“Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.”

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.

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.

There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help.

I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

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

My students are constantly amazing me.

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.

It still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.

I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.”

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

Effective leaders are made, not born. They learn from trial and error, and from experience.

Educated men and women, especially those who are in college, very often get the idea that religion is fit only for the common people. No young man or woman can make a greater error than this.

It is only an error of judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered.

Any truth, no matter how valid, if emphasized to the exclusion of other truths of equal importance, is practical error.

If you’ve been full of error and defeat, be done with it. Say, “By God’s grace, I’m done with it,” and take charge of yourself like never before.”

Error often is to be preferred to indecision.