Thanks for your comments Steve. There are many points you raise that deserve a response.
- Your “Mollison’s own suggestion of just get out there and do it”.
I agree in principle, with cautions. I suspect Bill made this statement because he or his colleagues might have encountred bureaucratic barriers. It suggests the ‘it is better to apologise than ask for permission’ adage.
The cautions I mention include that of making sure anyone’s ‘ just get out there and do it’ does not damage what others are doing. Sometimes, going and doing something in a public place impacts on what others are aleady doing. Urban foragers ‘just doing it’ by harvesting fruit trees they believe to be unused, for example, might inadvertently take produce allocated to community volunteers who maintan the trees or a charity that harvests to sell to raise funds. - Your “ I, myself have been keen to offer proposals of a global entity”.
Permaculture CoLab, UK-based, is working on becoming a global permaculture entity. I was earlier involved with the project.
Work is still being done, however to people like you and me who have done project planning, management and implementation, progress is very slow. There seems a lack of impetus, though CoLab would likely disagree. - Your “There are many more layers of many different mixes in society Permaculture has not yet reached”.
I agree. Having been involved in permaculture projects within mainstream society, both within and outside local government, I find many permaculture people believe the design system is more widely known than it really is.
There might be a disconnect with how permaculture people address the big, pressing global issues and the need to address the current fears people have about affordable housing and rents, the casualisation of working life and the resulting fnancial precarity and the other uncertantes in life that can weigh heavily on family people especially.
Permaculture keeps no collective statistics or analyses of trends in student numbers, project implmentation or other things. This makes it difficult to ascertain the state of the design system at any tme. Is it growing in participation? Is it being used by institutions or businesses? Are more or fewer people doing design courses?
All we have to answer these questions are personal observations or practitioners and the records of permaculture educators, and these are going to be variable and are unlikely to form a comprehensive picture of the state of the design system. Educators keep records of student numbers though I have seldom seen them published. The only public count I know of is that of my partner, a permaculture educator working for the past ten years as a local government sustainability educator whose job require her to keep statistics. The count of people who have done her courses, all of which make use of permaculture ideas and some of which have been permaculture introductory courses, totals 15,000.
