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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
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
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.
Bill Mollison
When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.
Bill Mollison
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
Bill Mollison
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.
Bill Mollison
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
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
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
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.
Bill Mollison
We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
Bill Mollison
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.
Bill Mollison
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.
Bill Mollison
Should we tamper with nature? is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
Bill Mollison
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
You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
Bill Mollison
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
Bill Mollison
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.
Bill Mollison
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
If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.
Bill Mollison
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?
Bill Mollison