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

Bill Mollison

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
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
BILL MOLLISON

Group Thinking World
Permaculture is something with a million heads. It’s a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can’t put a way of thinking back in the box.
BILL MOLLISON

Boxes Thinking Way
You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
BILL MOLLISON

Boeing Knocking Something
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
BILL MOLLISON

Problem Simple World
To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one’s needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.
BILL MOLLISON

Land Needs World
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
We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
BILL MOLLISON

Government Needs Oil
Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity – you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Modern Most Toilets
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
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
It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
BILL MOLLISON

Energy Food Friend Material Sustainable
You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.
BILL MOLLISON

Ducks Permaculture Problem
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
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON

Failing Law People Really
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

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

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

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