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.
BILL MOLLISONAnything 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.
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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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I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
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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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We have to let nature put what’s left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
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Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
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Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
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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.
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Why is it that we don’t build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?
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Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
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Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.
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A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
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Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
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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.”
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I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
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We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
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If you’re a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.
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“Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question – we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
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Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots.
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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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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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If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
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To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
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If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.
BILL MOLLISON