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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

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
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
My students are constantly amazing me.
BILL MOLLISON

Amazing Constant Students
Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.
BILL MOLLISON

Assorted Evolution Mammals Orchard
We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
BILL MOLLISON

Government Needs Oil
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
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
At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you’ve got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road.
BILL MOLLISON

Country Cutting Square
Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
BILL MOLLISON

Eerie House People
Humans were my study animal now – I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Night Opposite
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
BILL MOLLISON

Believe Interesting Thinking
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Communicates Experience Forest Hand
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
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
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
Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Apples Years

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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