permaculture

["scrooge McDuck" <declan@planetmail.net>]

Well expressed, Tony.
On Steve Hart' s point of "What do we do about the sharks?" The answer in a capitalist society is surely to identify them and note their existence, deny them our business, and discreetly warn others. Just like a dodgy second hand car salesman. Meanwhile we can feel free to benefit from anything they don't charge for, e.g. Geoff Lawton''s YouTube videos, a portion of which are educational for a newbie like me.
--
Declan Moriarty
Sent from my Android tablet with mail.com Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

On 14/07/2016, 20:37 Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> wrote:

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
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