Bill Mollison Quotes

#1. 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

Bill Mollison

#2. The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.

Bill Mollison

#3. Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex,
the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

Bill Mollison

#4. If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

Bill Mollison

#5. Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order.

Bill Mollison

#6. 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

#7. 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.

Bill Mollison

#8. 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.

Bill Mollison

#9. You don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

Bill Mollison

#10. Pollution is an unused resource.

Bill Mollison

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

Bill Mollison

#12. Women are the holders of all knowledge, everything a man knows he stole from a woman.

Bill Mollison

#13. There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

Bill Mollison

#14. The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.

Bill Mollison

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.

Bill Mollison

#18. We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

Bill Mollison

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

Bill Mollison

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

Bill Mollison

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

Bill Mollison

#22. Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains

Bill Mollison

#23. 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

#24. The value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water. Those property-owners with a constant source of pure water already have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income.

Bill Mollison

#25. To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality

Bill Mollison

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

Bill Mollison

#27. 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

#28. If you only do one thing, collect rainwater ...

Bill Mollison