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 MOLLISONPermaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
-
-
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 -
Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living.
BILL MOLLISON -
Women are the holders of all knowledge, everything a man knows he stole from a woman.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
BILL MOLLISON -
At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you’ve got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road.
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
BILL MOLLISON -
I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
Permaculture is something with a million heads. It’s a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can’t put a way of thinking back in the box.
BILL MOLLISON -
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
BILL MOLLISON -
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.
BILL MOLLISON -
It still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.
BILL MOLLISON -
You can’t live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they’ve got to rethink the whole basis of how they’re going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.
BILL MOLLISON -
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
BILL MOLLISON -
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
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 like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.
BILL MOLLISON -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
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.
BILL MOLLISON -
Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.
BILL MOLLISON -
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
BILL MOLLISON -
There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help.
BILL MOLLISON