Best 98 quotes of Bill Mollison on MyQuotes

Bill Mollison

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    Bill Mollison

    A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    Anarchy would suggest you're not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.

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    Bill Mollison

    Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.

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    Bill Mollison

    Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot.

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    Bill Mollison

    Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you've got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road. Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.

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    Bill Mollison

    Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

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    Bill Mollison

    Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.

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    Bill Mollison

    Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design. You don’t have to be a botanist; you don’t have to be a bulldozer driver; you don’t have to be a fence builder; you don’t have to be an architect. What the designer has to do is look at the relationships.

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    Bill Mollison

    Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    Humans were my study animal now - I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying - I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.

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    Bill Mollison

    I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

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    Bill Mollison

    I confess to a rare problem - gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me - but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.

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    Bill Mollison

    I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

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    Bill Mollison

    If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.

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    Bill Mollison

    If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much.

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    Bill Mollison

    If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that's a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don't poison things, they don't ruin things, they don't lose soils, they don't build things they can't sustain.

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    Bill Mollison

    If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.

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    Bill Mollison

    If you're a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.

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    Bill Mollison

    If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.

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    Bill Mollison

    I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen - whose language nobody can speak - to be very good permaculture people.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is. That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic. But you've got to say it's about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.

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    Bill Mollison

    Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

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    Bill Mollison

    I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

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    Bill Mollison

    I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.

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    Bill Mollison

    I think mine is a very rich life.

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    Bill Mollison

    I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

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    Bill Mollison

    I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    It’s a revolution. But it’s the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better. You might have less money to earn because your food is all around you and you don’t have any energy costs. Giant amounts of money might be freed up in society so that we can provide for ourselves better. So it’s a revolution. But permaculture is anti-political. There is no room for politicians or administrators or priests. And there are no laws either. The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.

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    Bill Mollison

    Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity - you couldn't flush the toilet without it. It's a huge dependency situation.

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    Bill Mollison

    Once you've said to yourself, "But I'm not using my physics in my house," or "I'm not using my ecology in my garden, I've never applied it to what I do," it's like something physical moves inside your brain. Suddenly you say, "If I did apply what I know to how I live, that would be miraculous!" Then the whole thing unrolls like one great carpet. Undo one knot, and the whole thing just rolls downhill.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    People do things which I find quite amazing - things I would never have done and can't understand very well.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.

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    Bill Mollison

    Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.

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    Bill Mollison

    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.

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    Bill Mollison

    Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.

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    Bill Mollison

    Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system