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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.

Bill Mollison

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
People do things which I find quite amazing – things I would never have done and can’t understand very well.
BILL MOLLISON

Done People Understand Wells
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
Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity – you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Modern Most Toilets
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
BILL MOLLISON

Children Decision Responsibility
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
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
BILL MOLLISON

Believe Interesting Thinking
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
You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political.
BILL MOLLISON

Amount Cost Energy Ourselves Provide
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Beached Bounder Hundred Seen Stream Tons
If 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.
BILL MOLLISON

Ocean Right Space
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Government Reality Simple
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
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
BILL MOLLISON

Rain Responsible Tree
Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Physics Teaching

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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I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don’t understand anything about where we live, and we don’t want to.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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