20 quotes
There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use or value them creatively.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
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.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Continue by constant assessment, consultation, feedback and innovative trials. Fill niches as they evolve.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Establish nursery and use selected varietal forms for new or replacement crop.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Commence broadscale placements with or after windbreak and nurse crop.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Analyse and get advice on soils and necessary nutrients.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Plan and carry out essential earthworks.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
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.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
"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."
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Plan ground layout and windbreak, access, and water. Detailing can follow later.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Assess market; future; prices; potential for processing to higher value; labour; shares, legal systems; social necessities and local self-reliance needs.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
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.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Steps in total planning are roughly in priority
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
Security can be found in renunciation of ownership over people, money, and real assets; to gain, keep or protect that which others need for periods of legitimate access. A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
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.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
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.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
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.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)
What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988)