permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

I realize that Lion’s post is 15 years old, but it’s instructive in that he 
makes the same mistake that so many others still make: he thinks permaculture 
is a set of techniques rather than a design system. Hence his tirade that he 
was exposed to some of the techniques before Mollison wrote about them, thus 
there is nothing new in permaculture. If you can’t make the paradigm shift to 
whole systems thinking, you won’t get what permaculture is. You’ll get stuck 
at sheet mulching or selling tomatoes, like Lion did. 

And the claim that permaculture is a pyramid scheme to sell PDCs is an old 
and false one too. I wrote up something about that in another forum, so I’ll 
reprint it here, in case any of you want ammunition the next time someone 
makes that claim.
________
The label of “pyramid scheme” for the PDC and permaculture makes no sense for 
two major reasons. The first is that in a pyramid scheme, profits flow upward 
to the early adopters. This doesn’t happen with PDCs; in fact, the opposite 
occurs. If a PDC teacher creates new teachers, those new teachers are 
competition for the senior teacher, potentially reducing his or her income. 
No income flows upward. Thus the PDC fails to meet the most basic criterion 
of a pyramid scheme, sending resources up the pyramid.

The idea that the PDC is principally a vehicle to create more PDC teachers is 
also belied by the facts. I have given out roughly 2300 PDC certificates, 
and, to the best of my knowledge, roughly 15 of those 2300 have attempted to 
teach at all, and only 3 are teaching PDCs regularly. That’s 3 out of 2300, 
or less than 0.2%. In 15 years of teaching PDCs, I’d estimate that the 60+ 
courses I’ve taught have spawned perhaps 10 PDCs taught by others. If I have 
to teach 6 courses to generate one taught by someone I subvert into my 
pyramid scheme, that’s the opposite of a pyramid scheme. To qualify as a 
pyramid each PDC of mine needs to generate several PDCs, and they don’t do 
that. It’s not just me. Geoff Lawton, who has said that he measures his 
success by the number of teachers that result from his PDCs, claims that 
roughly 1 in 250 of his students go on to teach. Other teachers report about 
the same. A pyramid scheme with a conversion rate of 0.25% or less is an 
utter failure. 

What the PDC does, much more effectively than turning out teachers, is to 
turn out designers. Roughly 10-15% of my students either become designers of 
some sort or take the PDC to further their design careers. That points to the 
real intention of the PDC. Since permaculture is a design approach, the PDC 
is meant to create designers.

Thus the claim of pyramid scheme is multiply false, in that the PDC fails to 
meet the most basic function of the scheme—enriching the early adopters—and 
its conversion rate is dismal. To my mind, making the claim reveals more 
about the ugly mental state and inability to reason critically of the 
claimant than about permaculture. They’re both misanthropic and confused.

I think what bothers those who make the claim is the evangelical nature of 
the PDC. The PDC exists to spread permaculture’s knowledge and system. But 
that’s what any educational program does. We don’t call engineering school a 
pyramid scheme, even though some of its graduates go on to teach engineering. 
But engineering school exists to create engineers. The PDC exists to create 
permaculturists, and I suspect that any enterprise that blatantly attempts to 
recruit converts to a new world view will attract criticism. But I believe in 
the usefulness of the permaculture approach—we are attempting to replace a 
dysfunctional, ecologically disastrous culture with a regenerative, healthy 
one via permaculture design, and that seems worth doing.

Toby
tobyhemenway.com

Just out: my new book on urban permaculture, The Permaculture City. Order it 
at your favorite bookseller or get a signed copy from me at  
http://tobyhemenway.com/book/the-permaculture-city/




> On Aug 21, 2015, at 10:42 PM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Lion Kuntz on Permaculture | RE: Permaculture design systems
> LIONKUNTZ/lionkuntz-plenty-3/
> plenty.150m.com/Archives/SANET_Archives/44-0269.html
> RE: Permaculture design systems*From:* Lion Kuntz (*lionkuntz@email.com*
> <lionkuntz@email.com?Subject=RE:%20Permaculture%20design%20systems&In-Reply-To=%3C384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01%3E>
> )
> *Date:* Thu Apr 20 2000 - 20:50:58 EDT
> 
> 
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> ------------------------------
> 
> <A.LEE> ------Original Message------
> <A.LEE> From: "Andy Lee & Pat Foreman"
> <mailto:goodearth@rockbridge.net?Subject=RE:
> Permaculture design
> systems&In-Reply-To=<384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01>
> <goodearth@rockbridge.net?Subject=RE:%20Permaculture%20design%20systems&In-Reply-To=%3C384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01%3E>>
> 
> <A.LEE> To: mailto:sanet-mg@cals.ncsu.edu?Subject=RE: Permaculture design
> systems&In-Reply-To=<384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01>
> <sanet-mg@cals.ncsu.edu?Subject=RE:%20Permaculture%20design%20systems&In-Reply-To=%3C384696432.956278258141.JavaMail.root@web08.pub01%3E>
> <A.LEE> Sent: April 18, 2000 9:15:56 PM GMT
> <A.LEE> Subject: Permaculture design systems
> 
> <old> > Permaculture is most noted as being a
> <old> > system designed to sell very-high-priced seminars on how
> <old> >to permaculture. Each
> <old> > owner of a permaculture course graduatation certificate
> <old> > becomes a new sales
> <old> > pitchman for permaculture without necessarily ever having
> <old> > sold one tomato ever
> <old> > to anyone. Agriculture is more than private home subsistance
> <old> > gardening. Agriculture
> <old> > is the feeding of the population who is not farmer/gardeners.
> <old> > Permaculture has made
> <old> > no contributions to agriculture which did not already
> <old> > previously exist in
> <old> > the public
> <old> > domain, and which already public property did not require
> <old> > expensive seminars or a
> <old> > cutesy name to use.
> 
> <old> > Signed by Lion Kuntz
> 
> <A.LEE> Dear Lion, the above could not be farther from the truth. Indeed,
> <A.LEE> Permaculture (and yes I am one who holds a design certificate
> <A.LEE> as well as a graduate certificate from the Permaculture Institute)
> <A.LEE> is the basis for your so-called micro-farming scheme. The
> <A.LEE> difference is, that there are tens of thousands of permaculture
> <A.LEE> practitioners around the world, and so far as I can tell, based
> <A.LEE> on your bashing of everyone else, you are the only
> <A.LEE> micro-farmer. That alone speaks volumes as to which system
> <A.LEE> is most sustainable thereby most attractive to
> <A.LEE> small-scale agriculturists.
> 
> <A.LEE> Your tirades are becoming a bit tiring. We are all willing to
> <A.LEE> learn, but your message is getting lost in your spew.
> 
> <A.LEE> With all due respect,
> <A.LEE> Andy Lee
> 
> Thank you for making public a previously undisclosed fiduciary relationship
> offering a profit-minded
> motive for you prior criticisms of my writings. Had you mentioned that you
> were a "Permaculturist" I
> might have realized that you would not have enjoyed my ranking of
> Permaculture in my
> comparisons.html webpage:
> http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/comparisons.html
> 
> My very first microfarm essays had the address to the gateway page, and
> there near the very top is a
> comparisons (from my point of view) of major small-mini-micro farming
> brand-names. Other systems are
> ranked higher than Permaculture from a species salvation viewpoint. There
> is some justifiable
> criticism of "Permaculture" recorded there.
> 
> I like Bill Mollison's writings. I have read several of his Permaculture
> books, and would recommend
> them to people. But I do not think this is a species-saving concept, and in
> fact it is very forward
> in it's selfishness. The first book I picked up made a point that one
> should be self-sufficient
> before being a commercial producer.
> 
> I don't believe in self-sufficiency, and I have never met the man or woman
> who can smelt their own
> ores and bake their own ceramics to make their own sparkplugs. What
> "permaculture" graduate can do
> their own open-heart surgery? Self-sufficiency is not a requirement for
> micro-farming, and I have
> said I would buy your milk and beef in the stores because it doesn't make
> sense to me to buy the
> land and equipment needed to raise my own beef and milk.
> 
> Because there is a profit-motive associated with your attachment to the
> Permaculture paradigm, which
> I have criticised, you do not have clean hands and pure heart when your
> choices of adjectives
> pointed at me are reviewed.
> 
> I have made some inventions. Microfarming is not actually one of them.
> According to two books on the
> market by authors of systems of competitors to "Permaculture" (and whom
> could also be considered to
> be competitors to "Ecological Synergy(tm)"), most of the subsystems were
> developed and perfected by
> the Chinese over 3,000 years ago. I will pay homage to the Chinese
> ancestors ingenuity, as does
> Leandre Poisson author of the "American Intensive" growing system, and as
> does John Jeavon's author
> of the "Bio-Intensive" growing system. The "French Intensive" growing
> system is also mentioned by
> both authors, and whom I too will credit with discovering the highest-yield
> farming system ever
> discovered up to that time.
> 
> "Permaculture" did not provide the basis for the "so-called microfarming"
> because I cannot find a
> replicable system within "Permaculture". If anything, Permaculture is a
> do-your-own-thing system. As
> such it can (try to) lay claim on anything and everything which has any
> resemblence or similarity to
> the design principles of Permaculture.
> 
> However, my record on microfilm in public and university libraries around
> the country dated 1972 to
> 1974 show that I was writing essays, reporting news, and reviewing books on
> alternative energy,
> solar orientations, gardening and back to the land. The published record
> shows I was exposed to
> these ideas long before Mollison wrote his first book. Lucky for me I have
> such microfilm evidence,
> so I can survive an attack on my credibility by a financial competitor in
> the marketplace of ideas.
> My record is probably in the Library of Congress, and I will shortly check
> to see if the microfilm
> by Bell & Howell Corporation was ever converted to computer accessable form
> on the web or ftp
> archives. I am more than happy to give credit where credit is due, but
> Permaculture really did not
> bring forth anything new to me.
> 
> It also does not have the virtures of some of its competitors, like
> "Biodynamics", "MOA" and
> "Kyusei" Nature Farming, or J.I.Rodale's "organic" systems. All of these
> have books, videos,
> seminars, classes, etc., just like Permaculture. I chose to rank them
> higher than permaculture based
> on the five questions of part 2 of the microfarming essay series partially
> published on SANET-MG.
> Archived at URLs: http://www.efn.org/~lkuntz/microfarm2.txt
> http://lifesaviors.nav.to/microfarming/microfarm2.txt
> 
> These are my criteria for ranking a system, and they speak more to what
> preserves the most habitat
> for endangered species the quickest, than they speak for personal profit by
> promoting any
> competitive agriculture regime or system.
> Sincerely, Lion Kuntz
> Currently in Eugene, Oregon, USA.
> http://lifesaviors/nav.to/microfarming/
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