Quote

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

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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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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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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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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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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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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Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
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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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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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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We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.
Bill Mollison
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Women spend the money of society on its goods.
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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Pollution is an unused resource.
Bill Mollison
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If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect 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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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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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