Guest guest Posted October 16, 2008 Report Share Posted October 16, 2008 Soil And Health Library http://www.soilandhealth.org/index.html ---- Health begins in the soil; Healing begins with hygiene; Liberty begins with freedom. This website provides a large number of free e-books available for immediate download. The books are mainly about holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living. There are secondary collections about social criticism and transformational psychology. No fees are collected for this service. Upon special request the Soil and Health Library provides custom-made digital copies of a far wider range of books in the same subject areas for its patrons, delivered on CD-ROM by post. There is a small fee for this service. All the library's subject areas can be comprehended as an inter- related whole and when this is done its books constitute a self- guided course of study or a self-teaching curriculum that connects agricultural methods to the health of animals and humans, shows how to prevent and heal disease and increase longevity, suggests how to live a more fulfilling life and reveals social forces working against that possibility. The Free Digitalized Library: There are four major subject areas: Radical Agriculture. The nutritional qualites of food and consequently the health of the animals and humans eating that food are determined by soil fertility. This section's interest is far wider than organic gardening and farming; other health-determined approaches to food-raising are also included. Go to the Agriculture Library The Restoration and Maintenance of Health. Nutritional medicine heals disease, builds and maintains health with diet—and sometimes heals with fasting or other forms of dietary restriction. There are many approaches represented in this collection. There is also a collection concerning longevity and nutritional anthropology. Go to the Health Library Achieving Personal Sovereignty. Physical, mental, and spiritual health are linked to one's lifestyle. This collection focuses on liberating activities, especially homesteading and the skills it takes to do that—small-scale entrepreneuring, financial independence, frugality, and voluntary simplicity. There is also a collection of social criticism, especially from a back-to-the-land point of view. Go to the Personal Sovereignty Library Achieving Spiritual Freedom. There are many seemingly-different self- betterment roads. The books in this collection seek to empower a person to effect their own development in an independent manner. Go to the Spiritual Freedom Library. Additionally Clippings and Miscellaneous. Since this library's beginning patrons have sent information and URLs where interesting bits of information and viewpoints could be found. Here you will find articles and essays and etc. that support and enhance the information found in our book collections. Go to the Clipping File. Latest E-Books Added. Digitalized titles added to the online Soil and Health Library in the last few months, The Actual Library The " actual " Soil and Health Library is in Tasmania, Australia. After June 15th, 2007 it will be open to contributing members who wish to read one of these books or just to visit the librarian and have a cuppa. The library does not yet have regular hours; an appointment must be booked. Write to Steve Solomon, PO Box 524, Exeter, TAS 7275 Australia or ring 03 6330 1113. Eventually, most of the titles in the in-print-on-paper collection will be converted to searchable-text e-books. Until these books are made into free-to-download e-texts a copy of most of them may legally be delivered to patrons who request one in an electronic format similar to a photocopy. The copy is delivered in the form of a PDF containing a high resolution scan burned on to a CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM). Scanning-upon-demand and mailing a PDF recorded on a CD-ROM costs considerably less than making and mailing a traditional library photocopy on paper. PDF documents can be printed out at any copy shop that can process digital files, may be printed on your own PC's printer, or viewed on your PC monitor without using up any paper or other supplies. To view a low-resolution sample of what you will receive if you request a custom made copy, a few pages of a book rendered into this PDF format, maybe be downloaded by clicking here. The sample download is 500 kb. If you request a copy you will receive high-resolution images of the complete book, in its original pagination, including front matter, index (if the book has one), etc. Every title in the " actual " library catalogue that is labeled " public domain " or " out of print, " is available to be scanned upon your request. To view a catalogue of the holdings of the Soil and Health Library How To Obtain a Copy To see a schedule of copy fees and instructions for ordering a copy, The actual library collection is being expanded as fast as income is received by the library through membership contributions and other donations of both cash and books. To see our financial statement, Books (in-print-on-paper) Wanted To see a list of books wanted for inclusion in the Soil and Health Library Most of the funds received from membership contributions will be spent upon acquiring these titles. You are invited to assist us in this area in two ways. The easy part of building this library is acquiring important books that are known about, but are not possessed yet. These are listed here. If you have any of these titles, please consider donating them. The intention is that the actual library will become a permanent planetary resource housed in a safe and stable environment. It is not absolutely necessary to donate the actual book; a scan made to our specifications can serve. Please contact the librarian about this. The harder part is finding out about important books that fit the library's subject