Bill Mollison
People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.Collection: People
At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you've got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road. Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.Collection: Country
You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.Collection: Dog
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rainsCollection: Rain
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.Collection: People
Humans were my study animal now - I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying - I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.Collection: Night
I think mine is a very rich life.Collection: Thinking
"Should we tamper with nature?" is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.Collection: Earth
I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Years
A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).Collection: Law
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.Collection: People
If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.Collection: Voting
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.Collection: Thinking
Pollution is an unused resource.Collection: Pollution
If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.Collection: Together
If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much.Collection: People
I confess to a rare problem - gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me - but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.Collection: Moving
Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Weed
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.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Errors
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments...Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.Collection: Country
I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Real
Say you're working for a big overseas aid organization. You can't leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! You can't get the mud huts right if you haven't got things right where you are. You've got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Wind
I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen - whose language nobody can speak - to be very good permaculture people.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: Ice
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.Collection: Simple
Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.Collection: Layers
Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.Collection: Skills
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.Collection: Eerie
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.Collection: Together
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.Collection: Helping
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.Collection: Simple
If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Land
To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one's needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.Collection: Land
Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.Collection: People
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.Collection: Animal
The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.Collection: College
Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.Collection: Iron
Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design. You don’t have to be a botanist; you don’t have to be a bulldozer driver; you don’t have to be a fence builder; you don’t have to be an architect. What the designer has to do is look at the relationships.Collection: Worry
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.Collection: Running
The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.Collection: Successful
If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Watches
Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.Collection: Self