This may be off topic as it was actually the Professionalism podcast I was looking to respond to, yet I ended up here and some of what is being discussed is relative. What I wish to express has been formulated over some time and I feel that now is the time to do so.
My awareness of permaculture came via an important relationship in my life which, although it itself lasted a relatively short time before there was a split, bore both fruit and seed in the form of children, permaculture, and playing guitar. Over many years of not a huge amount of contact, the relationship I referred to budded into a different type of love and kinship over distance.
So, in the late 70's the seed of permaculture blew into my existence, attached itself and got carried along wherever I went, growing slowly throughout the years as well as at times not growing at all, at least not evidently. The path it took was a grassroots one. I don't hold any claims to having done anything huge with it, though there is the saying about the butterfly fluttering its wings causing a tsunami or whatever. Yet when I look back there are some bigger things which flowed from smaller ones, such as a member of the little permie group I started in a suburb of Melbourne in Australia going on to teach permaculture and start a permie group nearby to where the group I had was.
At the time of the little permie group I mentioned, I lived in a suburban rented house with a small backyard. My intentions included learning more about and promoting permaculture, growing more of my own food, helping others, and living in a satisfying non-greedy way, and hoping this flowed onto something which was good for the planet. With a low budget, I simply extended personal intentions to being ones which benefitted not only myself but others. I provided the place, found the teacher, supplied some of the materials such as plants, refreshments etc. There was a very low, affordable cost per workshop and this paid the teacher, and folk got education and networked with other folk as well as had the seeds of ideas planted, and I got further educated, met others, and also got peoplepower help building a hot compost heap which in turn was used to build a no-dig garden which not only fed me and mine but then flowed on to being seed etc given to others. And on it goes.
Looking back now, I see that even when I think I have failed (like a group folding) I have continued wherever I have gone to do something however small in a permaculture direction, striving to increase my know-how and what I am doing, as well as help promote something I very much believe in and having small impacts along the way. Even recently, before coming again to the UK, an opportunity arose in the form of a friend of mine, who did some her permaculture with Bill Mollison himself and wished to get experience in teaching by running a couple of free PDCs first. I quickly put my hand up for this but then it was realized that, as I would be leaving for the UK before the course finished, I wouldn't be able to finish it and she wasn't totally happy about this. So then I offered to be her assistant instead and this worked well. I got a little bit more know-how and experience at the same time as supporting her. Who knows what will develop from this small thing.
For it is not so much what I in particular did or have done which I am really talking about here, but more about small things and how they can grow and bear fruit and seed which can go on to being something bigger. And in my experience it has been the cost of learning permaculture and the control flowing from this (or vice versa) which has prevented it going mainstream and has held things back in a lot of ways. It is not that I disagree or agree with what I am hearing about folk having more respect for stuff they pay more for than what they pay less for etc, but that all this is part and parcel and within a certain system and I think awareness of this is of necessity, even if one cannot perceive other ways as yet. This system is our experience and we are acting from that experience - until we learn something different. Nor do I think tearing down a system or reinventing the wheel are good uses of energy which flow on to better things. Or that Paul or anyone else, including ourselves, are necessarily the 'bad guy'... or the 'good guy' for that matter. They are what they are, from what they have experienced and know. And this colours. I feel the core of it is how to build positively without trampling on others and ourselves, as well as how to take what we have experienced and then build something better - which I myself define as planet and lifeforms living more harmoniously having realized how each affects the other. And I feel we are on that path.
Diane
