Quotes by Bill Mollison

People do things which I find quite amazing -- things I would never have done and can't understand very well.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.

Anarchy would suggest you're not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 only do one thing, collect rainwater.

I think mine is a very rich life.

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 are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.

You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.

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

Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.

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

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?

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.

The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area -- they're worse than witchcraft, really.

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.

Pollution is an unused resource.

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.

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.