I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
BILL MOLLISONWhy 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?
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
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When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies.
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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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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.
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I’m certain I don’t know what permaculture is. That’s what I like about it – it’s not dogmatic. But you’ve got to say it’s about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.
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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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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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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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Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
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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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Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
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I think mine is a very rich life.
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We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
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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.
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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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Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
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There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
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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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A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
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There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.
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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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I confess to a rare problem – gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me – but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves.
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You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
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You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way.
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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