Mollison Way Quotes & Sayings

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

A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws). — 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. — Bill Mollison

Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order. — Bill Mollison

You don't have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency. — Bill Mollison

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

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

The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. — Bill Mollison

There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help. They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience. — Bill Mollison

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

Maven Gustav, what is that awful noise?" Tobin bellowed, holding his hands over his ears.
"Why, it's my very own creation!" Gustav replied, beaming with pride. "I made this spell to be activated in the event of a castle emergency. In all my tests, it never failed to wake everyone," he noted, proudly.
"Yes, Gustav. It's fantastically loud. Well done. But what is the emergency, and how do we turn the alarm off? — R.S. Mollison-Read

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

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

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

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers. — Bill Mollison

Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living. It uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers — Bill Mollison

Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains — Bill Mollison

To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality — Bill Mollison

The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves. — 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. — Bill Mollison

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities — 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 — 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. — Bill Mollison

The horrifying sound of breaking glass, and a thunderous tirade of splintering pieces hitting the floor, stunned them all. Tobin spun around in shock. The massive Travelling Mirror, through which Tobin and Murphy had so recently arrived, shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces, cascading down the wall, and onto the floor in an enormous pile of jagged edges. The hall was still as everyone stared at the shattered mirror in shocked silence.
"Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dear," whispered Elbert. — R.S. Mollison-Read

Shaking his head, Tobin turned back to his picnic spread, and there, sitting on the end of the checkered cloth, and helping himself to one of Tobin's cupcakes, was a tiny brown squirrel.
Tobin blinked in surprise.
The squirrel was exceptionally bold. He made absolutely no move to leave, despite Tobin's frown, and merely stuffed more pink icing into his mouth with one tiny paw. His ears were tufted into small points, and he tilted his head to the side as he surveyed Tobin with bright, inquisitive eyes.
Tobin had to laugh. "Well, I suppose I don't mind sharing with you, little guy, even if you did eat one of my cupcakes," Tobin chuckled to himself.
"I should hope so. Frankly, I'm surprised that you thought you could even eat five cupcakes all by yourself," the squirrel replied airily. — R.S. Mollison-Read

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater ... — 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 ... — Bill Mollison

Women are the holders of all knowledge, everything a man knows he stole from a woman. — Bill Mollison

Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively. — Bill Mollison

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

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter. — Bill Mollison

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex,
the solutions remain embarrassingly simple. — 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. — 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. — Bill Mollison

Pollution is an unused resource. — Bill Mollison

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