Quote

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

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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If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
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Pollution is an unused resource.
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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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Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.
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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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I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.
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.
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Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
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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.
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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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We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
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If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they'll die in the next fire, or where you can't get water to them. Or they'll sit in all the dam sites. Or they'll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.
Bill Mollison
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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
Bill Mollison
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A house should look after itself - as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It's simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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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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Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
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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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