Bill Mollison Quotes

Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.

I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.

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

Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity - you couldn't flush the toilet without it. It's a huge dependency situation.

If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.

Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony, opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

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.

Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

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.

You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

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.

Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot."

My students are constantly amazing me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

Once you've said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics in my house," or "I'm not using my ecology in my garden, I've never applied it to what I do," it's like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.

If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.

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.

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.

If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.

When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.

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.

We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.

To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality

I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you've got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road. Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.

I confess to a rare problem - gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me - but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.

Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.

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.

We are sufficient to do everything possible to heal this Earth.

Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.