Quote

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

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
Coming
Question
Days
Seditious
Asks
Frontier
American
Frontiers
Simple
Gardener
People
Occupation
Deeply

More quotes by Bill Mollison

Image
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
Image
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
Image
People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.
Bill Mollison
Image
Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
Bill Mollison
Image
The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.
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
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
Image
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
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
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
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
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
Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.
Bill Mollison
Image
We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
Bill Mollison
Image
Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
Bill Mollison
Image
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
Image
If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
Bill Mollison
Image
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