permaculture

[David Travis <djtravis@hotmail.com>]

"I get the feeling that the permaculture movement has morphed into a
market place to sell books, DVDs and training courses related to
permaculture than a platform for sharing techniques and allowing
humans to live closer to nature in a simpler way. Many a material I
find on the internet are incomplete and keep referring to "Stuff to
Buy" or "Courses to Take". Just search for permaculture on youtube and
that's what you find. Any site claiming to be a "permaculture" site
talks about doing a course.
 
Or am I mistaken? I'd love to be corrected if I'm mistaken.
 
I remember some noble soul here who had setup permaculture.info - that
is great! WTG! But, why do the 'experts' end up locking themselves
into seclusion and not share their knowledge?
 
Cheers,
 
  -Suraj"


Dear Suraj,

I agree that this is a serious problem. In my experience it is a byproduct of 
the original process of certification. Permaculture education was originally 
designed to be a means of certifying design consultants. Even today, the 
regional groups (in the US at least) seem to be strongly focused on how to 
add new levels of accreditation, mentorship, and certification onto the PDC 
process; implementation and verification of permaculture methods seem to be 
secondary priorities. The most generic goal of a consultant is to make money 
using his or her certificate, and it turns out that the easiest and fastest 
way to do that is to promote oneself as a teacher. In addition to this there 
are landscapers who have used the certification process to "green" their 
resumes and explore new territory. Often all of this is combined in the 
permaculture demo/teaching site. The result is what some people 
(affectionally!) call a permaculture ponzi scheme of certificates, diplomas, 
apprenticeships, etc. It costs money, but people like to spend money and they 
have fun.

Part of the difficulty is that permaculture ideas are largely speculative and 
there is a great deal of risk involved in actually implementing them on any 
kind of large scale. Perhaps if permaculture had started out as being more 
centralized and democratic (as opposed to decentralized and autocratic a la 
Mollison), it would have developed the sort of infrastructure needed to move 
beyond demo sites and a handful of NGO projects, but who can say? 

Anyway, it's easy to see how the initial structure lead the movement there. 
Most people I've met within the permaculture movement seem to be perfectly 
happy with it staying on that track; it is satisfying peoples' needs on some 
level. 

- David



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