Quote

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

Bill Mollison

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Food
Animal
Found
Cultivated
Nature
Ecology
Human
Designed
Humans
Creates
Generally
Produce

More quotes by Bill Mollison

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
Freezing concentrates sugar (maple sugar), alcohol, and salt solutions as efficiently as heating distils water or alcohol from solutions. Open pans of maple sugar can have the surface ice removed regularly (each day) until a sugar concentrate remains. Salts in water, and alcohol in ferment liquors can be concentrated in the same way.
Bill Mollison
Image
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments...Permaculture uses the inherent qualities of plants and animals combined with the natural characteristics of landscapes and structures to produce a life supporting system for city and country, using the smallest practical area.
Bill Mollison
Image
We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
Bill Mollison
Image
Pollution is an unused resource.
Bill Mollison
Image
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
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