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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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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
Grow
Food
Grows
Seditious
Teach
Sedition
Practice
Shockingly
Self
Subversive
World
Reliance
People
Peaceful

More quotes by Bill Mollison

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To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
Bill Mollison
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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
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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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Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
Bill Mollison
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You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That's the last place you'll find those lessons readable.
Bill Mollison
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We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or 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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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
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If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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
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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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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
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