I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
BILL MOLLISONEven houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.
More Bill Mollison Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.
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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 can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.
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Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
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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.
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A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
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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.
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I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
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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.
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If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
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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.
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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