Quotes from Bill Mollison

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

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

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.

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

Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.

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

I think mine is a very rich life.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Without trees, we cannot inhabit the earth.

Animals are the messengers of the tree, and trees the gardens of animals. Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Anything that's left that's remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It's not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.