permaculture

[christopher nesbitt <christopher.nesbitt@mmrfbz.org>]

Scott,

This is a tangent well off the original topic.

First, Maya people want what other people want, land for their  
families, a better future for their children (education is very  
important), to increase their standard of living, and to accumulate  
"things", TV, cars, clothes, computers, iPods, etc. They are no  
different than anybody else. Despite what people would like to  
believe, the Maya did not have a history of collective living before  
the conquest. Precolumbian Maya history is as filled with empire  
building, domination of smaller polities by larger polities, tribute  
and taxation, atrocities, murder, brutality, war and slaughter as the  
Romans, the Greeks, or post arrival Maya history. This is well  
documented in their own writing, and part of what made it relatively  
easy for the Spanish to defeat the highland Maya was that the Quiche  
and Kakchikel were at war with one another when the Spanish arrived. I  
agree with part of what you are saying, but not what looks to me like  
an implied assumption of cultural elevation. The Europeans were as  
brutal to the Maya as the Maya were to the other Maya, either other  
language speakers or other cities.

Second, the modern Maya make the same mistakes on land use that corn  
farmers do in Iowa, damaging the carrying capacity of their land for  
short term gain, although the situation here is exacerbated by fragile  
soils and less security in land tenure than the farmers in Iowa. Keep  
in mind that the ancient Maya deforested their land, too, and the  
collapse of their  civilization is now believed by most archeologists  
to have been a result of overpopulation and climate change brought on  
by deforestation, so they were not "guardians of the commons" either.  
The desire of caucasians to attribute bad practices as a consequence  
of colonization is common, but wrong. Poor land use patterns here are  
not a consequence of the conquest, they are a consequence of being  
human.

Thirdly, to get to the level of sophistication of the ancient Maya,  
with their highly evolved esthetic, the cultural/artistic apogee of  
the Americas, their architectural and artistic achievements, their  
mathematics and astronomy required a level of surplus that was created  
by a rigidly stratified society, with royalty, a religious class,  
merchants, armies, peasants. The Maya had no socialist paradise. To  
create that wealth, that level of surplus required to sustain that  
sophistication involved an agricultural prowess that is staggering,  
and not completely understood, along with a pattern of dominating  
their neighbors. To get to that involved as much Bablyonian behaviour  
as any other large great society. The Maya the Spanish encountered  
were not pacifists, were not egalitarian, were no more culturally  
advanced than any other people of empire, but their art and cultural  
esthetic was, and remains distinct, enigmatic, and still enthralls  
most people who see it. It is a dim person who can walk the grounds of  
Tikal and not feel small and very temporary, who can look at the  
zoomophs and glyphs of the monumental writing at Quirigua and not feel  
the uniqueness embodied in the writing.

I have seen people ooh and aah about how spiritual the ancient Maya  
were, not realizing that to a captured enemy from Tikal, dragged,  
bound, and held at Caracol, tortured, for many years, ritually  
slaughtered, publicly, Guantanamo itself would seem like paradise.

The Maya, as sophisticated as they were in the Classic period, were  
brutal to one another, subjegating other polities, razing cities,  
enslaving their enemies, ritually slaughtering their foes, constantly  
at war, and made the same mistakes people have made over and over,  
overextending the population above the carrying capacity of the land,  
resulting in increased competition for resources, war, chronic  
malnutrition (late and terminal classic elite burials show signs of  
chronic malnutrition) and famine, which ultimately led to collapse and  
depopulation, especially of the southern Maya lowlands, which is where  
I am, and where the most impressive sites are. The Maya of today are  
more concerned with deforestation, there are dozens of Maya NGOs  
working on retaining forest cover, but they tide is towards more  
people and more forest lost and an eventual collapse, again. We have  
provided training in permaculture to people from these NGOs, and had  
agroforestry workshops for community members of communities they are  
working with.

Fourthly, the people here are just like people everywhere. People  
everywhere make short sited moves for quick material gain for the  
least energy expended possible, often with little thought to their  
grandchildrens grandchildren. Not everyone here is like that, just  
like not everyone anywhere is like that, but I imagine that most  
people here would like nothing more than a Wal Mart to appear, and a  
credit card to burn themselves into debt with.

