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.”
BILL MOLLISONThe 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.”
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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Use all the skills you have in relation to others – and that way we can do anything.
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If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.
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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.
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I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 years of field work in natural systems – and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.
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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.
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I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don’t understand anything about where we live, and we don’t want to.
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If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.
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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.
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There are only four things in all cleaners – whether it’s shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label.
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I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
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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.
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The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
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Permaculture is something with a million heads. It’s a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can’t put a way of thinking back in the box.
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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.
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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.
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I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen – whose language nobody can speak – to be very good permaculture people.
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It’s a revolution. But it’s the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better.
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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
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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.
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I think mine is a very rich life.
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You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.
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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.
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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.
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Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
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I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
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At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you’ve got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road.
BILL MOLLISON