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.

I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

My students are constantly amazing me.

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.

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.