“Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.”

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.

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.

I remember when I was first starting out in the late 50’s, and everybody at that time said rock ‘n roll was gonna die.

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.

Anything that’s left that’s remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It’s not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.

Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.

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.

I want Britain to lead the world in food and farming and to do that we need enough productive agricultural land.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It’s agriculture. It’s golf courses. It’s domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.

That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.

It was this appetite for beer-making material that led to crop cultivation, permanent settlement and agriculture.

Therefore to talk about biodynamic gardening, biodynamic horticulture, biodynamic agriculture and the French intensive system is merely a horrible heading of terminology.

High tech companies that focus on research, development and production will learn that they can be the perfect complement to our world-renowned agriculture heritage.