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

More quotes by Bill Mollison

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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.
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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Pollution is an unused resource.
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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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.
Bill Mollison
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If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
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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Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
Bill Mollison
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Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
Bill Mollison
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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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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
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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
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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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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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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
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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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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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To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
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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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