 Hi, this month's question, well not so much a question because I normally hear it is a statement and that statement is along the lines of permaculture training, permaculture courses should be free of charge because they're so important. So I think when we think about this what's going on here is that there's a bit of a mixing up between the idea of money and the problems we have with our current money system and there are plenty of costs and our current money system does lead to a lot of inequality in that if you have money you can earn interest and make more money, so it's gradually increasing the gulf between those who have and those who don't have and that's also reflected in land and so on. So the idea of earning money can also be associated with basically being a bad person. And what's also going on here is that something is important so it should be free, so I can see the logic in that and wouldn't it be great if our school systems taught permaculture? So we didn't have to have adult teachers teaching it because we learned it at school as kids or perhaps even our family taught as well. Hey, that's what our ancestors did, wasn't it? That when you grew up the first things you learned was where did you find food, how to be safe, all of those things because that was the vital information that you needed and that's why we remember stuff from our childhood, even if they're silly songs and the lyrics which are completely useless but because our brains take on board that early information, it's really critical for survival. So yes, permaculture courses should be free. I agree with that absolutely. The problem for us in our current climate is that most of us rely on money to pay bills to make exchange because we live in a world where we don't just have a few people around us that we meet all the time and that's who we rely upon for things so because in that world you can do each other favours. Essentially it's what happens in a family that everybody helps out or in theory everybody helps out and you do it for love, you do it for the love of it and that's a really lovely place to be because you'll feel like you're giving all the time and it's the essence of what Charles Eisenstein calls the gift economy where we do things for each other because we want to and that works really well in a world where everybody gets to hang out with everybody, you know, you're in a small community and that's the people you know and you're helping out each other all the time but we don't live in that world anymore, we live in the world which is very expanded by our communication technologies so the people that come and learn from me for instance, I love to meet them again but generally they come from afar and we do permaculture for a few days or a couple of weeks and then they go off and they do their own thing and hopefully they teach other people permaculture but it's very difficult in that context for people to come and for me to give two weeks worth of my time and my experience and to get something back in that exchange that's why money has become the easiest way to do that thing and money makes all of these things possible if you're watching a video, if you're using a camera, any technology at all, if you've got an internet connection it's very unlikely that you're not using money so I lived in Ireland for a year off the land, we grew food, we lived very simple lifestyle, it was 20 plus years ago so the internet was very new but we didn't pay for anything because we didn't use anything but if we needed things like if we needed electricity we would have had to buy it we would have either had to buy solar panels and batteries or we would have had to pay for a mains connection so we didn't use those things so we didn't need money but most of us in our modern world use money to do those things and even if you're trading some work in exchange for somebody paying your council tax which is something that we need money for in Britain you're still in a system that uses money that makes sense so coming back to why aren't permaculture courses free well yes they should be but I'm not paid by some other system as a permaculture teacher so I have two choices and the primary choice that I saw when I was learning to teach 15 or 15 years ago was that the people who were teaching permaculture because there weren't many courses and there weren't many people who had heard of permaculture at that point most people had a job a normal day job albeit a job that maybe they felt had some value for them from a moral perspective that they felt was ethical for them and then they taught permaculture on the weekend occasionally so there weren't many courses around because the people that taught the courses and had the experience and the understanding to teach spent most of their time doing a job working for local education or whoever to earn money to pay their bills so they could then do that for free or for very little money at the weekend now to me that doesn't make a lot of sense from the perspective of how do we make the most of people who have the skills and the understanding to teach other people surely if permaculture is so important then the people that know the permaculture should be teaching all the time or at least producing materials that educate and share with other people which is what I try to do when I'm writing books or making videos in addition to teaching people in person but somewhere along the lines I need to earn a living and if I'm not working as a gardener which is something I did for a while or doing IT which I also did for a while because I feel that it's more important that I do permaculture and teach people in permaculture then I need to earn money in some way from that process and of course a book does bring in a little bit of money but not very much really particularly compared to the effort that goes into it and especially if you buy it from one of the big providers like Amazon so for Amazon I get 50p in six months time for each book that goes out they earn about six times as much as I do just for selling it on my behalf which is great and that's typical for any author so becoming an author really is about well on some level establishing oneself has you might call an expert in one's field but also I wrote the book and I'm writing my current book to help myself understand what it is that I need to know and to share it in a way that helps other people to understand so when we're running permaculture courses when I'm teaching a permaculture course there are various costs involved and of course one of those costs could be paying me for being there and that needs to be an element of it because I don't have any other form of significant income that allows me to do that for free that makes sense it does I do have the opportunity to give my teaching time for free to a few people on low income and so if people on our courses if people sign up for a concessionary fee that's what they're not paying for they're not paying me to teach them they're just paying for the other things unfortunately we live in a world where there are overheads venues have overheads so we have to pay a caterer we need to pay for food if you're residential there's going to be costs for hot water for showers and camping and rooms and heating and all those kind of things associated with a venue so that's essentially why permaculture courses aren't free because there are those overhead costs and we can look at how might we remove those well we could spread those courses out over a long period of time and maybe meet somewhere that doesn't cost any money that somehow is warm and dry enough and and that we all walk there so we're not creating a big carbon footprint in order to do that rather than just traveling once because whenever I spread over several weekends I have to travel several times and that means that really I can't travel so far afield in order to teach those and essentially money whilst the money system as it stands doesn't work or doesn't work as well as it could it does at least allow us all the opportunity when we have some money in the bank account to choose where it goes where it allows us to vote for what we want to see in the world and so when I earn some income then I have the opportunity to turn around and say actually I really like that project I want to buy some food from those people or I want to buy that particular kind of this or that because I think it's really important to support those people in order for them to do more of it and for that thing to flourish in the world so when it comes back to this idea of money and permaculture courses yes absolutely permaculture courses should be free we should be teaching people with permaculture in schools and the people who are teaching it should be supported and rewarded and you know surely the most important things in our world are the things we should be supporting the most not saying we don't want to give you any value for that so yeah permaculture courses are not free but for me the value that I got from doing my permaculture courses paid itself over so many times in the richness that I've gained in my life as a result of doing it