If you're a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

"Should we tamper with nature?" is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.

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

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.

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.

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