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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

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
BILL MOLLISON

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

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

Believe Interesting Thinking
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

Blue Color Detergent Label Smell Toilet
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
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

Book Writing Years
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Beached Bounder Hundred Seen Stream Tons
You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
BILL MOLLISON

Boeing Knocking Something
There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.
BILL MOLLISON

Ends Ethics Investment Law Obey
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
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
BILL MOLLISON

One Rainwater Thing
“Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question – we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
BILL MOLLISON

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

Natural Thinking World
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Bushmen Helping Permaculture
It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.
BILL MOLLISON

Community People Poverty
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
BILL MOLLISON

Problem Simple World
I think mine is a very rich life.
BILL MOLLISON

Life Mine Rich Thinking
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
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

Fire Water Wind
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
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
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
Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.
BILL MOLLISON

Challenges Permaculture 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
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

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Mollison Quotes