Soil And Health Library
Health begins in the soil; Healing begins with hygiene;
Liberty begins with freedom.
This is a free public library of alternative
agriculture, holistic health, self-sufficient living, and personal development. It
offers accurate, full-texts of carefully-selected older books whose importance and
contemporary relevance has not diminished. Most books in this library are out of
print and can be very hard to find; many are old enough to be public domain.
The Soil and Health Library has four
major sections:
- Radical Agriculture. Here, the theme is how to create physical health
through nutrition. 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 Maintence of Health. Here, the focus is nutritional
medicine, primarily on Natural Hygiene, which heals by limiting or reducing nutrition.
There are also selections concerning longevity and nutritional anthropology. Go to
the Health Library
- Achieving Personal Sovereignty. Physical, mental, and spiritual health
are interlinked, holistic. This library focuses on liberating achievements: homesteading,
small-scale entrepreneuring, financial independence, frugality, and voluntary simplicity.
Go to the Personal Sovereignty
Library
- Achieving Spiritual Freedom. There are many seemingly-different self-betterment
roads, most leading to the same place. Most spiritual seekers choose a path that
aligns with their own predispositions. My preferences are for methods that empower
a person to self-determinedly handle their own development in an independent manner.
Go to the Spiritual
Freedom Library.
ALSO:
- The books we provide are deciphered by Caere's Omni-Page Professional software.
After spotting the dubious scans as they are automatically indicated by Omni-Page,
the copy is carefully read for errors in MS Word. Still, there will almost certainly
be some typos remaining. If you find any, 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 Organization maintains links to
other sites that support its aims and goals.
- Letters from patrons of the
Soil and Health Library.
- An open letter from Steve Solomon
to the patrons of the library asking for advice about shaping a foundation or other
enduring trust to continue the availability of these books using my personal estate
once my assets become my estate and not what I'm living on.
The Purpose Of Soil And Health (dot) Org
I prefer to learn by going back to the originators of a body
of knowledge because those who follow in the founders' footsteps are rarely trailblazers
of equivalent depth. 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--while on some levels,
some things hardly ever change at all.
However, there are powerful tendencies on Earth causing the
foundations of knowledge to be lost in obscurity. That would be okay if there were
better knowldege and wiser wisdoms coming on line to replace them. But usually the
opposite is the case. I have observed this tendency in every area of study I've taken
up seriously: history, agriculture, natural medicine, even investing. 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.
Here's an example. Despite all the recent advances of so-called
"scientific" 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, while 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 also devastated the self-sufficient,
independent lifestyles enjoyed by so many Americans as recently as one century ago.
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 we do today. The current decline in personal rights in America 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. Only free persons can forthrightly demand
their liberties.
I think what has happened since 1870 was, as the industrial
food system became ever more "efficient" it also made the price of
basic agricultural commodities lower and lower. Consequently most Americans rejected
their self-sufficient-farm birthright for a paying job in town, and soon became wage-enslaved.
Wage slaves, like all other kinds of slaves, feel insecure and think that they have
to shuck and jive in order to survive.
The industrial system's focus is on 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 neighbors whose mental awareness
seems wrapped in fat. Americans especially are disdained world wide for being hugely
obese. Americans spend ever-larger portions of their productivity on the treatment
and cure of disease. This whole area of "health" care is not really a productive
use of effort, but really constitutes enormous waste, pain, and suffering, whose
source is almost entirely unappreciated.
Dr. Isabelle Moser, who spent 25 years conducting a clinical
practice using holistic approaches, told me 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.)
Maybe someone will write in and tell me who the sage was
that so wisely 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.
I've observed that modern higher education points people's
attention away from the Truth and toward an ever-increasing confusion created by
too much data. In consequence, many can no longer recognize evil, even when it is
in front of their eyes. So I am making it my personal work to restore 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 already
hear.
How You Can Help
If you admire what is being done here and wish to assist this effort:
- You can offer to scan/transcribe/error-check one or more books for inclusion
in the Soil and Health Organization's virtual library.
- You can suggest titles for inclusion.
- You can provide the library with a loan of a clean, scanable copy of one of the
books we are interested in finding and reproducing (see our bibliographies). The
price of mailing the book will be paid both ways if you ask. Your willingness to
loan copies for scanning will be essential to the growth of this library because
I have settled permanently in a remote part of Australia. The libraries here do not
offer much in the areas this website focuses on.
- You can make a contribution to help cover the costs of this site. Expenses are
not large, but having a domain name, offering significant amounts of bytes for free
download on the world wide web, and buying old books do cost. Go
to our financial statement.
- You can participate in an ongoing discussion about how to continue the work of
this library after its founder passes to the next life. If interested, click here
and find out what provisions have already
been made and what more might be done. The personal involvement of a few remarkable
beings will be needed to keep this library going.
Who Is Creating This Site?
My name is Steve
Solomon. Click here to go to my personal page and find out about me.
Click here to communicate via email at ssolomon@soilandhealth.org
Write via ordinary mail to:
Steve Solomon
P.O. Box 524
Exeter, Tasmania 7275
Australia
The materials on this site are NOT copyright by Soil and
Health Organization. If anything available here is copyrighted by another, in conformity
with generally agreed-upon copyright protection practices, that fact will be plainly
made known at the opening of the work, just as in any other book printed on paper.
Reproduction and dissemination of uncopyrighted materials on this site is encouraged,
so long as no alterations are made in the material and the documents herein are maintained
complete and entire. Under the rules regarding "Fair Use (as interpreted by
this Library)," a library, including this electronic one, can make a copy of
any book it cannot purchase in new form on the retail market. However, further reproduction
and dissemination of copyrighted materials by the patrons of this library is prohibited
by international agreement and U.S. Copyright Law. Saving downloaded copyrighted
material on your own hard disk constitutes copying. So if you wish to remain
within the laws (as we interpret it) read copyrighted books while online. Enjoy!
I earnestly wish this library to remain within the law regarding
copyright infringement. Periodically I check the availability of books that do or
that may have existing copyrights. Should one of these turn up to be in print, I
will immediately remove the copy from this library and refer the reader to a source
where an in-print-on-paper version may be purchased. Should any user of this library
know of any book in the library that is in print, please advise ssolomon@soilandhealth.org
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