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.

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

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.

We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.