Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

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

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.

The extinction rate is so huge now, we're to the stage where we've got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.

One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong - if you make what I call a Type 1 Error - you can get nothing else right.