You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.

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

Say you're working for a big overseas aid organization. You can't leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! You can't get the mud huts right if you haven't got things right where you are. You've got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

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

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."

The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.

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.