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 MOLLISONI think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
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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.
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It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.
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Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
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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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If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.
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You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.
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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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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.
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Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.
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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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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
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I think mine is a very rich life.
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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.
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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.
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To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
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The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.”
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Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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