permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

> It is hit and miss, nothing engraved in stone. A book is written to sell 
> for income or it is written and made available for free to the public or 
> the for-profit work is converted to a freebie after a time. Its all up 
> to the author and noone else. Its a time tested proven system. Just 
> because its the digital age and it is easy to put any work online 
> doesn't give anyone the right to do so without the author's permission.
>
> Facts of life; works will be pirated and put online anyway. Useful for 
> those who can access them. If this happened open ended fewer authors 
> would write for a living and less good works would be available to help
> sustain our collective knowledgebase.

Some who take from the pool of pirated as well as open source/public 
domain literature benefit greatly and give back to the world works of 
equal or greater value. In your case reading PII was a life changing 
experience and because of that you will make a significant contribution 
to the global permaculture pool of knowledge.

Have you visited the Soil and Health Library, Steve Solomon's magnum 
opus?   http://www.soilandhealth.org/

If enough people feel strongly enough that Mollison't PDM should be made 
available to anyone who wants it for free then why don't those folks
absorb the content of PDM, synthesize it, add new and uptodate reference 
material then publish it for free on the web. I don't see why this 
should be a particularly daunting task. After all, much of the text in 
PDM could be condensed dramatically and transformed into something new;
add modern graphics, sound, video, embedded web links and external 
references and an extensive bibliography and you'd have made a good 
start at creating the Global Permaculture Community's Manual of Design,
or some other title.

There is so much free material online to work with now that is 
underutilized. I fear that some of it may disappear for lack of 
encouragement to its host and author, or lack of funds or other valid 
reason. Upshot, its high time that these resources are identified, 
documented, copied with permission and preserved through some sort of 
portal website. The various permaculture database projects that have
emerged in this list purported to do something like that. Start simply 
and build. A permapedia like the PC Wikipedia entry is good but much 
more and greater diversity of content is needed. How to put something 
like this together, where to start? a blog, a wiki, a website? This 
list's archives contain a ton of useful information; even my meager 
website and blog has much material, some unique. Paul's permies.com
is another, permaculture.info made a good beginning but faltered because
not enough people had coadmin access to keep it maintained and moving 
forward. I am thinking of a giant permaculture portal website for 
starters. A wiki is useful for this because you can create a heirarchy 
of subjects with infinite subsets.