Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.
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.
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater...
You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.
If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.
We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.
Pollution is an unused resource.
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.
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
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.
We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities.
Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality.
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.
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.
Without trees, we cannot inhabit the earth.
Animals are the messengers of the tree, and trees the gardens of animals. Life depends upon life. All forces, all elements, all life forms are the biomass of the tree.
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.