I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
BILL MOLLISONIt 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.
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We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
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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.
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If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
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“Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question – we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
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You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political.
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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.
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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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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.
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
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Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.
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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.
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Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
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I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.
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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.
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I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen – whose language nobody can speak – to be very good permaculture people.
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It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers
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We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
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There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
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We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
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The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.
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You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.
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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.
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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