Bill Mollison’s 1981 Permaculture Lecture Notes: New Edition
Courses/Workshops, DVDs/Books — by Thomas Fischbacher January 20, 2010
Bill Mollison teaching with Geoff Lawton at Trinity College, Melbourne, 2009
Photo © Craig Mackintosh
In 1981, Bill Mollison gave a Permaculture Design course for which Dan Hemenway produced lecture notes. While these originally were made available as a set of pamphlets for a small copying fee, they have been available on the web for quite some time, in PDF form, like here (3.5mb PDF), for example.
While the social and cultural context has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years, and this material hence does not reflect that change, these pamphlets still provide quite a useful free resource that explains permaculture in detail. While the Permaculture Designers’ Manual certainly presents many ideas in a more accessible way than these transcripts of Bill Mollison’s lectures, they nevertheless are an often quite useful complementary resource. This holds in particular for a few issues which are presented in a slightly cryptic way in the Permaculture Designers’ Manual and benefit from an alternative explanation.
A re-edited version of this material, both in the form of HTML web pages as well as a PDF (using LaTeX-based typesetting which, hopefully, should be more homogeneous and easier to read than the original) is now available here: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~doctom/teaching/permaculture/PDC/index.html
This also provides a number of explanatory footnotes that should help to both provide more background on some ideas, and put them into more recent context.
Comments (1)Money Literacy – Part IV
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 15, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part IV of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, Part II and Part III if you haven’t already.
Patterns are amazing things. Maybe, their fascination comes from the human mind being very good at spotting them, while at the same time also being very bad at spotting them. It is sometimes claimed that "a genius is someone who sees something that is patently obvious for the first time" and, very often, patterns are fascinatingly obvious – in hindsight.
By what process precisely does a culture lose its indigenous money as it gets connected to a more powerful economy? One might of course guess that "bait" is an important factor: Look at all these shiny new gadgets that the new money can buy. There’s even television screens! Still, some may not be that easily seduced, and as, unfortunately, we all feel better about major life decisions if we can avoid permanent confrontation with observations that force us to re-evaluate whether they might have been a major mistake, the question arises how to "connect" those to the new money economy who value their independence of it very highly.
Comments (1)Money Literacy – Part III
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher January 13, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part III of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I and Part II, if you haven’t already.
A small economy joins the big economy
In the last part of this series, we saw that linking a big economy to a small economy is by no means an innocent act: naively, this might be regarded as just ‘giving everybody more choice’, i.e. more options for trade, hence more ‘freedom’. But everything works in two ways: one cannot link a big economy to a small economy without linking the small economy to the big economy. So, this will simultaneously give the big economy a strong handle on the small economy. What would in principle prevent a small population of economically powerful participants in the big economy from using their sheer weight to e.g. buy up key resources such as land in the small economy? This is not a purely theoretical issue – we see such processes all around us. Note that this is practically bound to happen if the big economy keeps on generating major internal pressure to "grow". And, as one cannot separate a culture from its economy, this effectively means that the largest aggressive-expansive economy, that of the culture called "western civilization", keeps on re-programming other cultures’ economies, and eventually these cultures themselves. Might that even be called ethnocide?
Comments (4)Money Literacy – Part II
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 10, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part II of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, if you haven’t already.
Any society practices division of labour to some extent, and hence, needs some way to keep track of who is pulling their weight, and who is not. The fundamental idea is, of course, that someone who contributes to society’s well-being acquires some form of credit that gives him permission to ask society to do him some favour in turn. It is entirely conceivable that in some small societies – such as some close-knit families, or maybe some abbeys, all this bookkeeping on who owes whom how big a favour is done only mentally, without any form of written record or specific token. Usually, however, this keeping track of favours easily gets out of hand and becomes so confusing that societies soon start to rely on some sort of additional device – not for all processes, but at least for a considerable share of them. Let us for now call any such socially agreed upon way of keeping track "a currency". It is perfectly normal in any society to see multiple quite different currencies being in circulation simultaneously, from bank notes to invitations to a barbeque. This is important to note, for we normally associate only one concept with the term "currency": some sort of "formal money" (where we usually think of coins, or bank notes, etc.). Hence, it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves that this might be overly narrow-minded.
Comments (5)Money Literacy – Part I
Alternatives to Political Systems, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 8, 2010
The 20th century was strongly dominated by two schools of thought on how to design a system that guides human effort towards the improvement of living conditions and the advancement of human society: On the one hand, we have "capitalism", on the other hand "communism". While both are often regarded as irreconcilably opposing philosophies, the one proposing a de-centralized market mechanism, the other one a centralized planned economy to allocate "scarce resources", it is important to notice that, in the past century, both gave disturbingly similar results in one important respect: Back then, they both amounted to increasingly damaging vital life support system resources in order to meddle through the problems of the day. One might try to capture this thought in a succinct provocative phrase: The one thing communism and capitalism could not agree on is whether the process of destroying the current best available remaining resources should proceed in a centralized or de-centralized way. Mindless bickering over this – essentially minor – detail brought the world insanely close to the brink of instant nuclear annihilation at least thrice in the 20th century, in October 1962 [1], in October 1969 [2], and in September 1983 [3]: we should perhaps count ourselves lucky we even made it so far.
The Tricks of the Human Mind
General, Global Warming/Climate Change, Society — by Thomas Fischbacher December 19, 2009
Editor’s Note: Thomas Fischbacher has been a valued commenter on this site for a while now. Today Thomas makes his PRI post debut, with a great piece on why sometimes logic and facts are neither logical nor factual in the context of our cherished beliefs. Others that would like to contribute articles are very welcome to do so.
When studying the human mind, one of the most fascinating – and at times startling – insights is that there is sometimes a serious discrepancy between the tale the human mind spins to itself, and actual reality.
One especially striking demonstration of the extent of the distortions introduced by the brain’s data pre-processing was given by Edward Adelson, MIT professor of vision science, with the "checkershadow illusion":
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This innocent illusion is so extremely appealing because it conveys its profound message in the most direct, most immediate, most rapid way possible: Your eyes lie, and much more than you actually might ever have imagined.
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