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

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
Children
Ethical
Decision
Responsibility
Existence
Take

More quotes by 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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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.
Bill Mollison
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Should we tamper with nature? is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
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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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.
Bill Mollison
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
Bill Mollison
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The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.
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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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
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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
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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
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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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I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
Bill Mollison
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Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
Bill Mollison
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I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
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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Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
Bill Mollison
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What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.
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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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