permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

This whole thread reveals more about people's head-worms around money 
than it does about the actual state of permaculture training. And thanks 
to Michael B, Larry S, and Paul W for having more patience than me in 
dealing nicely with this perennial issue. It reminds me of the 
Creationists; you show why their arguments make no sense and reveal 
ideological bias, and then they just keep on spouting the same 
wrong-headed statements.

David Travis wrote:
> 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.
This is just silly. I'm not sure that there is a single person on Earth 
who actually earns a living teaching Pc; we all need other jobs to make 
ends meet. And it takes 5 years or more of hard work at little or no pay 
to earn the reputation to attract enough students to courses to make 
them run. Easy and fast? It was and is the hardest work I've ever done 
by far and only after 12 years of it are my courses consistently 
successful, and that's the case for every teacher I know. Please do some 
thinking and research before making knee-jerk assertions like this.

As for more layers of accreditation being gratuitously added, I am 
bombarded, as are other teachers, by countless requests for ways to 
continue in permaculture learning in a formal way. I'd rather not set up 
further programs, as it's a lot of work for almost no personal return, 
but the demand for them came long before the advanced programs did. If 
all this is a Ponzi scheme, it's a terrible failure of one. Few design 
courses make money; I've been around enough to know.

No one seems to remember that Stewart Brand's great quote, "information 
wants to be free" was only the first half of what he wrote. The 2nd half 
was, "information wants to be expensive," and he then gave potent 
reasons why that is also true. TANSTAAFL.

If I never see this kind of thread again, it will be too soon, but it's 
good to know that fewer and fewer people are hanging onto these 
uninformed views.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.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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