I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen – whose language nobody can speak – to be very good permaculture people.
BILL MOLLISONIf 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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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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To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one’s needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.
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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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I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 years of field work in natural systems – and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.
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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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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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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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You won’t get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that.
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I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don’t understand anything about where we live, and we don’t want to.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.
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You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.
BILL MOLLISON