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?
BILL MOLLISONYou 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.”
BILL MOLLISON -
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
BILL MOLLISON -
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
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 -
The extinction rate is so huge now, we’re to the stage where we’ve got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.
BILL MOLLISON -
Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.
BILL MOLLISON -
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
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 -
I think mine is a very rich life.
BILL MOLLISON -
You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way.
BILL MOLLISON -
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON -
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 -
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







