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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

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
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
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
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
It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
BILL MOLLISON

Energy Food Friend Material Sustainable
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
People do things which I find quite amazing – things I would never have done and can’t understand very well.
BILL MOLLISON

Done People Understand Wells
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
BILL MOLLISON

Rain Responsible Tree
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
Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity – you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Modern Most Toilets
Anything that’s left that’s remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It’s not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.
BILL MOLLISON

Cutting Forests Lasts
Permaculture is something with a million heads. It’s a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can’t put a way of thinking back in the box.
BILL MOLLISON

Boxes Thinking Way
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
We have to let nature put what’s left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
BILL MOLLISON

Ass Come Together Up
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

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