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

Bill Mollison

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Bill Mollison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: May 4
Died: 2016
Died: September 24
Anthropologist
Author
Biologist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Farmer
Naturalist
Psychologist
Stanley
Tasmania
Australia
Complex
Solutions
Remain
Problems
Though
Simple
Embarrassingly
Problem
Increasingly
World
Complexes

More quotes by Bill Mollison

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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.
Bill Mollison
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Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
Bill Mollison
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Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
Bill Mollison
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We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently.
Bill Mollison
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If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.
Bill Mollison
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Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.
Bill Mollison
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We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
Bill Mollison
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Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison