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.
BILL MOLLISONDon’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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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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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I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
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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.
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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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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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Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
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Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.
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I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
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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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We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
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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.
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Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
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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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If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
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You can’t live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they’ve got to rethink the whole basis of how they’re going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.
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We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
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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.
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Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.
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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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As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing.
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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.
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I never listened to what they were saying – I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.
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We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
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Humans were my study animal now – I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals.
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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.
BILL MOLLISON