Lastly, what you look at as "Maya" is how the Maya would look at  
Germans, French, Dutch, etc, as "European". They wear similar clothes,  
speak languages that appear to be similar (some are), and to an  
outsider they all seem to be more or less the same. However, the Maya  
make large distinctions between each other. There is distrust and  
often hostility between different Maya people, often rooted in  
animosities that are hundreds (or thousands) of years old. The Quiches  
and Kakchikel warred with one another, the Itza and Yucatec warred  
with one another. The Kekchi wiped out the Manche Chol, literally,  
(there are no more Chol speaking people, they were killed by the  
Kekchi, and any remnants were culturally/linguistically absorbed by  
the Kekchi). The Tzutuhil do not trust the Kakchikel, etc, etc, etc.  
Here in Belize, the Mopan look down on the Kekchi as being  
unsophisticated bumpkins, new arrivals to Belize (having crossed into  
Belize in the late 1890s). There is not, and never has been, a  
monolithic "Maya".

The history of the Maya of Guatemala is a brutal history, both pre- 
conquest and post-conquest, especially the last 40 years, one that the  
US paid for (via the Israelis after Carter suspended military aid to  
the Guatemalans, and the reason all their soldiers carried Galils in  
the late 70 and early 1980s), and that I agree with you %110. Many of  
the Maya in Belize, the Kekchi, especially, emigrated to Belize to  
escape those very problems. I was in Guatemala a lot in the 1980s, and  
know a lot about what happened there. As a young man, I went through  
numerous checkpoints in the Peten for both the army and the EGRP, the  
largest guerilla group in the Peten, and each time was terrifying. For  
a lot of reasons that I will not go into here, I understand the  
horrors of at least the mid 1980s through the Peace accord of 1996 in  
Maya communities.

Returning to where I am today, I live in an ancient city. There are  
dozens of house mounds here, and nearby Lubantuun was a major  
ceremonial site and trade site (albeit with a complete lack of  
monumental writing, no stellae). My house sits on a plaza, there are  
ruins all around. A site, Uxbentun, straddles this land, and was a  
suburb of Lubantuun (where they allegedly found the crystal skull). I  
estimate that in the viewscape that now holds one family across the  
river there were 100-130 households, and on this 70 acres there are  
another 50 house mounds, terraces, plazas, a small temple. Maya  
households today have 6-12 people in them, so we are looking at land  
that held thousands of people. At one point this was a busy place.  
Now? Its empty. They were so successful that.... they exceeded the  
carrying capacity of their land... etc. The 150 year period of  
850-1000AD saw the last monumental inscriptions on all the large  
cities in the southern lowlands, as one by one they were all  
abandoned. They made the same mistakes being made now. Belize will be  
Haiti in 100 years, not because of the conquest, or cultural scarring  
related to the conquest, but because people are people.

We know that the ancient Maya had very sophisticated agricultural  
systems because they were able to maintain high population densities  
and maintain non-calorically productive classes like royalty,  
religious classes, demi-royalty, a thriving merchant class (I find  
obsidian and jade here, no local sources for that, which were traded  
hundreds of miles), standing armies, and they did this without the  
wheel, without beasts of burden, with no trucks, without chainsaws,  
with no herbicides, or fertilizers, or hybrid seed, or bic lighters,  
all tools the modern Maya have. Right now, your average milpero  
manages through hard work, careful planning and a dose of luck to  
break even, for life. There is seldom much surplus. I believe the  
ancient Maya practiced agroforestry here, though near here in the  
swamps out of the hills, it is believed they practiced chinampa. This  
is supported by many archeologists, including Dr. Annabel Ford and her  
work up at El Pilar with ramon nut. Whatever they were doing they did  
it right for a very long time... and then their population exceeded  
the ability of their land to support them, and... the rest is "history".

