“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.”

If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

Pollution is an unused resource.

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

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.

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.

If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

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.

There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help.

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.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.

My students are constantly amazing me.

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.