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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.

Bill Mollison

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.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Creation Watches
We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.
BILL MOLLISON

Catastrophes Spectacular Talent
I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 years of field work in natural systems – and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.
BILL MOLLISON

Fields Forests Years
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

Country Cutting Square
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Garden Hence Shetter Words
We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
BILL MOLLISON

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

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
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
If you’re a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.
BILL MOLLISON

People Simple Want
If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Details Together
You won’t get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that.
BILL MOLLISON

Cooperation Knows Running
We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
BILL MOLLISON

Governments Help Hirerachical Ourselves
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
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON

Failing Law People Really
They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.
BILL MOLLISON

Communicates Experience Forest Hand
It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
BILL MOLLISON

Energy Food Friend Material Sustainable

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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