-
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.
Bill Mollison -
A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.
Bill Mollison
-
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. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.
Bill Mollison -
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.
Bill Mollison -
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments...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.
Bill Mollison -
Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
Bill Mollison -
People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
Bill Mollison -
I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.
Bill Mollison
-
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. You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political. There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.
Bill Mollison -
Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
Bill Mollison -
The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I said, "At last someone understands what permaculture's about."
Bill Mollison -
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.
Bill Mollison -
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.
Bill Mollison -
Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.
Bill Mollison
-
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. I never listened to what they were saying - I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.
Bill Mollison -
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
Bill Mollison -
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.
Bill Mollison -
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. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.
Bill Mollison -
Say you're working for a big overseas aid organization. You can't leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! 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 Mollison -
If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.
Bill Mollison
-
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.
Bill Mollison -
A really failing society has a lot of rules or laws.
Bill Mollison -
Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. 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.
Bill Mollison -
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
Bill Mollison