“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.”

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

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.

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.

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.

If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

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.

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.

I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.

My students are constantly amazing me.

Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.

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.

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

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.”

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

The best way to protect both the policemen and the community going forward is by creating a system that’s just, where everyone feels safe.

Music allows a person to express their deepest thoughts, thoughts that cannot be expressed with just words.

I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.

Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can’t create it if you don’t have one.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement.

Don’t expect a great day; create one.

I wanna keep creating those situations for myself so I don’t have to be out front all the time. Then when I do have to be out front, I can do it to the max.

We’re creating a TV show of Scrooge, starring Jamie Farr, with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge.