Bill Mollison Quotes
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
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.
Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.
Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.
The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.
Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
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.
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.
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.
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.
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.
If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.
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.
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.
You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.
The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area - they're worse than witchcraft, really.
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.
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.
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.
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough.
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much.
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.
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.
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.
Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity - you couldn't flush the toilet without it. It's a huge dependency situation.
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
People question me coming through the American frontier these days. They ask, "What's your occupation?" I say, "I'm just a simple gardener." And that is deeply seditious.
