Bill Mollison Quotes
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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.
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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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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. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
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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.
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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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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.
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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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."
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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.
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We have to rethink how we're going to live on this earth - stop talking about the fact that we've got to have agriculture, we've got to have exports, because all that is the death of us.
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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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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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We are sufficient to do everything possible to heal this Earth.
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A really failing society has a lot of rules or laws.
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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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My students are constantly amazing me.
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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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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.
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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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The value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water. Those property-owners with a constant source of pure water already have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income.
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I think mine is a very rich life.
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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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Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions. 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.
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Why is it that we don't build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it's a trivial thing to do?