permaculture

[Evan Schoepke <thejulianeffect@gmail.com>]

Hey folks,

Don't mean to flog a dead horse here but I just thought I would give this
one more go...
For a innovative system that talks up abundance this, and abundance that, it
seams as though we're looking at this from the classical scarcity/capitalist
viewpoint.  What if someone takes that farmers pdf spreads it around and
then everyone starts doing organic polyculture farming and no one has to go
hungry ever again? What if the indigenous knowledge of polycultures and
plant guilds had been copyrighted by Monsanto (which they would love to do)?

I often use the metaphor of a flower shop to explain the scarcity/abundance
conundrum.  Classic capitalist logic (which some people seem to think is
synonomis with moral logic) says that you can't give out flowers for free or
as flower shop or you'll lose lots of money.  Everyday all over the country
thousands of perfectly good flowers get dumped in the trash.  Some of these
flowers may have been harvested in another country and then flown to shop at
a great expense of money and resources, and yet still perfectly good flowers
end up in the trash.  Imagine instead if the flower shop stapled their
business card to each of those flowers and couple of days a week handed out
all those flowers for free in different parts of the city.  Now which flower
shop would you want doing the flowers for your wedding, the one that throws
the flowers away in the trash, or the one that gives them away for free.
 Whenever I tell people I dumpster perfectly good cases of beer they
curiously ask me,"why would anybody throw away good beer"?  To which I
always reply "because they're capitalist of course, being wasteful is what
they're good at". Being wasteful is what the ideology of
capitalism compels them to do....

  If anything by my actions *I have only increased the appeal* and market
share of permaculture material.  Remember when google came out with free
email they seemed to have done okay with that, and in fact next week they're
coming out with an entire free operating system that will compete with
windows from Microsoft (aka:the ultimate digital proprietary monster).

I am happy that folks have been talking about various open source
permaculture sites and projects and so I wanted to offer

   -   appropedia.org
   - open source
ecology<http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Open_Source_Ecology>
   - blooming in space <http://bloominginspace.wordpress.com/2008/12/>


If the principals of permaculture can not evolve to accomadate the needs of
people *willing to learn* from various backgrounds and income levels in a
very substantial way then permaculture *will not* avert a vast ecological
and social collapse.  To be clear I have *never* stolen anything from Bill
Mollison and have in fact have given as much time and *money* and I can to
the permie cause. I didn't even scan the Permaculture Designers Manual
myself but merely promoted a link I found to a free copy.  The reason I did
this is because I do know that there are people from all over the world with
less resources who would put it to good use (*see christophe's comment*).  I
expect to get support and criticism but most importantly I expect that
permaculturalist of all people will at the very least *begin to
question*the "business as usual" logic that is destroying our planet.
Is capitalism
as we know it now an "appropriate technology"?

take care and fair share,
~evan

P.S. I invite anyone on this list serve (even folks who wish someone sued my
pants off) to write and contribute to www.punkrockpermaculture.com.  Thank
you, and keep up the great work.