I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
BILL MOLLISONIf you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
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Why is it that we don’t build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?
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Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
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Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
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You can’t live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they’ve got to rethink the whole basis of how they’re going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
BILL MOLLISON -
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
BILL MOLLISON -
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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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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We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
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There are only four things in all cleaners – whether it’s shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label.
BILL MOLLISON