC, the venue was 
kind enough to put out mugs, each with a participant's name on it. They 
asked that each person be responsible for rinsing and putting away their 
own mug. The system worked beautifully; the classroom stayed free of 
scattered mugs; each was back in the rack at the end of the day. Then, 
come our mid-class day off, the mugs were put through an industrial 
sterilizer and the labels were removed. They went back to the classroom 
unlabeled. Within a few days, mugs were everywhere--under chairs, on 
shelves, left outside, many full of molding tea leaves, and another 
couple of dozen mugs had been commandeered from elsewhere since no one 
could find a clean mug and it was easier to grab another from the stash. 
Soon almost every mug the place had was in our classroom, dirty and 
haphazardly stuck anywhere.

I was pretty surprised, since the participants seemed like decent folks. 
The lesson I took home was twofold: private ownership is one way to 
encourage responsibility toward resources, and, a culture that is used 
to private ownership is liable to behave irresponsibly toward resources 
held in common.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



Nancy Frank wrote:
> Steve -
>
> I think it will be awhile before we get as far as we've come and  
> return to common land.
>
> Nancy
>
>