Below is the opening paragraphs to Permaculture Practice: Hybrids of the Gift Economy and Capitalism by Terry Leahy.
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Strains within permaculture
Certain kinds of conflict seem to be very likely in the permaculture movement. We could say that they are disputes between people who want to use their permaculture skills to make a liveable income in the market economy and people who stress the problems of capitalist practice. The following examples come from my conversations with permaculture people. They have been made anonymous, partly to protect identity but also because I have used a bit of poetic licence to bring out key issues. Robbo explains the conflict as he sees it:
There are people like me who want to get a right livelihood and are actually doing it. We are constantly being harassed by those who are merely talking about how to fix the world – the coffee set. I ask them, where does all that coffee come from? They have no interest in broad acre agriculture and stigmatize permaculture people who try to make a living from permaculture – because they are doing business. They are ignoring the plight of farmers. People who are setting up permaculture businesses are people who want to go out there and do it, as opposed to people who think we should not get any money and should maintain a peasant lifestyle.
In this account, Robbo maintains that commercial farmers are actually supplying the world with food. Permaculture activists should be setting up their own farming businesses and providing a model for commercial farmers. However there is a faction of permaculture people who are not sympathetic to this strategy. They seem to believe that all permaculture work should be voluntary. They think there should be no permaculture businesses at all. Instead, we should live self-sufficiently as peasants growing our own food.
A conflict that was seen by some to embody this divide took place in a very successful permaculture group. Jan had spent many years of her life leading a local group that had become very strong, partly through her leadership. She decided she needed to spend more time on her own permaculture business and recruited her friend Roxanne to stand as leader of the group. Roxanne agreed and was voted in. With another friend of Jan’s, Roxanne decided to set up a website for their group. Jan asked if she could put some advertisements for her business on their site. Initially, this all went ahead but then a number of members of the group at large objected. Theirs was a non-profit group and should not be advertising a private enterprise. In any case, Jan’s business was in competition with the permaculture training their group was offering for free. Legal advice was sought and Jan was asked to sign a statement of conflict of interest. She continued to lobby for her ads to be run. One of the members of the group threatened to take the matter to court if this happened. A huge chunk of the most active people in the group resigned. There was a lot of bitterness between former friends and there is no doubt that the work of the group suffered from this conflict.
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