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I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

Bill Mollison

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.
BILL MOLLISON

Country Help Huts Rights Work
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
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
BILL MOLLISON

Dwells Principle Resources Urban Use
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 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
When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies.
BILL MOLLISON

Car Enemy Vegetables
I confess to a rare problem – gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me – but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves.
BILL MOLLISON

Air Confess Fall Moving
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
BILL MOLLISON

Goods Society Women
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON

Failing Law People Really
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
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
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Desert People Teaching
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
BILL MOLLISON

Believe Interesting Thinking
A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
BILL MOLLISON

Book Collection Information Own Person
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
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
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
I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
BILL MOLLISON

People Philosophers Teach
I never listened to what they were saying – I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.
BILL MOLLISON

Country Opposite People Watched
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
Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture Ecosystems Order
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
BILL MOLLISON

Dirty Earth People
Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots.
BILL MOLLISON

Beach Life Sea Years
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
BILL MOLLISON

Consciousness Morality Nonsense
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
Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
BILL MOLLISON

Eerie House People
Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
BILL MOLLISON

Deep Understanding Wealth World

I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

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I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

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