“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.”

People do things which I find quite amazing – things I would never have done and can’t understand very well.

The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.

You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.

We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.

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.

You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political.

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.

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

To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one’s needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.

If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.

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

Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains

Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees.

Remember Killer Moth, the most ingenuous rogue ever to defy the dynamic duo, Batman and Robin ?

That we don’t design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

In the New Yorker library, I have long been shelved between Nadine Gordimer and Brendan Gill; an eerie little space nestled between high seriousness of purpose and legendary lightness of touch.

It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.