The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.
BILL MOLLISONIf 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
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Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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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.
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Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.
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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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I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
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I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen – whose language nobody can speak – to be very good permaculture people.
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Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
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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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I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
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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.
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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.
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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