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  • From: "Robert Waldrop" <bwaldrop@cox.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Why is permaculture more about selling books, DVDs and training courses?
  • Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:04:17 -0500

----- Original Message ----- From: "Suraj Kumar" <suraj@sunson.in>
The only thing I'm "nit-picking" here is the proprietary information
bit. Why should information be proprietary? Is it because there is an> underlying element of insecurity?

Is it possible that there is a language/communication issue here? When I think of "proprietary" information, I think of trademarked/copyrighted/patented info. It seems unlikely to me that there is much of that in the permaculture movement. Just because someone is selling a publication doesn't mean that the info inside is proprietary -- which suggests some kind of legal protection to the info.

I think that all of the information necessary for permaculture education is certainly available in the public domain somewhere, starting with Mollison's pamphlets, available for free at http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/PDC_ALL.pdf , which are transcriptions of a PDC given by Bill Mollison of a Permaculture Design Course in New Hampshire in the early 1980s.

A design certificate "certifies" that you have attended a course and gone through a certain curriculum. It doesn't mean that you are an expert permaculture designer, "apprentice" would be a better description, or perhaps it is a "ticket" to a lifelong experience of learning and practice/praxis. I studied and tried to praxis permaculture for years before I got enough money to take a permaculture design course. In my self-study, I got some things right, some things wrong. Now my approach is more organized and wholistic, before the course I was always looking at things as discrete units and not always getting the inter-connections, but I suspect that even if I hadn't taken the course, I would still have learned that lesson. My mistakes were very important to my learning however, and thus I treasure them as much as my successes. I have actually lost count, but I sometimes say I grow more than 100 different varieties of useful or edible plants on my 1/7th acre house site in central Oklahoma City, but there is another list of almost 100 different varieties of plants that I tried and failed with.

I like giving stuff away too, I started a food coop (www.oklahomafood.coop ) that only sells local foods and we give away our software to other groups who want to do something similar http://www.localfoodcoop.org/ . Now that that group has matured to the point where I have been liberated from the position of General Manager, I am part of a design process to prepare and then give away (under the general public license system) a platform for online newspaper cooperatives, hopefully that will launch within the year ("you heard it first here"). I have a free online "Almanac of Useful Information", which is mostly about "kitchen permaculture" or perhaps more correctly, "permaculture design principles applied to kitchens and food systems". www.bettertimesinfo.org/2004index.htm . And then there's www.energyconservationinfo.org where I pile up and give away various accoutrements relating to energy conservation and disaster preparation/recovery/mitigation. I really enjoy this kind of social entrepreneurship.

At the same time, if you want to read the permaculture design of my house, I charge US $10 for the PDF. I give some of those away too usually in response to requests from people in third world countries. I am a teacher's assistant with an online PDC, and I get paid a bit for that, and tuition is charged and paid by the students.

Dan Hemenway (not to be confused with Toby who participates here, they are probably related at the "200 year ago ancestor level"), whom I study permaculture with, in his essay on Living Lovingly http://www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org/livinglovingly.pdf says that "Love is the harmony between giving and receiving." And that's what I'm trying to find in my own life.

Those are my thoughts, hope they are not too confusing and contribute something to the dialogue.

Robert Waldrop
Oklahoma City





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