Bill Mollison Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).

  Bill Mollison

  Law, Failing

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Mollison

  People, Urban, Spoiled

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Bill Mollison

  Voting, Rolling, World

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Way, Boxes

  Source: permaculturenews.org

  10 Copy quote

• Pollution is an unused resource.

  Bill Mollison

  Pollution, Resources

  12 Copy quote

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

  Bill Mollison

  Together, Assembly, Ifs

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Bill Mollison

  People, Looks, Want

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Mollison

  Moving, Fall, Air

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

  18 Copy quote

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

  Bill Mollison

  Animal, Found, Produce

  27 Copy quote

• Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.

  Bill Mollison

  Weed, Past, Balance

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Needs, Lessons, Lasts

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Errors, Design, Type

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Animal, Cities

  20 Copy quote

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

  Bill Mollison

  Thinking, World, Natural

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

• There are a few societies that show signs of having been very rational about the physics of construction and the physics of real life. Some of the old middle-Eastern societies had downdraft systems over whole cities, and passive, rapid-evaporation ice-making systems. They were rational people using good physical principles to make themselves comfortable without additional sources of energy.

  Bill Mollison

  Real, Ice, Cities

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

• Say you're working for a big overseas aid organization. You can't leave home in a Mercedes Benz, travel 80 kilometers to work in a great concrete structure where there are diesel engines thundering in the basement just to keep it cool enough for you to work in, and plan mud huts for Africa! You can't get the mud huts right if you haven't got things right where you are. You've got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

  Bill Mollison

  Home, Organization, Mud

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Wind, Fire, Water

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Mollison

  Teaching, People, Desert

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Mollison

  Simple, Weather, Long

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Mollison

  Ice, Water, Alcohol

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Layers, Fuzzy, Boundaries

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

  9 Copy quote

• Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.

  Bill Mollison

  Skills, Use, Way

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Eerie, Agriculture, Design

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy 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

  Together, Extinction, Enough

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  5 Copy quote

• We have to rethink how we're going to live on this earth - stop talking about the fact that we've got to have agriculture, we've got to have exports, because all that is the death of us.

  Bill Mollison

  Talking, Agriculture, Earth

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

  4 Copy quote

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