Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things.

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.

The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

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

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.

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