Soil And Health Library
Health begins in the soil; Healing begins with hygiene; Liberty begins with freedom.

This is a free public library of holistic agriculture, holistic health, self-sufficient living, and personal development. It offers you the opportunity to read accurately rendered, unabridged 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 hard to find; many are old enough to be public domain.

The Soil and Health Library has four major sections:

Radical Agriculture. Here, the underlying 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 Maintenance 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, especially homesteading and the skills it takes to do that: small-scale entrepreneuring, financial independence, frugality, and voluntary simplicity. There is also a collection on 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, 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.

Newest Titles Date Added Soil and Sense, Graham 05/01 Pay Dirt, J.I. Rodale 04/01 Friend Earthworm, Oliver 04/01 The Saccharine Disease, Clive 03/01 History of a Crime Against The Pure Food Law, Wylie 03/01 The Clifton Park System of Farming, Elliot 01/01 The City Forest, Yeomans 01/01 High Road to Hunza, Mons 12/00 The Challenge of Landscape, Yeomans 12/00 Health and Survival in the 21st Century, Horne 10/00

ALSO: CONTACT US | YOUR PARTICIPATION | LONG RANGE PLAN The books we provide are deciphered by Caere's OmniPage Professional software, using an Epson Perfection scanner (a gift to the library courtesy of Lee Larson of Portland, Oregon). After spotting the dubious scans as they are automatically indicated by OmniPage, the copy is carefully read for errors in MSWord; and thence to html using Claris HomePage, which is an elementary WYSIWYG program, but effective enough for the purpose of book text online. Still, 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 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 how to continue the availability of these books once my meager retirement assets become my estate and not what I'm living on. Includes a long-range plan (books to be done eventually) for the development of this library How to enjoy reading these books more. This library has intentionally been formatted to work for the most primitive sorts of browser programs. The books it contains carry no instructions for the display of any particular fonts and only in a few cases are line lengths specified. But unfortunately, most users 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 set your browser window quite narrow, so as to better mimic the line length found in ordinary books.   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 knowledge 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. Take the U.S. for 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 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. A similar process has occurred in Australia and Canada.     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 country folk 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 global 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, scannable 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 don't wish to donate the book. 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. Eventually I hope the physical in-print library built around this website will end up as a special collection here in Tasmania or elsewhere down under. 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 eventually be needed to keep this library going.   Who Is Creating This Site? This site is created by 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