permaculture

[mIEKAL aND <qazingulaza@gmail.com>]

I don't hate the manual but I think there's no question that an open  
source alternative should be a top priority.  We've had 100s of  
visitors, interns, helpers come thru Dreamtime in the last 20 years &  
I would say 5% of them would have been able to afford to buy the  
"information"....  Most of these folks live on a couple thousand  
dollars a year if that much.  They simply don't buy books in the  
traditional consumerist way.  It's not a judgement about the validity  
of Bill's book.  One of the thing over the years that people have felt  
most useful about their visit here is our immense library of  
resources....  But I've personally bought 3 copies of the big book in  
20 years.  The bindings fell apart on 2 of them  (the book seriously  
needs a textbook binding & not the cheap binding that it has) & the  
other one was grabbed by someone.  & you know what?  A lot of these  
folks are doing very important work on the permaculture front & need  
all the support & encouragement they can get from the older generation  
of designers.

~mIEKAL



On Nov 17, 2009, at 3:59 PM, lbsaltzman@aol.com wrote:

> I would also add to what Scott is saying, if you hate the manual  
> write a better one and by all means distribute it for free. That  
> would be far more helpful than attacking the current one.  Like  
> every other field of human endeavor, one would hope that people  
> would honor the founders for starting the field, and then work to  
> improve on their work and then pass it on to the next generation.
>
> Larry Saltzman