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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.

Bill Mollison

I think it’s pointless asking questions like “Will humanity survive?” It’s purely up to people – if they want to, they can, if they don’t want to, they won’t.
BILL MOLLISON

Asking People Questions Thinking
The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture College Earth
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON

Failing Law People Really
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Concentrate Concentrated Open Remains Remove Sugar
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
Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Physics Teaching
Pollution is an unused resource.
BILL MOLLISON

Pollution Resources Unused
As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing.
BILL MOLLISON

Hardly Mature Sufficient Trees
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Amount Cost Energy Ourselves Provide
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
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
BILL MOLLISON

Rain Responsible Tree
You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
BILL MOLLISON

Boeing Knocking Something
People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.
BILL MOLLISON

Build People Sustain Things
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Land Needs World
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
BILL MOLLISON

Insurmountable Opportunity
Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
BILL MOLLISON

Characteristics City Country Landscapes Permaculture
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
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture Design Eerie
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
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

Animal Night Opposite
My students are constantly amazing me.
BILL MOLLISON

Amazing Constant Students
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
If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.
BILL MOLLISON

Death Rolling Voting World
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Encounter Process Reactive
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
BILL MOLLISON

Goods Society Women
If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.
BILL MOLLISON

Ocean Right Space
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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