permaculture

[<woodsjay@cox.net>]

It is the accountability that makes the lesson. Where ownership and 
accountability differ is where things will go wrong. For instance on the 
cups, accountability doesn't slow chipping and breakage but ownership does. 
For instance on land, where ownership is anonymous or absent from the area 
then accountability is reduced and the lawn doesn't get mowed nor the weeds 
pulled and the trash piles up..

---- kris kaul <kriskaul@yahoo.com> wrote: 
> Toby,
>  
> I'm not sure this was the lesson you had to take home, although I am in 
> sympathy with it.  It's just that I remember from reading about 
> commonly-held property in the past that such systems were made to work well 
> through having individual responsibilities and, more importantly, 
> individual accountability.  Members would monitor each other's use of the 
> resource (of water, for instance, or a community woodlot).  So in that 
> sense, the labels on the mugs were functioning at least as much due to 
> their ability to assign individual accountability as actual ownership - if 
> someone found a mug sitting on a shelf, they'd know exactly who left it 
> there!
>  
> Kris
> 
> --- On Wed, 10/29/08, permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org 
> <permaculture-request@lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:
> 
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:45:35 -0700
> From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America
> To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID: <49092DDF.9070104@patternliteracy.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
>       
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