A letter to hand to a possible publicist / steward

Written in the author's project voice, identity held general. Candidates below.

You're holding this because I think you might be the right person to help carry something.

For more than a decade I practiced permaculture design — on land, around the world, learning from hundreds of practitioners through blood, sweat, and honest failure. Somewhere in those years I noticed that the principles I was using on watersheds and food forests were the same ones I was using on teams, tools, organizations, and my own interior life. So I wrote them down — all the way down: not as a memoir but as a working framework, stress-tested against history, published with its own falsification program and a public record of every place the evidence forced it to change. It's called Permanent Culture 3.0. It's free, it's open, it's licensed as a commons, and it was built — openly, and by design — in collaboration with AI working at a scale one person couldn't reach alone, across several generations of that experiment.

I publish it under a pen name, and that is not shyness — it is the point. This work has an explicit constitution against becoming a personality cult: a stewardship charter with my own diminishing authority written into it, succession designed while leaving is still easy. Which is why I'm writing to you. It needs voices and hands that aren't mine: someone to help it reach the people who would use it, and to hold it to its own standards while it grows. The role could be publicist, steward, editor, critic, or some braid of these — the charter in the repository describes the governance honestly, including what you'd be signing up to correct.

I'd ask you to do three things before we talk: read the one-page card, walk one real problem of your own through the practice protocol, and read the file where the framework lists what would prove it wrong. If after that it still feels alive to you — let's talk. And if it doesn't, telling me why would be the first genuine act of stewardship.

— The author ("The Unknown Soldier")

Candidate directions (verify fit before approach; these are doors, not commitments)

Publishing houses native to this material: Chelsea Green (the working home of regenerative/permaculture publishing), New Society Publishers, and — for reach beyond the movement — the sustainability lists of major trade houses. A house editor often brings the publicist.

Steward-archetypes worth seeking: a respected permaculture teacher-elder who bridges generations (someone of the Rosemary Morrow lineage of generous teaching); a commons/P2P practitioner who has governed open projects (the Ostrom-workshop and P2P Foundation worlds); a systems-literate editor or science communicator who has shepherded evidence-forward books; and one skeptic — a reviewer who didn't love it — because a stewardship circle with no internal critic is a choir. Transition-movement conveners (the Rob Hopkins school of movement-building without guru-ism) model the public voice this needs.

Sequence: lineage courtesy first (the permaculture community hears about this from us, not from press), then the steward conversations, then the publicist — the work's credibility engine is its openness, so the people come before the promotion.