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.

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.

Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.

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

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.

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

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.