If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that's a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don't poison things, they don't ruin things, they don't lose soils, they don't build things they can't sustain.

Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things.

Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

That we don't design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.

Permaculture is something with a million heads. It's a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can't put a way of thinking back in the box.

We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.