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Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.

Bill Mollison

Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Apples Years
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Brain Ideas Writing
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
You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.
BILL MOLLISON

Country Help Huts Rights Work
If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
BILL MOLLISON

People Philosophy Poison
Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture Ecosystems Order
“Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question – we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
BILL MOLLISON

Earth Faces Question
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Dog Encounters Real
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Eerie House People
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Enough Extinction Together
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
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
BILL MOLLISON

Group Thinking World
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
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Beach Life Sea Years
A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
BILL MOLLISON

Book Collection Information Own Person
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.
BILL MOLLISON

People Spoiled Urban
If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Details Together
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.
BILL MOLLISON

People Simple Want
If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.
BILL MOLLISON

Death Rolling Voting World
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
BILL MOLLISON

Believe Interesting Thinking
We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
BILL MOLLISON

Growing Kitchen Looks
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Fields Forests Years
Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.
BILL MOLLISON

Boundaries Fuzzy Layers
My students are constantly amazing me.
BILL MOLLISON

Amazing Constant Students
You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
BILL MOLLISON

Boeing Knocking Something
I think mine is a very rich life.
BILL MOLLISON

Life Mine Rich Thinking
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

Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.

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Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.

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