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.
BILL MOLLISONThe 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
-
-
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
BILL MOLLISON -
I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
Use all the skills you have in relation to others – and that way we can do anything.
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 MOLLISON -
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.
BILL MOLLISON