“Scientific discoveries happen not through method or magic, but from being open to discovery by listening to one’s emotions and responding to intuition. Like a poet, the researcher, as well as the therapist, needs the ability to imagine what the truth might be. Each tests it, but in a different way. The poet words a couplet, the therapist tries a strategy, and the researcher tests hypotheses. A theorist, however, must be aware of all three.” Pauline Boss from an OnBeing interview with Krista Tippets 12/13/18
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
David Foster commencement speech, Kenyon College, 2005
“Today is difficult, tomorrow is much more difficult, the day after tomorrow is very beautiful, but most die tomorrow evening.”
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
“Designers are optimistic people who are trained to be courageous about the future – and making the future happen. The aren’t always aware of the intricacies of operations and the impacts of the solutions they propose, just like entrepreneurs, but they aren’t afraid of confronting a blank piece of paper… and getting to work making something new.”
“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.“
“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”
“Don’t fight forces, use them.”
“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. “
“Permaculture is revolution disguised as organic gardening”
Graham Burnett ‘Permaculture: A Beginners Guide’
“Observe Nature thoroughly rather than labour thoughtlessly”
Masanoba Fukuoka ‘One Straw Revolution’
“Of course, chaos can lead to failure and extinction. But so can order. Far more nations, people, and ideas die of atrophy than die from revolution. Both order and chaos are necessary ingredients for long run success – for sustainability.”
John Ikerd, “Small Farms Are Real Farms“
“One of the most important things about permaculture is that it is founded on a series of principles that can be applied to any circumstance—agriculture,urban design, or the art of living. The core of the principles is the working relationships and connections between all things.”
Juliana Birnbaum Fox, “Sustainable Revolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide“
“Most permaculturists are expert at understanding the relationships between landforms and water harvesting or between soil microorganisms and plant health. But when it comes to our human relationships, we often founder. Nurturing the vegetables in the garden is a lot easier than nurturing our connections to the people who decide where to plant the vegetables and who will water them.”
Juliana Birnbaum Fox, “Sustainable Revolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide“
Permaculture is based on the observation of natural systems, the wisdom contained in traditional farming systems, and modern scientific and technological knowledge. Although based on good ecological models, permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.”
Bill Mollison “Introduction to Permaculture”
Permaculture is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
Graham Bell, The Permaculture Way
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe
Speed is irrelevant if you are going in the wrong direction.
“Is it all worth it? If we do our best to heal the Earth and make our place in her a sustainable one, is there a good chance that we will succeed? To my mind that’s the wrong question. Even if we could answer it – and we can never know anything about the future for certain – it would beg the question: How do I want to live my life? So my answer to the question is that I want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”
Patrick Whitefield “The Earth Care Manual”
Q. So are there specific things that you’d like to see changed? Forget about what the activists want, forget about public opinion for a second, just from the perspective of what science suggests would be good for the animals …
A. People get into, “big is bad, small is good.” It’s not that simple. The key is management. Whether you are big or small, you’ve got to have good management. Another thing you cannot do is understaff and overwork. If you overwork people they are going to get so tired there’s no way they can do things right.
We’ve got to figure out sensible things to do. The thing that worries me on a lot of these issues is that we’ve got more and more people getting involved who have never done anything practical, because schools have taken out all the cooking, sewing, woodworking, and art. And in the real world of practical things, nothing can be perfect. You can work to make it better, but it won’t be perfect.
You have to pick out some specific thing to work on. I worked on improving slaughter plants — that’s a specific thing. You gotta pick out something specific if you want to make constructive change on the ground, not destructive change. We have this abstractification, with activists attacking things they don’t even know anything about. And ag has responded poorly. Ag gag laws: dumbest thing they could have ever done. That just makes you look guilty. Why are they passing laws to make it a crime to videotape something?
Temple Grandin, Grist interview