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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

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

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

Failing Law People Really
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
You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political.
BILL MOLLISON

Amount Cost Energy Ourselves Provide
We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Creation Watches
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
Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
BILL MOLLISON

Characteristics City Country Landscapes Permaculture
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
You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.
BILL MOLLISON

Ducks Permaculture Problem
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 think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
BILL MOLLISON

Natural Thinking World
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
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
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

“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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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