Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.

People question me coming through the American frontier these days. They ask, "What's your occupation?" I say, "I'm just a simple gardener." And that is deeply seditious.

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.

You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That's the last place you'll find those lessons readable.

The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I said, "At last someone understands what permaculture's about."

I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

We have to rethink how we're going to live on this earth - stop talking about the fact that we've got to have agriculture, we've got to have exports, because all that is the death of us.