Bill Mollison Quotes

“A really failing society has a lot of rules or laws.”

“Allow the system to demonstrate its own evolution.”

“Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.”

“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.”

“Gardeners plant like we will live forever.”

“If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.”

“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.”

“If you only do one thing; collect rainwater.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Pollution is an unused resource.”

“Raise potatoes not consciousness.”

“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.”

“Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.”

“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.”

“The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.”

“The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality”

“Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains.”

“We are sufficient to do everything possible to heal this Earth.”

“We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.”

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