Permaculture by Quotes

What are some memorable/favorite quotes by permaculturalists (from well known to obscure/anonymous) that are profound or concise in explaining an aspect or the whole of the spirit of permaculture?

For my part, I am partial to "what less can I do?" from Fukuoka, but such can be rivaled and unseated/unseeded.

"When it is all said and done, and the coffin is in the ground, it is the farmer who is the richest man of all".

My Uncle in 1998

"Permaculture as a design system contains nothing new.  It arranges what was always there in a different way, so that it works to conserve energy or to generate more energy than it consumes.  What is novel, and often overlooked, is that any system of total common-sense design for human communities is revolutionary!"  Bill Mollison

"One certain result of using our skills to integrate food supply and settlement, to catch water from our roof areas, and to place nearby a zone of fuel forest which receives wastes and supplies energy, will be to free most of the area of the globe for the rehabilitation of natural systems.  These need never be looked upon as 'of use to people', except in the very broad sense of global health."  Bill Mollison

Tyler Ludens wrote:"Permaculture as a design system contains nothing new.  It arranges what was always there in a different way, so that it works to conserve energy or to generate more energy than it consumes.  What is novel, and often overlooked, is that any system of total common-sense design for human communities is revolutionary!"  Bill Mollison

Thanks Tyler, I like the first one particularly. I found another by Mollison just before: “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.”

You don't strike me as an idle dreamer.... perhaps an ideal dreamer, the best kind!

Learn, Live, Share.
This is my motto for how I live my life.
Try to LEARN something new that enriches how you LIVE, your life, and SHARE it so someone else can benefit from it.
It's like the Permies site really.

This might not be the best and I can't remember the woman's name that said it but I'll never forget it "How can I live in excess when others are in need"!

These are a couple of quotes by Bill Mollison that I like:  We’d had agriculture for 7,000 years, and we’d been losing for 7,000 years — everything was turning into desert. So I wondered, can we build systems that obey ecological principles? We know what they are, we just never apply them. Ecologists never apply good ecology to their gardens. Architects never understand the transmission of heat in buildings. And physicists live in houses with demented energy systems. It’s curious that we never apply what we know to how we actually live.  
Make the least changes that you need to achieve what you want.

Don’t cut a tree down unless you have to

Geoff Lawton says "We can solve all the world's problems in a garden."  I like it in part because you can look at it at so many different levels, from the peace we find for ourselves working in our gardens to the peace it could bring the world if people all over the world were feeling secure in their food supply because of their gardens.

"Where water runs, make it walk."  This one is just such an easy axiom for expressing a fundamental permaculture concept, not only in terms of how to manage water but it also applies to holding energy as long as possible in your system.  

If you dont have a pig, you have to be the pig

Sepp

Modern Agriculture was a lie when it came into being, it is still a lie and will always be a lie. Perpetuated for the sole purpose of creating a false need and to feed greed of companies.-- Wendell Berry

Our motive for protecting the soil is our certainty that it is fragile. It does not have the same unchanging character as a mountain or a river; it is a recent and ephemeral product. We owe it our lives and our energy, and the bodies we give it back are not payment enough.   - William Bryant Logan

What is Permaculture?
Permaculture is designing sustainably abundant societies as part of protecting and preserving water supply, agricultural land and the greater environment. The word is derived from Permanent Agriculture and Permanent Culture with the aim being to use practices that enable agriculture and culture to slowly improve and strengthen as time progresses

"Where water runs, make it walk."  This one is just such an easy axiom for expressing a fundamental permaculture concept, not only in terms of how to manage water but it also applies to holding energy as long as possible in your system.

Some great ones on this thread.  Here is one of my faves:


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

Virtually everything we take for granted today is on an unsustainable trajectory. Isn’t it inevitable that anything unsustainable must end someday?  The time to build self-reliance and independence is now, everything that is currently taking place around us suggests that we have a small window of opportunity to build these alternative systems...

Despite all our achievements, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

I myself LOVE this quote as I love growing things(medicinal plants & trees) and 'muck around in earth'.

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

John F Dean wrote:Hi Mark,

Welcome to Permies.

Thanks John, been a member for a while. More a looker and learner & not participating much,
but was sayin' to myself how much I enjoy this great site, and that should change.

Like that Mark Twain quote btw! Hope your having a Blessed day.

Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, won the Right Livelihood Award. This is his acceptance speech from 1981.



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From Pinterest today:


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Burra Maluca wrote:It's perma-culture, not instant-culture

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I got a laugh at my PDC course when I said:

I like living on the edge, that's where the garden is most productive, where I do most of my best work, and judging by my face... the most berry consumption too.  :~)

Hamish.

Buckminster Fuller quotes:

"It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service
to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?"

"We have reached the point where we are now possessed of sufficient
information for each individual human to dare to exercise the option
to ``make it'' rather than having to depend on the decisions of an
educated elite."

"We are most probably here for local information-gathering and
local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally
regenerative Universe."

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change
something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

"Don't fight forces, use them"

"There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis.
There is only a crisis of ignorance."

"I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset
whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually
exclusive."

"I'm not trying to imitate nature, I'm trying to find the principles she's using."

"Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly
one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the
theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that
specialization precludes comprehensive thinking."

"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you its going to be a butterfly."

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Edward Abbey quotes:

“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.”

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.”

“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”

“Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.”

“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”

“We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.”

“One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”

“We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.”

“What most people really desire is something quite different from industrial gimmickry- liberty, spontaneity, nakedness, mystery, wildness, wilderness.”

“Seeds are life”
My friend Seedgal

Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive.
— David Holmgren

Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.
— Bill Mollison