“The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.”

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.

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

Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.

Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains

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.

That we don’t design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.

We have to let nature put what’s left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

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.

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.

To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.

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