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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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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
Form
Destroy
Many
Forms
Good
Conflict
Settle
Life
Exist
Settling
Type
Wilderness
Already
Error
Keep
Bush
Order
Errors

More quotes by Bill Mollison

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You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
Bill Mollison
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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
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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
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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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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 challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
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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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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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 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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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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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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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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To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one's needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.
Bill Mollison
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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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If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
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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The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.
Bill Mollison