permaculture

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

Alex McCausland wrote:

<><><>
Well we don’t have ANY “high speed” connections here in Ethiopia, especially not farmers, but have you never heard of a 
thing called EXTENSION. What if I download the manual (even on my dial-up at $0.007/minute) and print of 1 copy then 
photo copy it 100 times. I can then distribute this to 100 different organisations that work with  farmers around the 
country. None of them may have been interested to buy the DM for $100, but one or two may actually leaf through and get 
interested, then we may stand a chance of getting some PC implemented on the ground, with illiterate peasant gladly 
taking on the (new) Gospel of PC and cooperative design. Do you think the missionaries that turned up in Konso 50 years 
 ago could have been successful if they had to pay Jesus $100 for every copy of the Bible they used!? (Could any of 
those peasants who now spend their Sunday mornings screaming Allelujah at their empty fields actually read the bible? 
Maybe they
 will spend Monday doing cooperative design sessions so their fields can be full, with a free DM) According to your 
philosophy, in order to do this I should have to pay $10,000 to Tigari (assuming $100 per copy would cover it) instead 
of $25 for photocopying. Not only that I have to wait a month for the books to turn up from Tazmania. Now Bill may live 
a good old frugal lifestyle, that’s not the point, the point is that it’s Permaculture, not himself, which really 
matters. I don’t care about tigari, if I can get a village to feed itself. For the same $10,000 we can give a full PDC 
to to 10 school teachers and implement a follow up program in 5 schools with 64 days of consultancy monitoring and 
feed-back in each school. In other-words we can take a big step towards generating food security for 5 communities. I 
don’t see why Tigari should take that money. Yes Bill wrote the book, but what is the USE of the book if it’s only there 
for the white upper-middles of the anglo-saxon empire.
> www.permalodge.org

To reduce the depletion of Tagari's income by not having copies available to download for free from the Web by any and 
everybody, including those not in need (especially those who can easily afford to buy the book but are too cheap to 
spend the money) why don't groups/projects like yours just purchase one copy of the book then scan and print copies 
yourselves for distribution to the extension agencies to hand out to farmers and homesteaders. You have spent about $100 
plus cost of reprinting. Better yet why not collaborate with other international groups to collectively appeal to Tagari 
to make the DM available from Google Library which I think is the best option for Bil, by far. If he does not want to do 
that now he can always consider this option for some future time. At least you will have voiced your wishes to Tagari 
and through this they might take more seriously addressing the need of low income peoples around the world to have 
access to this great work by making a digital copy available online, hopefully through the resources Google offers.

> www.permalodge.org

That's a fascinating website and you are doing great work. I hope something 
can be done to make the DM and related works
available to your constituency and others in Ethiopia.