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

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.

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.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Well to me growing, up I’ve had my own psychological war with my parents dying at such a young age. My mother was killed by a drunk driver, then two months later my father drowned.

Growing up with sexual abuse and having to be in gangs and dealing with my own trauma; finding the cultural identity when I was 16, and learning those traditional ways saved me from hurting myself.

The bottom line is the Kiss Army is growing by leaps and bounds.

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal.

Growing up in Poland, I didn’t have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don’t have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.