… 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.

Source: Wikiquote: "Bill Mollison" (Sourced: Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) Course, 1983 "So what's the point of a fiscal economy? The point is, that it's really an invention that feeds upon distrust, for the benefit of stupidity. And if you don't tell me that greed is not stupidity, you're not thinking... 'Cause in any area where you have a finite resource, and here we are... all sitting in a finite resource, it doesn't make sense to be greedy. It makes sense to increase the procreative resource so that greed becomes obsolete. Thats what makes sense, that's what's intelligent. Stupidity is to grab what you can. Intelligence is to grow so much, there is no need to grab anything. That is intelligence. Stupidity is greed. On a broad enough scale it becomes evil. If you ever wondered what evil is, it is stupidity on a large scale.", Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988): "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action: of looking at systems and people in all their functions rather than asking only one yield of them; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions. A basic question that can be asked in two ways is: ‘What can I get from this land or person?’ and 'What does this person have to give if I cooperate with them?' Of these two approaches, the former leads to war and waste, the later to peace and plenty." -Bill Mollison) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app