permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Along with Declan, I ‘d like posts here to be directly related to 
permaculture design, that is, will improve our ability to do design and 
understand permaculture. Calling someone a liar and fraud without offering 
concrete proof is anti-people care, hate speech (the buddhists call it harsh 
speech; it’s surely very bad karma), and comes off as nothing more than 
jealous opinion-spouting. So if ya gotta do it, cite the specific cases of it 
with names, dates, and places. And never fear, you can’t be successfully sued 
for defamation if you tell the truth. 

There’s a lot I don’t like about the Lawton faction assuming the kingship of 
permaculture, but just as whenever I challenge some incredible statement of 
Mollison's, it turns out to be true, I’ve never actually caught Geoff in a 
lie. When I posted a remark about GTD being a failure that they had tried to 
hide, they sent me a chain of links showing that they have admitted the 
collapse of the first site and cited accurate reasons for it, carefully 
distinguished the first GTD site from the second more-successful one, and 
made all that information easy to find for anyone looking for the whole story 
instead of, as I did, cherry-picking facts to construct a negative narrative 
about it. 

So, other than the typical achievement bloat and colonialist “ignore the 
accomplishments of others” mindset that most ambitious people engage in, I’ve 
not seen anything significant that I could call lying and fraud. (A specific 
case I am referring to by “other than" is Lawton’s creating a slew of PRI-USA 
institutes without, AFAIK, ever consulting any US permaculture elder or 
experienced practitioner. Imagine if an American went to Australia to set up 
US-based institutes without consulting the people who’ve been doing it there 
for 30 years! But that’s not lying or fraud, just bad sector analysis, and 
rude.) 
 
I’m happy to be contradicted by documented, referenced facts, but 
name-calling and unfalsifiable assertions violate everything permaculture 
stands for. Yup, he can be a shark, but sharks fill an important niche in the 
food web. And I prefer his kind of sharkery to that of a couple of others 
waiting in the wings. At least he’s cranking out a ton of useful videos and 
pulling in thousands of converts, rather than, say, offering “free” courses 
that are crappy and full of hidden costs.

If we’re going to complain that permaculture is being weakened, we can’t 
indulge ourselves in exactly the behavior that weakens it.

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 Jul 14, 2016, at 8:08 AM, scrooge McDuck <declan@planetmail.net> wrote:
> 
> This thread highlights the need for a moderator or two on this list. Excuse 
> me, I thought a Permaculture mailing list was going to have permaculture as 
> it's topic.
> Character Assassination &, personal insults are certainly off topic, and 
> upsetting to some. Political campaigns in a PLUTONOMY like the US are 
> likewise out of order, as I suppose were my own comments on religion, for 
> that matter.
> 
> Can I make an appeal for constructive discussion of PERMACULTURE? If 
> someone feels we need warning about a certain dangerous Permaculture sharks 
> references to online sources are a better approach than one sided polemics.
> -- 
> Declan Moriarty.
> Sent from my Android tablet with mail.com <http://mail.com/> Mail. Please 
> excuse my brevity. permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
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> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture