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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

There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help.
BILL MOLLISON

Hands People Water
I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.
BILL MOLLISON

People Spoiled Urban
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

Enough Extinction Together
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
BILL MOLLISON

Goods Society Women
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
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
BILL MOLLISON

Alcohol Freezing Ice Water
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
Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Found Produce
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
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Men Self
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
BILL MOLLISON

Problem Simple World
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
BILL MOLLISON

Forests Lose Teacher
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
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON

Failing Law People Really
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
Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.
BILL MOLLISON

Boundaries Fuzzy Layers
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

Design Looks Worry
My students are constantly amazing me.
BILL MOLLISON

Amazing Constant Students
If you’re a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.
BILL MOLLISON

People Simple Want
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
BILL MOLLISON

Insurmountable Opportunity
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
The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture College Earth
It’s a revolution. But it’s the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better.
BILL MOLLISON

Law People Political
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
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
BILL MOLLISON

Dirty Earth People
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
BILL MOLLISON

Consciousness Morality Nonsense

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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