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

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I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
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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.
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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.
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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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The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
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Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
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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.
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Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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