My students are constantly amazing me..

I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them..

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

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

I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to..

We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything..

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 ….

You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that..

We have to rethink how we're going to live on this earth - stop talking about the fact that we've got to have agriculture, we've got to have exports,….

There are a few societies that show signs of having been very rational about the physics of construction and the physics of real life. Some of the ol….

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 simpl….

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher..

One of the great rules of design is do something basic right. Then everything gets much more right of itself. But if you do something basic wrong - i….

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 ….

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….

The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permacul….

We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some ama….

Most modern homes are simply uninhabitable without electricity - you couldn't flush the toilet without it. It's a huge dependency situation..

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 ….

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 ….

If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself..