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If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

Bill Mollison

We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
BILL MOLLISON

Governments Help Hirerachical Ourselves
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing.
BILL MOLLISON

Hardly Mature Sufficient Trees
We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
BILL MOLLISON

Government Needs Oil
It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
BILL MOLLISON

Energy Food Friend Material Sustainable
I think it’s pointless asking questions like “Will humanity survive?” It’s purely up to people – if they want to, they can, if they don’t want to, they won’t.
BILL MOLLISON

Asking People Questions Thinking
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
BILL MOLLISON

Believe People Time Wasting
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Car Enemy Vegetables
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 MOLLISON

Eerie House People
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.
BILL MOLLISON

Garden People Philosopher
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
BILL MOLLISON

Group Thinking World
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
BILL MOLLISON

Looks People Want
Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
BILL MOLLISON

Deep Understanding Wealth World
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
BILL MOLLISON

Children Decision Responsibility
I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 years of field work in natural systems – and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.
BILL MOLLISON

Fields Forests Years
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Creation Watches

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

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If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

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