As far as conversion not being spiritual, I was in a back village up  
at the border sometime in the early 1990s, and on a weekend I got to  
witness two Pentecostal meetings (at the same time) where a bunch of  
50 year old Maya ladies cut loose, dancing with what can only be  
described as wild abandon, doing amazing impersonations of tweakers on  
a 14 hour ecstasy binge at a rave at dawn on the beaches of Goa.  
Ecstatic dancing is a form of spirituality. The preachers preached in  
southern bible thumping manner, all Jesus wheezing... speaking in  
tongues, just like a television evangelist. They had the rythm, the  
cadence, the same message, everything, neatly translated into Kekchi.  
I am not religious, but I have to say that many of those people were  
filled with... something, love of God, the holy spirit, hysteria,  
demons, hahaha, I don't know, but it was real, and it was impressive,  
and... just a bit scary. There were no Spanish people there, no  
instruments of the government, this was not coerced. The preachers  
were Guatemalan Kekchi. The Catholic church had 7 men and a guitar  
that night, a subdued affair. I stopped by because I was staying in  
the Catholic school, and hung out. It seemed  much more calm place to  
be. The Pentecosts had these two competing rally's with two sound  
systems and two preachers, trying to out sing each other in waves of  
halallulah-aggression ay one another, very, very weird. People came  
from villages on both sides of the border in droves. There were  
perhaps 30 households in the village, certainly less than 200 people,  
but well over 600 people showed up for this event.

I was just talking with a friend who is an archeologist who works in  
Belize annually, who has been to that community for field work, and we  
both agreed that the evangelists are a double edged sword, part of the  
general cultural erosion, but also positive in eliminating alcohol,  
reducing domestic abuse, etc. Seeing Maya ladies be able to really cut  
loose made me admire this outlet for ectstatic dancing, something they  
really don't have chances to do very often. Maya ladies have very  
rigidly defined roles in life, and ecstasy is not a part of it.

There is also the evolving culture of dependency, where by a new  
pastor opens a church, hands out money and "things" and gets  
"converts", and this is a problem on other levels... a whole other  
topic! Perhaps for another day.

The only generalization I would make is that people are people, and  
people do what people do.

Thanks for enduring my rant. Hahahah, sorry if it is a bit unfocused,  
but there is so much tied together that it is hard to tell one part  
without some reference for context.

Christopher


Please see:
"The Conquest of the Last Maya Kingdom" to hear about the last post  
classic southern Maya lowland site and how that ended (really dense,  
and I hope you want to know all about Mopan Maya family names, and  
Itza political structure in the late 17th century...)
"The Fall of the Ancient Maya", an excellent book that is very  
accessible. Puts forth several hypothesis on the collapse and leaves  
the reader to think about them.
""Copan, The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Maya Kingdom" for a very  
detailed look at the terminal classic period of the ancient Maya at  
one site.
"Popul Vuh" is the Quiche Maya story of creation, and is an excellent  
source of information regarding Maya cosmology and life before and on  
the eve of the conquest.







On Oct 30, 2008, at 9:32 PM, Scott Pittman wrote:

