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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

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

Forests Lose Teacher
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 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

Dog Encounters Real
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
I’m certain I don’t know what permaculture is. That’s what I like about it – it’s not dogmatic. But you’ve got to say it’s about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.
BILL MOLLISON

Design Eerie Permaculture
Pollution is an unused resource.
BILL MOLLISON

Pollution Resources Unused
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
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
Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.
BILL MOLLISON

Anarchy Cooperation Permaculture
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 should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.
BILL MOLLISON

Catastrophes Spectacular Talent
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
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.
BILL MOLLISON

Garden People Philosopher

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.

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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.

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