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

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.

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.

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.

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

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

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.

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.

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

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

When I’m lying in bed I think about the next collection. That makes me sound insane, doesn’t it? That I’m getting into bed with David Beckham and thinking about clothes.

She was only a collection of flaws and she was beautiful.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

When a group of people get together, it’s collective power. You know that you’re doing it for the good.

I’m in a business where no one cares about anything except how well your last collection sold.

The “we” of your divine birthright – the one that is aware of its place as part of the collective whole – knows that it is your sacred obligation to shine your brightest light, not just in your moments of glory but each day.

I’ve enjoyed photography, ever since I was a teenager, and I’m still at it. I’ve had shows in various cities, around the country, and I have a number of pieces in permanent collections in museums that I’m very proud of.

I’m touched by the idea that when we do things that are useful and helpful – collecting these shards of spirituality – that we may be helping to bring about a healing.