> What you describe, Christopher, is endemic to colonized cultures  
> around the
> world.  We can't begin to understand the horrors that have been  
> visited on
> these people and it has fractured their cultures and wounded them
> individually for over 400 years.  To me most of the world is  
> suffering Post
> Traumatic Stress Syndrome from their ancestral experience of being  
> held
> hostage by another culture.
>
> This process is still going on, though in more subtle ways, today.   
> What all
> this indicates is that there is so much trauma involved that one  
> can't make
> any general conclusions about behavior or patterns.
>
> If you look at the Maya of Guatemala what you see is the end result  
> of a
> massive attempt at genocide within the last 40 years on top of the  
> brutal
> colonization of the Spaniards.  So their conversion to evangelical
> Christianity becomes a survival technique rather than some major  
> religious
> experience.
>
> With the hand in hand exploitation of religious organizations,  
> corporate
> looters and political adventurism it is a wonder anyone survived at  
> all.
> Read "Thy Will Be Done" by Gerard Colby and Charlotte Bennett for an
> overview of the collaboration of the Rockefellers and the religious
> organization The Summer Language Institute to exploit the oil and  
> other
> resources in Ecuador and Peru.
>
> With this background it comes as no surprise to me that these people  
> aren't
> too concerned with deforestation, keeping the commons tidy, or any  
> of the
> other "civilized" behavior patterns.  There is a similar pattern of  
> cultural
> dysfunction in the Former Soviet Union where collectivization was  
> enforced
> by threat and violence - when that is removed things fall apart.
>
> That should be enough for tonight. Thanks for tolerating my rant.
>
>
>
> Scott Pittman
> Director
> Permaculture Institute
> www.permaculture.org
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of  
> christopher
> nesbitt
> Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 12:00 PM
> To: permaculture
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Trends in America
>
> Hi Steve and Toby,
>
> I am going to make some observations of land tenure from the limited
> perspective of living in proximity to indigenous communities, but am
> not emotionally attached, am not attacking anybody. This is an
> alternative view of the problems and benefits of land tenure in Maya
> communities in southern Belize:
>
> I have lived in a piece of land in southern Belize for the last 20
> tears. When I bought it, I bought it cheap because it lacked road
> access (still lacks road access), had no grid (still has no grid
> electricity), and the land was severely damaged abandoned pasture land
> and old citrus groves. I have used my labour, my thoughts, my
> energies, income earned off the farm as well as income from the farm,
> to rehabilitate the soil, make this land a beautiful farm, and to make
> a very well established food forest, with many hundreds of species.
>
> When I bought this land, I wanted to open it up to be a community. I
> invited local people, and international people, and.... no one was
> really interested. They all wanted to pursue their own thing, so I
> pursued my own thing, too. I now have an Eden, which I intend to pass
> on to my children, which I share through courses. Toby has taught
> here, twice, and knows that we provide scholarships for participants
> who can not afford to take the courses we offer (made possible by
> teachers like Toby who are willing to facilitate scholarships).
>
> If this land had been community owned, it would have all been burned
> down and planted to corn years ago.
>
> Moving on to the matter that you may not have considered: most people
> in the developing world want private property, at least the people I
> know. For the last 20 years, I have lived in San Pedro Columbia,
> Toledo, Belize. My neighbors are mostly Kekchi Maya people who did
> have community land tenure, and, as the book "the Tragedy of the
> Commons" points out, community land was not always well managed. I am
> not saying that it couldn't be, but my experience here has shown me
> that, here at least, it is not. Fallow crop rotational cycles
> appropriate for the types of soil we have here, 12-15 years, were not
> observed when that land was everybody's and nobody's. The incentive
> was, at the time, to chop it, burn it and plant it out to corn before
> someone else did, resulting in shortened fallow cycles of 7 years, 5
> years, 3 years, with the predictable decline in production and an
> increased environmental cost of erosion, siltation, and fire damage
> (we lost 50 acres of habitat to a caretaker for a privately owned
> piece of land "managed" by absentee land owners this last year, though
> the core areas of the farm were largely unaffected). Any one who
> fallowed a piece of land for more than 7 years could expect to find
> someone else clearing it for their milpa when they went out to their
> farm.
>
> Toby has been to two of the farms in San Pedro Columbia with well
> developed agroforestry. One is Saul Garcias land, farmed for 40 years,
> worthy of a book of its own, amazing levels of biodiversity both
> between species and within species, and the other is Ignacio Ash's
> farm, a very wel developed farm that is a cacao dominant polyculture
> that has been in one family for 3 generations. He has also been to
> Burton Caliz's farm, which is another farm that is amazing. These
> farms are exceptional, and a common feature is that they are "owned",
> that the person who established them expected to have something to
> pass on to their children.
>
> In 20 years time I have watched all the rainforest within a two hour
> walk of the village chopped and burned up for corn. Lack of delineated
> properties resulted in a land use pattern that is full of contention
