You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.
BILL MOLLISONPermaculture 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.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don’t understand anything about where we live, and we don’t want to.
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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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If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.
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There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
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The extinction rate is so huge now, we’re to the stage where we’ve got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.
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I confess to a rare problem – gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me – but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves.
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Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
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You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
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You won’t get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that.
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Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees.
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We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
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Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
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Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.
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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.
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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