"Should we tamper with nature?" is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough.
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.
I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
My students are constantly amazing me.
Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.
I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
