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Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity – you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation.

Bill Mollison

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
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 probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.
BILL MOLLISON

People Spoiled Urban
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture Country Poison
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
BILL MOLLISON

Children Decision Responsibility
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
We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
BILL MOLLISON

Growing Kitchen Looks
If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.
BILL MOLLISON

Ocean Right Space
Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Physics Teaching
My students are constantly amazing me.
BILL MOLLISON

Amazing Constant Students
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
BILL MOLLISON

Goods Society Women
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
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.
BILL MOLLISON

Looks People Want
Anything that’s left that’s remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It’s not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.
BILL MOLLISON

Cutting Forests Lasts
The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
BILL MOLLISON

Agriculture College Earth
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
BILL MOLLISON

Believe People Time Wasting
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
Use all the skills you have in relation to others – and that way we can do anything.
BILL MOLLISON

Skills Use Way
When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies.
BILL MOLLISON

Car Enemy Vegetables
Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.
BILL MOLLISON

Assorted Evolution Mammals Orchard
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
The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
BILL MOLLISON

Hierarchy Permaculture Successful
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
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
BILL MOLLISON

Rain Responsible Tree
Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
BILL MOLLISON

Deep Understanding Wealth World
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
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
BILL MOLLISON

Problem Simple World

Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity – you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation.

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Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity – you couldn’t flush the toilet without it. It’s a huge dependency situation.

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