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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.

Bill Mollison

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

Problem Simple World
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Apples Years
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Fire Water Wind
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
Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.
BILL MOLLISON

Bloody Even Way Wronger
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Addition Color Down Smell Toilet Unnecessary
You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way.
BILL MOLLISON

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

Natural Thinking World
Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.
BILL MOLLISON

Conflict Errors Order
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
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
BILL MOLLISON

Alcohol Freezing Ice Water
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
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
There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.
BILL MOLLISON

Ends Ethics Investment Law Obey
It’s a revolution. But it’s the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better.
BILL MOLLISON

Law People Political

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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