Permaculture Quotes

• I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Beginning
  • Involved
  • Permaculture

• 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.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Relationships
  • Connections
  • Designs

• Anarchy would suggest you're not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Anarchy
  • Animate
  • Cooperating

• 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.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Life
  • Interested
  • Tribal

• Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive.

  

  David Holmgren
  • Energy
  • Design
  • Information

• The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Successful
  • Hierarchy
  • Permaculture

• Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. 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
  • Landscape
  • Agriculture

• Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Challenges
  • Permaculture
  • Sedition

• 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.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Design
  • Permaculture
  • Dogmatic

• Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Nature
  • Human
  • Ecology

• 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.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Energy
  • Technology
  • Design

• 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
  • Country
  • Animals
  • Characteristics

• 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
  • Language
  • Students
  • Desert

• 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
  • Brain
  • Idea
  • Permaculture

• 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
  • Books
  • Review
  • Permaculture

• 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
  • Thinking
  • Heads
  • Permaculture

• 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
  • Philosophy
  • Labor
  • Observation

• Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Plants
  • Permaculture
  • Animal Species

• 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.

  

  Bill Mollison
  • Helps
  • Basis
  • Permaculture