Permaculture Made Me Join Facebook

Category: people systems, networking sites, social gatherings, education

By Eric Seider

Well I’ve gone and done it. There is no turning back now. I’ve gone against my better judgement personally, but I believe it’s for the good of mankind. Yes, I have signed up for facebook. Why should anyone care? More importantly why should a permaculture site care?  Well the title says it all...permaculture made me do it.

 I really don’t like sitting in front of a computer/smart phone what have you….But I seem to spend hours a day doing it anyway. As a graphic designer I was in front of a computer more than I wasn’t. When I discovered permaculture I naively thought this would change. “Brilliant I thought, I’ll be outside all day designing with natural elements and no more computers“ Well partly true. I do spend many hours outside designing with natural elements. But there is certainly no lack of time spent in front of the computer as well, and I think having an iphone might have ruined me for good. In reality they are just tools, use or abuse them as you wish. As we need more documentation of permaculture trials and tribulations and specifically good demonstrations of permaculture in action, a smartphone alone is enough to to do the job. Take pictures, post online, take video, post online, record audio, post online, heck if you can’t be bothered to type, just audio record it and have someone else type it for you.

There are plenty of people doing good work on the ground who can’t be bothered to or have limited access to publish what they are doing, alternatively there are many more people doing no practical work on the ground but publishing endlessly about theory. We need more of the real, on the ground work, being published than the theoretical keyboard warrior fantasy. Maybe we need a system where you pair an on the ground worker with a keyboard warrior. I’m sure there is an interesting energy exchange opportunity in their somewhere. 

I know for myself the last thing I want to do after a full day of work is to sit in front of the computer and write about it. But I feel compelled to share the information, and of course it benefits me as well. I know we all wish we wrote more articles and documented things better etc...and well I’m hoping facebook makes it a bit easier to accomplish this. Mostly the reason for joining facebook is to share the information with people who are not familiar with permaculture. A lot of my friends would fall into this category. The majority of what they know about permaculture is from me, and unfortunately they don’t share my urgency to make their lives about it. So perhaps this can help spread the concentric rings of awareness out further and reach more people. My mom is on facebook, how else would I reach her network of friends, facebook makes it too easy. I am also well aware of how much of a distraction facebook is for most people, it’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to sign up. But I’m hoping if I focus my involvement about spreading permaculture it can be a tool of change rather then a tool of distraction. 

“You must learn the tools of your enemy so that you can use that tool against them or make it not work at all.” - Grandfather Stalking Wolf