Like some other people on permies, I live in an apartment (a flat in London with no balcony or garden) so am unable to complete a lot of BBs in the
PEP scheme. About a couple of months ago, I found
PEA which is tailored more towards my situation. However, I didn't feel compelled to try to achieve any of their BBs. Why? Because it felt as if my time doing PEA would be a waste of time when I find a place with a garden. A PEA1 badge would be great, but I understand it's in the early stages still. I'm only 21 and have almost no
experience of the
permaculture lifestyle that I've discovered on this site. I still have plenty of time to learn and hopefully as I progress so will the development of the PEA program.
With the concern that there would be little overlap with PEP and PEA, I got to work on comparing some of the numbers. On the picture below is the maximum amount of progress one can get towards the 16 different PEP badges if PEA sand badges are completed. Any
BB will grant an air badge so that's a given. Please note that these are maximums, because some badges include a possible list of tasks, but not all of them need to be done.
Some badges have PEA only BBs whereas others send you to PEP BB pages. For example, nest PEA sand has complete overlap with PEP as all of its BBs are from there. However, only 93% of the PEP sand badge can be gained as it's excluded cleaning the outside of windows for apartment dwellers. If people don't want to get PEA only BBs, there is still some overlap for them if they change their minds later on.
A lot of the badges will give points for any BBs gained in the PEP version which I think is great! A good example of this is dimensional woodworking and community living.
Interestingly, tool care doesn't count towards PEP sand, but it does towards
straw. This is mainly because PEA's badges involve more time to be put into them. Therefore more time consuming straw PEP BBs were chosen to be part of PEA.
Two have no overlap at all:
gardening and commerce. With
gardening, PEP concentrates on large projects whereas PEA focuses on teaching the methods that are needed to learn gardening techniques. On the other hand, commerce has different amounts of
residual income that needs to be gained. PEP requires $5 a year whereas PEA requires $10. So while technically the progress towards PEA reaches the PEP amount of money, it has to be applied for again. Therefore, I didn't count it.
Now oddball is... well it's the oddball. There's a PEA oddball
thread, but I'm unsure if the points put towards PEA are allowed to be transferred over to PEP. Therefore, I've left it as N/A.
Overall, calculating the amount of progress that can be made gave me more inspiration to work towards PEA. Hopefully this will help somebody else too!
P.S: I haven't listed the possible route to get to the maximum amount of progress, but I've been considering making a PEA checklist to achieve my commerce BB. If so, I may post the best route in the future.