area but that are not yet known to the librarian. If you know about any books that should be in the Soil and Health Library but are not, and are not listed in " Books Wanted, " please advise the librarian. Soil And Health Discussion Group Here, a wide ranging discussion goes on about how different agricultural and gardening methods change nutritional qualities of the foods being grown, about the resulting health of the animals and humans that eat those foods, about the best ways to homestead, to grow food, about how the current New World Order is suppressing homestead success. This is gently moderated by Steve Solomon. All points of view and opinions are welcome so long as they exhibit a respect for sustainability and human health and respect the viewpoints of others. You are welcome to post your own essays, refer to other's writings, engage in dialogues. To join the group, click here. Chat with the librarian Contributing members who wish to discuss the materials in the library or the subjects it is concerned about are invited to engage the librarian, Steve Solomon, in written chat, to talk via internet telephony using Skype or Google or to use ordinary telephone. To set this up, contact Steve Solomon via email. ALSO: Scans are made into e-books using ABBYY FineReader software. The library uses a Xerox Document Centre 286 to scan books at a high speed. Use of this machine is donated by Steve Solomon. The skills to convert scans to e-books are provided by the librarian, Steve Solomon, who once owned a typography business specializing in scholarly and trade books. Despite great care taken to eliminate inaccuracies there will almost certainly be some typos remaining. If you find any errors, or anything that even seems it might be an error, please let us know exactly what and where it is. Be specific, please. We will check it and fix it. Errors. The Soil and Health Organisation maintains links to other sites that support its aims and goals. Updating and correcting these links get little attention; most energy is put into adding to the books offered. Please accept apologies in advance for any non-current links on this list. Letters from patrons of the Soil and Health Library: a sampling of positive responses received. How to enjoy reading these books more. To make access as broad as possible this library has intentionally been primitively designed at a level of WIN95-era internet formats. The books it contains carry no html coding for the display of any particular fonts and only in a few cases are line lengths specified. Unfortunately, web users usaually set their browser windows quite wide so that whilst visiting most sites they can see all the display at once. But when reading a book on this site, it is suggested that you reset your browser window to be quite narrow, so as to better mimic the line length found in ordinary books. Some complain that reading books on a PC monitor is hard on the eyes and have asked for various " cures " such as tinted backgrounds. The real problem is too much contrast. Contrast and brightness can rapidly and easily be reduced with the settings of your own monitor. Many do not realise that post WIN95 web browsers allow specifying default fonts. Most people's default font is Times Roman, because Times is the original default provided by Microsoft. This paragraph is formatted to display in Bookman Oldstyle no matter what your browser's default setting may be. Bookman is a particularly easy font to read. To change Internet Explorer's default font this is the path: Tools/Internet Options/General/Fonts . . . and then choose what ever font you wish. In an increasing number of cases, the books are offered as PDFs. To download the reader program, " Adobe Acrobat Reader " at no cost, click the Adobe image immediately below this paragraph. The default settings on earlier versions of Adobe's PDF reader make saving of downloaded pdfs a bit awkward. To fix this use the path Edit/Preferences/Options and then untick the box that says " display pdf in browser. " The Purpose of Soil And Health Library The wisest student learns from the originators of a body of knowledge because those who later follow in the founders' footsteps are not trailblazers of equivalent depth. This is especially true of the writings from many post WWII academics and professors who mainly write because they must publish . . . or perish. Even when the earliest works in a field contain errors because their authors lacked some bit of data or had a fact wrong, their books still contain enormous wisdom. If nothing else, study of older books lets us discover that the conditions that prevail today aren't the way things always were—whilst on some levels, some things hardly ever change at all. There are powerful forces on Earth obscuring the foundations of knowledge. That would be okay if there were better knowledge and wiser wisdoms coming on line to replace them. But usually the opposite is the case. As the sort of person Sir Albert Howard called " the laboratory hermit . . . someone who knows more and more about less and less " . . . increasingly dominates ever-wider areas of scholarship, the focus of scholarship gets ever narrower, and less wise. Manipulative social-political-economic interests attempt to create Orwellian realities that suit them; their domination of academia and media makes people forget the fundamentals. Ferdanand Lundberg's book The Rich and the Super Rich explains exactly how this works. You may find Lundberg's book in the Social Criticism collection. Here's an example of the result of foundation- and industry- influenced " science. " Despite all the apparent advances in broadacre industrial agriculture, the nutritional qualities of our basic foodstuffs have been declining during this century. That's largely because most agronomists focus on bulk yield and profitability of the crop, whilst knowing next to nothing about animal/human