black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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.
BILL MOLLISON

Eerie House People
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
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
BILL MOLLISON

Rain Responsible Tree
Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Found Produce
The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.”
BILL MOLLISON

Book Writing Years
You can’t live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they’ve got to rethink the whole basis of how they’re going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.
BILL MOLLISON

Bushmen Helping Permaculture
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
BILL MOLLISON

Insurmountable Opportunity
I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
BILL MOLLISON

People Philosophers Teach
People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.
BILL MOLLISON

Build People Sustain Things
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
If 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.
BILL MOLLISON

People Simple Want
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
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
There are only four things in all cleaners – whether it’s shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label.
BILL MOLLISON

Blue Color Detergent Label Smell Toilet
There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.
BILL MOLLISON

Ends Ethics Investment Law Obey
I’m certain I don’t know what permaculture is. That’s what I like about it – it’s not dogmatic. But you’ve got to say it’s about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.
BILL MOLLISON

Design Eerie Permaculture
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
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

Hands People Water
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 MOLLISON

Government Reality Simple
Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.
BILL MOLLISON

Anarchy Cooperation Permaculture
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
Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.
BILL MOLLISON

Bloody Even Way Wronger
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
If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Details Together
We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
BILL MOLLISON

Governments Help Hirerachical Ourselves
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

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Mollison Quotes