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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.

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
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
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
BILL MOLLISON

Group Thinking World
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
Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.
BILL MOLLISON

Anarchy Cooperation Permaculture
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
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough.
BILL MOLLISON

Brain Ideas Writing
You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.
BILL MOLLISON

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

Believe Interesting Thinking
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
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.
BILL MOLLISON

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

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

Problem Simple World
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

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