„There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.10
Frases de Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison
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Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison
Fecha de nacimiento: 4. Mayo 1928
Fecha de muerte: 24. Septiembre 2016
Bruce Charles Mollison fue un biólogo, investigador, científico, profesor, activista y naturalista australiano.
Conocido como 'padre de la permacultura', un sistema de diseño integrado u holista desarrollado conjuntamente con David Holmgren que enlaza agricultura, geografía, arquitectura, ganadería, edafología, economía, sociología y agroecología, avanzando en su conexión con estrategias de acceso a las tierras y sistemas legales de grupos sociales y empresas.
Recibió el Premio Right Livelihood en 1981 junto con Patrick van Rensburg. Bill Mollison falleció el 24 de septiembre de 2016, a la edad de 88 años.
Frases Bruce Charles "Bill" Mollison
„… 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 have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 7.1
„Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 9.1
„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: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.2
„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
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.2
„A bird's-eye view of centralised and disempowered societies will reveal a strictly rectilinear network of streets, farms, and property boundaries. It is as though we have patterned the earth to suit our survey instruments rather than to serve human or environmental needs. We cannot perhaps blame Euclid for this, but we can blame his followers. The straight-line patterns that result prevent most sensible landscape planning strategies and result in neither an aesthetically nor functionally satisfactory landscape or stretscape. Once established, then entered into a body of law, such inane (or insane) patterning is stubbornly defended. But it is created by, and can be dismantled by, people.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.21
„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
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.4
quoting Vogel, Steven, Life in Moving Fluids; the Physical Biology of Flow, Willard Grant Press, Boston, 1981.
„Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disoder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.9
„Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use or value them creatively.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.7
„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.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 3.10
„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
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.5
„In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.15
„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
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.7
„Peat preserves timber, animals, and such unexpected treasure-troves as hoards of acorns and firkins of beech butter from the forests which preceded the bogs. A whole archaeology may very well lie in peat, and the pollen record may reveal past history. At the base of Irish bogs the Fir Bolg (the little people), their axes, bridges, butter, and forest life are well preserved. They and their forests were banished, as if by magic, by the Tuatha de Danan (the Children of Diana) who now dig the peat. Diana was displaced in turn by Mary, mother of God. But all are mixed in the peat and the tongue of Ireland.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 9.9
„As we read this, we stand in the plane of the present; we are the sum of all our ancestors, and the origin of all our descendents. In terms of our model, we are at an ever-changing origin, located on the boundary of past and future. As well, we are spinning with the earth, spiralling with the galaxy, and expanding or contracting with the universe. As origins, we are on the move in time and space, and all these movements have a characteristic pulse rate.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.19
„In any group endeavour, there are practical and effective, or impractical and ineffective, ways to manage a complex system. Impractical, frustrating, and time-consuming systems are those governed by large boards, assemblies, or groups (seven or more people). These "meetings" have a chairperson, agendas, proposals, votes, or use consensus, and can go on for hours. Consensus, in particular, is an endless and pointless affair, with coercion of the often silent or incoherent abstainer by a vociferous minority. Thus, decisions reached by boards, parliaments, and consensus groups either oppress some individuals (votes) or are vetoed by dissenters. In either case, we have tyranny of a majority or tyranny of a minority, and a great deal of frustration and wasted time. The way to abolish such systems is to have one meeting where the sole agenda is to vote to abolish decision meetings -- this is usually carried unanimously -- and another where a consensus is reached to abolish consensus -- this too shouldn't take long.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.10
„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
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 12.15
„We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently …“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.8
„Life is also busy transporting and overturning the soils of earth, the stones, and the minerals. The miles-long drifts of sea kelp that float along our coasts may carry hundreds of tons of volcanic boulders held in their roots. I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 8.20
„A people without an agreed-upon common basis to their actions is neither a community nor a nation. A people with a common ethic is a nation wherever they live. Thus, the place of habitation is secondary to a shared belief in the establishment of an harmonious world community. Just as we can select a global range of plants for a garden, we can select from all extant ethics and beliefs those elements that we see to be sustainable, useful, and beneficial to life and to our community.“
— Bill Mollison
Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 14.2
