Bill Mollison Quotes Page 3

“I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.”

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

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

“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.”

“I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.”

“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.”

“I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because they don't understand the natural world at all.”

“I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.”

“I think mine is a very rich life.”

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

“I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.”

“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.”

“I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is. That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic. But you've got to say it's about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.”

“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.”

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

“Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.”

“Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity - you couldn't flush the toilet without it. It's a huge dependency situation.”

“My students are constantly amazing me.”

“Once you've said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics in my house," or "I'm not using my ecology in my garden, I've never applied it to what I do," it's like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.”

“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.”

“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.”