permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

David Travis wrote:

>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.

Pretty limited and shortsighted view of the permaculture scene. Much progress has been/is being made spreading the good 
word. Many lives have been improved and the environment is in a much better state, because of the widespread use of 
permaculture methods.

>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? >

To make such a statement you obviously do not know much about permaculture, and for that matter natural agriculture and 
landscaping either.

>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.

Pretty short-sighted and limited view of permaculture. Interesting that you give little credit to Mollison, other than 
for the wrong reasons.