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The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.

Bill Mollison

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 MOLLISON

Animal Night Opposite
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Cooperation Knows Running
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

Affluent Confirm Issue Shower
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Men Self
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Community People Poverty
The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture College Earth
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
BILL MOLLISON

Rain Responsible Tree
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
BILL MOLLISON

Alcohol Freezing Ice Water
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
BILL MOLLISON

One Rainwater Thing
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?
BILL MOLLISON

Fuel Things Trivial Water
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

Book Writing Years
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Law People Political
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Design Eerie Permaculture
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Ends Ethics Investment Law Obey
Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.
BILL MOLLISON

Assorted Evolution Mammals Orchard
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

Assembly Creation Watches

The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.

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The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.

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