> and conflict, where the land was not stewarded for the long term
> benefit of the community or for the land itself, and has kept this
> community mired in stagnation, economically marginalized by a lack of
> access to traditional avenues of credit (and this is not a debate
> about wether or not that is a good thing) and with a social
> prohibition on making long term investments in the land, like planting
> cacao, enforced by sabotage, community censure, arson and violence.
> Any attempt to plant long term crops like cacao or coffee, or timber
> trees in association with cacao or coffee was seen as a resource grab.
> Cattle pastures were not managed to avoid soil damage, because it was
> not "theirs", and the way to show intention to use that land was
> through not fallowing it.
>
> Commonly owned land here resulted in greed, fear and division, too,
> worse, in my opinion, than where property was delineated.
>
> The few cacao farms in this watershed of any size are held by families
> that managed to get their land titled back in the 1920s or 1950s, like
> Ignacios, whose grandfather planted out most of the cacao he has. Saul
> "stronged" his land and would probably have chopped anybody who tried
> to steal it from him into several chunks a few years ago. He owned
> that then and now by respect for his abilities and age, respectively.
>
> Now, the land that provides the ecological services displaced by
> shifting cultivation tends to be privately owned land. I allow people
> to collect firewood from my land, for example, since their is no
> firewood close to the village anymore, except on privately owned land.
>
> Another community near hear is San Antonio village, a Mopan Maya
> community that was established in 1840. San Antonio is very well
> developed (if you like agroforestry, there is a section in the middle
> of the village that is staggeringly productive, combining several back
> yards to make a small carbon sink and block of habitat for birds that
> is also very productive in food and cacao). The largest cacao farms in
> Toledo are all owned by farmers in this village. Average acreage of
> cacao farms in Maya communities is a bit over an acre. In this
> community, the median acreahe is 4 acres, with several farms as large
> as 12 acres. Some of the farms are being managed by the children or
> even grandchildren of the initial farmer. San Antonio village is like
> a garden, one of the prettiest villages in Toledo, and well developed.
>
> San Antonio is a prosperous village. People invest their energies into
> their land because it belongs to them.
>
> Looking at San Antonio Village, and San Pedro Columbia we see one
> community with property rights that has engaged in very sophisticated
> agroforestry, land that is passed securely from generation to
> generation, who can access credit to expand their farms, buy TVs,
> build new houses, have shops, that is able to send children to school,
> and another, that has also developed, but not as quickly, that is
> still dependent (though less so) on shifting cultivation, that lacks
> access to credit and has been marginalized at the boundary of the
> currency based economy. Both of these communities are engaged in
> agriculture. Both of these communities have access to the same
> markets. Both of these communities are over 100 years old. One of
> these communities is a nicer place to live (hahaha, and I don't live
> there)!
>
> San Antonio observes better agricultural practices on commonly owned
> land, too, with 60 feet from any waterway kept forested, and the
> school and church well taken care of, a pride in ther community that
> is an extension of their pride in their farms.
>
> There are some differences in the communities apart from property
> rights. San Antionio is Mopan Maya, a lowland Maya in the Yucatecan
> language group, and the Kekchi are a Quichean people, highland in
> origin, who arrived in Belize after 300 years of perpetual
> displacement. The Mopan came from San Luis Rey, Peten, with the
> intention to settle that valley, a single movement to establish a
> settlment, from a place very similar to San Antonio, same plants,
> soils, weather patterns. The Kekchi in Columbia arrived as the front
> end of a wave of the displaced of the displaced of the displaced, and
> have a legacy of living for a few generations in one place and then
> migrating, either by choice or external factors. They are from the
> highlands, cooler, with a pronounced wet season and dry season, and
> different plants. But, apart from that, right now, they both have
> access to the same markets, the same level of service (clinics,
> schools, extension services, hospitals). The biggest difference has
> been their relationship with the land they farm.
>
> There are people here who speak against private property for the Maya,
> saying the communal land system is their culture (debatable, but
> certainly the model since the Conquest). Most of these proponents own
> their own land, if Maya, or are Caucasian, who own property back where
> they come from. Most Maya people would like property they can pass to
> their children, or use to access credit, and can increase the value of
> by their labour, etc.
>
> I am not debating the merits of access to credit, or economic
> integration with the balance of the country and the global economy,
> but it is worth noting that %99.9 of the farmers I know would like to
> own their land, would like access to more money, would like all the
> things that I suspect you enjoy or have access to, Steve, a computer,
> an education for their children, a TV, a car, and they don't have
> those things because with poor land tenure, making shifting
> cultivation provide the bulk of their income (financial and caloric),
> they are always two steps from a bad crop failure and loss.
>
> San Pedro Columbia surveyed most of the land five years back and gave