nutrition. However, there's a little-appreciated " law " about this area: nutritional value usually drops in direct relationship to the increase in bulk production. Or, in agriculture at any rate, " quality " seems the opposite of " quantity. " Industrial agriculture has devastated self-sufficient, independent lifestyles. Take the U.S. as an example. In 1870, something like 90 percent of all Americans lived on free-and-clear farms or in tiny villages. And in consequence, enjoyed enormously greater personal liberty than today. The current decline in personal rights in America, Canada and in Australia is NOT the result of there being more people dividing up a fixed and limited amount of total possible liberty into smaller and smaller slices. It is a consequence of financial insecurity, financial dependency and wage slavery. Persons lacking financial independence rarely possess the strength to forthrightly demand social liberties. This is what happened: since 1870 as the industrial food system became ever more " efficient " it lowered the price of basic agricultural commodities. Consequently most country folk rejected their self-sufficient-farm birthright for a better-paying job in town, abandoned their technologically primitive free-and-clear homestead in favour of a city apartment (with electric power and running water) and soon became wage-enslaved. The ones who remained on the farm borrowed to invest in capital-intensive production methods and so became debt slaves. Wage- and debt-slaves, like all other kinds of slaves, feel insecure and think that in order to survive they must not reveal their true feelings, must suppress themselves whilst pleasing those in authority. The global industrial system's imperative is balance-sheet efficiency in all areas, including farming, but the apparent cheapness of economically-rational agriculture does not reflect a true accounting of costs. Despite the statistical increase in average lifespan, our average health and feelings of wellness have been declining. Consider as an example the large proportion of your neighbours whose mental awareness seems wrapped in fat. Americans especially are disdained world wide for being hugely obese. Australians and Canadians are going the same way, spending ever- larger portions of their productivity on the treatment and cure of disease. This whole activity of " health " care is not a productive use of human attention, but in reality constitutes enormous waste, pain, and suffering, suffering whose main source, poor nutrition, is almost entirely unappreciated. Dr. Isabelle Moser, who spent 25 years conducting a clinical practice using holistic approaches, suggested in private conversations that what she termed the " constitution " of her older patients was typically much stronger than the constitution of her younger ones. Each generation got a poorer start than the one before it as each generation built the foundation of their health from foods produced on ever-more degraded soils grown ever- more " scientifically, " and more and more consisting of processed, denatured fodder. (The full text of Dr. Moser's book How And When To Be Your Own Doctor, is in the Health Library.) (For a good discussion of the concept of " start, " read Wrench's Wheel of Health in the Longevity Library. See also: Shelton's Orthotrophy, Chapter 36.) It was a sage who quipped: " if they can stop you from asking the right questions, you'll never come up with the right answers. " In this library you will encounter individuals who DID ask the right questions and even came up with some of the answers. Modern higher education points people's attention away from the Truth and toward an ever-increasing confusion created by too much data. This library restores the availability of key books written by amazing individuals, books that offer major illumination to those who can already see, books that speak the truth to those who can still hear. How You Can Help If you admire what is being done here and wish to assist this effort: You can suggest titles for acquisition (or donate the books). You are invited to discuss the content and direction of this library. Suggested titles may be old enough to be public domain or at least out of print. By Australian copyright rules we usually cannot copy books for our users that are currently in print (unless they are also old enough to be public domain material). Perhaps you can lend a book for processing into an e-book after discussing the proposed title with the librarian. All lends are returned within a few weeks of receipt and return postage is paid. E-books can also be scanned from very clean, sharp photocopies; photocopies need not be returned and sending a photocopy does not place a rare book at the slight risk of loss in the post. Another way to " lend " a book without much postage cost is to scan it for us and then send the scan burned on a CD-ROM. If you wish to undertake this, it would be wise to first clear the title with the librarian. To permit accurate optical character recognition such scans must be done in greyscale, at 300 dpi, preferably in the form of TIFs. You can become a contributing member by making a once-in-a-lifetime contribution of ten Euros. Expenses of this library are not large, but having a domain name, offering significant amounts of bytes for free download and buying old books do cost. The most important aspect of patron contributions is the motivation they provide to increase the scope of this library. See the financial statement. Who Is Creating This Site? This site is created by Steve Solomon. Click here to go to his personal page and find out about him. Click here to communicate via email. Write via ordinary mail to: Steve Solomon P.O. Box 524 Exeter, Tasmania 7275 Australia http://www.soilandhealth.org/index.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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