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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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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
Great
Gets
Much
Design
Something
Call
Make
Wrong
Error
Else
Errors
Everything
Basic
Nothing
Rules
Right
Type

More quotes by 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.
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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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To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
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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.
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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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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
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Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
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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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If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
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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.
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
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People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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