Bill Mollison Quotes
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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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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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Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
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It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.
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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. 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.
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If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they'll die in the next fire, or where you can't get water to them. Or they'll sit in all the dam sites. Or they'll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.
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Anarchy would suggest you're not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.
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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.
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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.
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I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
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The end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora.
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You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That's the last place you'll find those lessons readable.
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Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things.
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Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
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We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
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Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living. It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers
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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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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.
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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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Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
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A house should look after itself - as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It's simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.
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The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
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Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design. You don’t have to be a botanist; you don’t have to be a bulldozer driver; you don’t have to be a fence builder; you don’t have to be an architect. What the designer has to do is look at the relationships.
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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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If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.
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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.
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
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People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
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Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.
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