Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.

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.

I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is. That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic. But you've got to say it's about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

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.

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.