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We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.

Bill Mollison

Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
BILL MOLLISON

Concentrate Concentrated Open Remains Remove Sugar
To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one’s needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.
BILL MOLLISON

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

Home Modern Most Toilets
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities
BILL MOLLISON

Insurmountable Opportunity
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Enough Extinction Together
We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Creation Watches
“Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question – we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
BILL MOLLISON

Earth Faces Question
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions.
BILL MOLLISON

Alcohol Freezing Ice Water
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 not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.

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We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.

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