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

More quotes by Bill Mollison

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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.
Bill Mollison
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I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.
Bill Mollison
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The extinction rate is so huge now, we're to the stage where we've got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.
Bill Mollison
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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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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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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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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 cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
Bill Mollison
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I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.
Bill Mollison
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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.
Bill Mollison
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Anything that's left that's remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It's not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.
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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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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Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
Bill Mollison
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If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much.
Bill Mollison
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Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
Bill Mollison
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Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
Bill Mollison
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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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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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Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
Bill Mollison