> the land to people. I wish I could say that was done transparently and
> was painlessly, but it was not. It was done in the months before a
> general election with the intention of gaining votes. I am sad to say
> it worked, and that party swept into power for a second term (though
> they lost the next election when they had no assets to give away).
> Having aid that, most people got the land they were farming, and are
> happy with this. They have also started planting out more tree crops,
> and the overall health of that land is better as people have incentive
> to manage it well, by planting long term crops, and to avoid burning
> into their neighbors lands.
>
> There is also a movement in Belize for land owners to set aside a
> percentage of their land to be maintained as habitat and for the
> ecological services wild areas provide, which is a whole other
> subject. Their are talks about incentives for this, etc.
>
> In closing I would say that the 30 prettiest farms I have seen (I
> worked as the head of extension for a cacao cooperative here, and have
> visited well over 400 farms in Belize, and dozens of farms in Costa
> Rica, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Venezuela) have all been farms
> where the owner had very secure land tenure, either property or long
> term leased land, and an ability to transfer ownership to their
> children. I am not saying that communal land doesn't work, or that
> private property is a panacea that will solve all of the problems
> facing farmers here (or anywhere), but that land here is better
> maintained when the stakeholders have something to pass on to their
> own children via secure property rights.
>
> Just my .02.
>
> I have to run, go plant some more trees.
>
> In development,
>
> Christopher
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Oct 30, 2008, at 1:26 AM, Steve Read wrote:
>
> > Hello, Toby Hemenway,
> >
> > Interesting approach  to extrapolte from one PDC and its mug praxis
> > to principles and strategies of land tenure; It reminds me too of
> > the platitudinous arguments that Thatcher & Co. put forward to
> > justify selling off the council owned housing, frankly I rarely saw
> > a run down council house except on estates that had been designanted
> > as 'problem' estates by the local council and were then therefore
> > following some strange logic of their own refilled with more
> > 'problem' families. And then of course council blocks that fell into
> > disrepair and misuse becaus ethey were simply so badly designed.
> >
> > Your argument also belies the fact that for prbably millenia humane
> > societies  have enabled land tenure strategies that allowed
> > sustainable, durable use of commonly held assets. Th
> > e fatuous book 'Tragedy of the commons' has been massively
> > instrumental in creating a mythology around this subject. Your
> > argument also imo seems to betray a certian myopia, looking out the
> > window do I see a world where privately owned resources are not
> > destructively exploited, a world where privately property is tended
> > and nurtured for subsequent generations? Or do I see a world where
> > the traditional class layers have gone to be replaced by one big
> > squandering propertied class in the rich countries and those that
> > are becoming fatter? For myself I only have to go to the municipal
> > dump to see where private property ends up, even when still in good
> > condition.
> >
> > I imagine that you personally however are tending well your private
> > patch of Earth, your private Eden.
> >
> > And of course there's Renting property out, what  a great way to
> > increase my income, living off the sweat and labour of others,
> > keeping the world split into have's and have nots and of course
> > expecting the people who are renting the property to look after it
> > as if it were their own, well how is it they can do that in rented
> > accomodation and yet wouldn't be able to do it in commonly held
> > accomodation?
> >
> > I would however agree with you Toby that there is some education to
> > be done, its not difficult, one simply transports the emotional
> > content that one has for 'mine' to 'ours'. I frankly fail to see
> > that if we can't do this and that as designers we are not promoting
> > this how we are to move along towards sustainable interconnected
> > communities.
> >
> > Buy the land and free it into a safe common legal entity, then help
> > people develop the capacity to nurture it, and in this I am speaking
> > too and perhaps in particular of the urban areas. This definately
> > seems to be the philosophy developing here in France.
> >
> >
> > Steve R
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ======= At 2008-10-30, 04:45:47 you wrote: =======
> >
> > > 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
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > permaculture mailing list
> > > permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> > > Subscribe or unsubscribe here:
> > > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
> > > Google command to search archives:
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> >
> > = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
> >                         
> >
> > Best regards.                           
> > Steve Read
> > steveread@free.fr
> > 2008-10-30
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
> _____________________________
> Christopher Nesbitt
>
> Maya Mountain Research Farm
> San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
> PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
> BELIZE,
> Central America
>
> www.mmrfbz.org
>
>
>
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_____________________________
Christopher Nesbitt

Maya Mountain Research Farm
San Pedro Columbia, Toledo
PO 153 Punta Gorda Town, Toledo
BELIZE,
Central America

www.mmrfbz.org