Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Humans
Town
Come
Towns
Work
Field
Much
Turned
Possums
Years
Fields
Academic
Attention
Systems
Natural
Forests
Become
Bush

More quotes by Bill Mollison

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.
Bill Mollison
Image
I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
Bill Mollison
Image
If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
Bill Mollison
Image
People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.
Bill Mollison
Image
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
Bill Mollison
Image
Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.
Bill Mollison
Image
That we don't design agriculture to be sustainable is totally eerie. We design it to be a disaster, and of course, we get a disaster.
Bill Mollison
Image
You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
Bill Mollison
Image
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
Bill Mollison