“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.”

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.

You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

When you go into MMA you really can’t do it half-assed. If you do it half-assed, then you’re going to get annihilated.

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

We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.

Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

Pollution is an unused resource.

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

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.

It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.

If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you’re literally a creative collagist? You’re taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.

The diversity in the human family should be the cause of love and harmony, as it is in music where many different notes blend together in the making of a perfect chord.

Together, we can create a world in which peace is real; in which every human being can thrive; in which all share the promise of our century. I believe we can succeed.

Europe is not one of the major powers. And Africa even less so of course. But Africa has what Europe lacks: space, human resources, and natural resources

Let us join together to hasten forward the Divine Cause of unity, until all humanity knows itself to be one family, joined together in love.

It was amazing to see all the support that he got from around the world and to see how everyone worked together to help make his dream reality. Watching him do this really made me believe that I could too.

Instead of going out, I’m trying to encourage people to have a memorable experience in their own home. We call it ‘Delicioso Night In.’ I invite the people I care about the most. Then, when I get a lot of people together, I like to have finger foods.

My friends and I were wild and we liked to joy-ride.