If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they'll die in the next fire, or where you can't get water to them. Or they'll sit in all the dam sites. Or they'll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.

You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.

Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.

Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.

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.