“Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.”

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.

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

I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.

To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality

Humans were my study animal now – I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals.

I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.

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.

A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.

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

Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.

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

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

I never listened to what they were saying – I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.

I confess to a rare problem – gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me – but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves.

The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

An Anarchist is anyone who denies the necessity and legitimacy of government; the question of his methods of attacking it is foreign to the definition.

If the individual has a right to govern himself, all external government is tyranny. Hence the necessity of abolishing the State.

The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.

The main question … is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law.

The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.

Let those that merely talk and never think, That live in the wild anarchy of drink

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort