“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.”

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.

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.

Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.

We have to let nature put what’s left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

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.

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.

To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality

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.

I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.

It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.

A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.

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.

I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

It isn’t like that at all. It may be more difficult now, and take longer than when I started to write, but there’s a great, empty warehouse out there looking for simple talent.

There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.

Be sincere. Be simple in words, manners, and gestures. Amuse as well as instruct.

I still don’t like the word agnostic. It’s too fancy. I’m simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people.

I am surprised to see that today everything that does not amount to surrender pure and simple to generalized capitalism.

To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the novel is dying.

As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways.

The new product, if it’s going to be successful, is going to require a new name. New ladder, new name. It’s as simple as that.