Subject: Re: [permaculture] 101 PERMACULTURE DESIGNS, downloadable imgur album - Album on Imgur
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 20:44:11 -0700
Yes, a big “thank you” to Darren for posting that. There are so many rumors
in permaculture history! While we’ve still got the pioneer generation around,
let’s get these stories down direct from them so that the spoilers can’t do
their typical revisionist number on them.
Andrew Jeeves joined in on a thread on the Regrarians FB page a few months
ago and wrote a lucid and hysterically funny bit on the process of writing
the Designer’s Manual. I don’t feel right about quoting the whole thing (I
saved it but don’t see it on FB any more), but here’s one piece of it:
>
> Bill sat at his desk mulling and musing and reading and cursing and
> drinking cups of tea and looked after his ailing mother and wrote on scraps
> of paper an idea or two and threw these in a big old wooden tea chest. When
> he saw an interesting article, he ripped it out of the magazine and threw
> it into the tea chest. At times he went out to "The Swamp", our wonderful
> property across the road, and planted trees, or directed our drott driver
> to build dams and swales and drains and islands. At times we went fishing
> and hauled the net on Godfrey's beach, he on the shore end and me on the
> deep end and then we had a big feed on poddy mullet or salmon. Eventually
> the tea chest was full. So, we all got together (Bill, Reny [Slay], me,
> Simon Fell and sometimes visitors) and started putting the upended tea
> chest into themes. We ended up with a dozen or so. Bill then started
> writing to the themes using the ideas and info collected and drawing it all
> together, linking, theorising, all in his chicken scratch writing.
It’s this sort of stuff we need to chisel into some stone blocks. And it
makes me want to hang out with Andrew.
>
It also reminds me of these wise words from a great American:
"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they
are genuine" -- Abraham Lincoln