Bill Mollison Quotes

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

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions. Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.

Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living. It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers

There are only four things in all cleaners - whether it's shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn't matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label - it still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.

It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.

I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.

The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

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.

One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong - if you make what I call a Type 1 Error - you can get nothing else right.

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 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.

Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.

Women are the holders of all knowledge, everything a man knows he stole from a woman.

Security can be found in renunciation of ownership over people, money, and real assets; to gain, keep or protect that which others need for periods of legitimate access. A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.

I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.

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.

A house should look after itself - as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It's simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

I think mine is a very rich life.

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

Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

There are a few societies that show signs of having been very rational about the physics of construction and the physics of real life. Some of the old middle-Eastern societies had downdraft systems over whole cities, and passive, rapid-evaporation ice-making systems. They were rational people using good physical principles to make themselves comfortable without additional sources of energy.

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."

We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

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.

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.

The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.

Why is it that we don't build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it's a trivial thing to do?

I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.

Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

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.

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.

A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).

Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.

We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

Pollution is an unused resource.

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

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.

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

You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that.

We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently.