Best 23 quotes in «permaculture quotes» category

The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

Abbiamo inventato la parola biologico perché abbiamo agito in modo non biologico. Abbiamo inventato la parola naturale perché abbiamo agito in modo innaturale. Abbiamo inventato la parola permacultura perché abbiamo creato l’agricoltura.

A sacred way of life connects us to the people and places around us. That means that a sacred economy must be in large part a local economy, in which we have multidimensional, personal relationships with the land and people who meet our needs, and whose needs are met in turn.

Am inventat cuvântul organic doar pentru că am făcut lucruri anorganice. Am inventat cuvântul natural doar pentru că am făcut lucruri nenaturale. Am inventat cuvântul permacultură doar pentru că am făcut agricultură.

In fact they were looking for weapons eager to find something they could justify the millions of dollars and massive deployment of personnel, the collection of stun-guns, tear-gas guns, pepper-spray guns, M16’s, horses, clubs, and armored personnel carriers with which they intended to protect the city from our hordes of puppet carriers and potentially illegal gardeners

It is only our limited time frame that creates the whole "natives versus exotics" controversy. Wind animals, sea currents, and continental drift have always dispersed species into new environments... The planet has been awash in surging , swarming species movement since life began. The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot is persuasive testimony to the fact that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.

Most permaculturists are expert at understanding the relationships between landforms and water harvesting or between soil microorganisms and plant health. But when it comes to our human relationships, we often founder. Nurturing the vegetables in the garden is a lot easier than nurturing our connections to the people who decide where to plant the vegetables and who will water them.

One of the most important things about permaculture is that it is founded on a series of principles that can be applied to any circumstance—agriculture,urban design, or the art of living. The core of the principles is the working relationships and connections between all things.

Permaculture land-use ethics invite us to protect intact ecosystems where they remain and, where ecosystems have been destroyed, to help restore them. Permaculture design also suggests that we take care of earth while taking care of people.

All the world's problems can be solved in a garden.

Each such cycle is a unique event; diet, choice, selection, season, weather, digestion, decomposition and regeneration differ each time it happens. Thus, it is the number of such cycles, great and small, that decide the potential for diversity. We should feel ourselves privileged to be part of such eternal renewal. Just by living we have achieved immortality - as grass, grasshoppers, gulls, geese and other people. We are of the diversity we experience in every real sense. If, as physical scientists assure us, we all contain a few molecules of Einstein, and if the atomic particles of our physical body reach to the outermost bounds of the universe, then we are all de facto components of all things. There is nowhere left for us to go if we are already everywhere, and this is, in truth, all we will ever have or need. If we love ourselves at all, we should respect all things equally, and not claim any superiority over what are, in effect, our other parts. Is the hand superior to the eye? The bishop to the goose? The son to the mother?

I think there has always been a strong crossover between the household- and community-level design in permaculture. From the beginnings of permaculture in the 1970s, there was a close connection to the 'back to the land' movement and the counterculture. Within that broad movement, international communities and ecovillages were major themes.

Of course, chaos can lead to failure and extinction. But so can order. Far more nations, people, and ideas die of atrophy than die from revolution. Both order and chaos are necessary ingredients for long run success - for sustainability.

The natural world is built upon common motifs and patterns. Recognizing patterns in nature creates a map for locating yourself in change, and anticipation what is yet to come.

Trust is built in many ways: by creating opportunities to share something of our lives and feelings, by encouraging people to argue passionately for their ideas and positions while still respecting their opponents' right to differ, by meeting responsibilities and building a track record of dependability, and by sharing risks together.

When God created the Garden of Eden, She didn’t use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and GMO apples.

There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.

We only invented the word organic because we made things inorganic. We only invented the word natural because we made things unnatural. We only invented the word permaculture because we made agriculture.

When God created the Garden of Eden, She became the first permaculturalist.

You can spend your whole life traveling around the world searching for the Garden of Eden, or you can create it in your backyard.

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.

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.