Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

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.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

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

I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.

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