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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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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
Enough
Species
Hold
Longer
Huge
System
Ecology
Stage
Extinction
Left
Anywhere
Together
Rate

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Pollution is an unused resource.
Bill Mollison
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Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
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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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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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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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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People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
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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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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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.
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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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