You can't live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they've got to rethink the whole basis of how they're going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.

The value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water. Those property-owners with a constant source of pure water already have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income.

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

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.

We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

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.

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.