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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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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
Like
Couldn
Brain
Came
Idea
Write
Ideas
Shift
Enough
Suddenly
Writing
Fast

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
Bill Mollison
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I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.
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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You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
Bill Mollison
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
Bill Mollison
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If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
Bill Mollison
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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.
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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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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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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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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The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
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