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.

We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

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.

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

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

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.