permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Some of what rafter had posted on his website recently made me do some more 
thinking about why permaculture is so hard to define. It resulted in a new 
article at my website,

http://www.patternliteracy.com/668-what-permaculture-isnt-and-is

To sum it up: For millennia humans just focused on meeting their needs, 
without needing to care about the consequences. Now we have to consider how 
to meet our needs while preserving ecosystem health (thanks, rafter!). That a 
huge paradigm shift. Permaculturists often mistake permaculture for that 
paradigm shift. But permaculture is better thought of as the design approach 
that's one the new tools needed for that paradigm shift. It's not the 
movement, the philosophy, or the paradigm itself. It's an approach to solving 
the problems that this new paradigm makes clear.

Hope you enjoy it.

Toby 
http://patternliteracy.com


On Nov 28, 2012, at 6:41 PM, Scott Pittman wrote:

> Just to add to this history of the word Permaculture.  It was trademarked in
> 1982 by a landscape architect in Florida, (probable one of Bill's first
> students in the U.S.) and because the architect failed to prove up the
> copyright by using it he lost it after holding it for six years.
> 
> I applied in 1998 in the hopes of fulfilling Bill's statement in the
> Designer's Manual that the word was owned by all graduates of the PC Design
> Certificate course but by then they told me it had appeared in the
> dictionary was in the common language. The copyright I applied for was to
> the graduates of a PDC just as Bill had promised - imagine my surprise when
> I found myself accused of stealing permaculture from Bill.  I had already
> been refused by the copyright office!
> 
> Just to be clear, I took Bill at his word when he said that permaculture
> belonged to the world, and I still hold him to it - permaculture belongs to
> all of the students, teachers, organizers and designers who operate under
> the ethics of permaculture and the guiding principals. For purposes of the
> Permaculture Institute we do not recognize those people who engage in
> permaculture professional practice who have not completed a PDC and who are
> not Diplomats.
> 
> Scott Pittman
> 
> "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. 
> On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." 
> ~Arundhati Roy
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Toby Hemenway
> Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2012 12:50 PM
> To: permaculture
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Permaculture definitions,
> 
> On Nov 28, 2012, at 9:54 AM, venaurafarm wrote:
> 
>> Phil Ferraro, Director
>> Institute for Bioregional Studies
>> writes about Permaculture:
>> "The term, permaculture, was patented by, Bill Mollison in
>> the early 1970's
> 
> Just want to correct, probably unnecessarily, the error about Pc being
> patented. It never was patented or trademarked. Bill misunderstood copyright
> law and stated and wrote wrongly, many times, that permaculture was a
> copyrighted term. No one can copyright a word, an idea, concept, or a
> process (the last can be patented). He could have trademarked the term but
> did not, and when he or someone else tried years later, I believe that the
> trademark office ruled that the term is now too widely used to be
> trademarked, and is in the public domain.
> 
> Chaos rules.
> 
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com
> 
> 
> 
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