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

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
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Desert People Teaching
A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
BILL MOLLISON

Book Collection Information Own Person
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
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
BILL MOLLISON

Insurmountable Opportunity
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
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
BILL MOLLISON

One Rainwater Thing
If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
BILL MOLLISON

People Philosophy Poison
I’d come into town from the bush – after 28 years of field work in natural systems – and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.
BILL MOLLISON

Fields Forests Years
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
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Men Self
We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
BILL MOLLISON

Government Needs Oil
Use all the skills you have in relation to others – and that way we can do anything.
BILL MOLLISON

Skills Use Way
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
BILL MOLLISON

Goods Society Women
We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.
BILL MOLLISON

Catastrophes Spectacular Talent
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

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

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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

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