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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Flight From The City, by Ralph Borsodi, written 1933
  • Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 21:32:49 -0600


I'm strongly recommending Flight From The City, by Ralph Borsodi, written
1933 and more relevant today than seventy years ago. This link has the
complete book online. Comments welcome tradingpost@gilanet.com or
webmaster@globalcircle.net

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030204borsodi/030204borsoditoc.html

paul tradingpost@gilanet.com

------------------------
This is from an intro to the Soil And Health Library online by Steve Solomon,
Tazmania, Australia, at http://www.soilandhealth.org/index.html


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.

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 degredation 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 move lower and lower as their quality also moved 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. Australians and
Canadians are going the same way. I cannot testify about other parts of
Earth, not having travelled extensively. Americans, Canadians and Australians
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. See also: Shelton's Orthotrophy, Chapter 36.)

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.


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  • [Livingontheland] Flight From The City, by Ralph Borsodi, written 1933, Tradingpost, 10/11/2003

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