black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.

Bill Mollison

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

Boeing Knocking Something
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It’s a revolution. But it’s the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better.
BILL MOLLISON

Law People Political
Women are the holders of all knowledge, everything a man knows he stole from a woman.
BILL MOLLISON

Country Emotion Knows Life Men Women
Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
BILL MOLLISON

Deep Understanding Wealth World

If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Mollison Quotes