Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
BILL MOLLISONThe worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.
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It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.
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We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
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Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
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A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
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If you’re a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.
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People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.
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There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.
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Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
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You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
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The extinction rate is so huge now, we’re to the stage where we’ve got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.
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We have to let nature put what’s left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
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If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.
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If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.
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I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
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Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.
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My students are constantly amazing me.
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When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies.
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There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
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When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough.
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The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.
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We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
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Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
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Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
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We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.
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At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you’ve got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road.
BILL MOLLISON