permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

http://soilandhealth.org/about-the-library/
About the Library

The Soil and Health Library is a not-for-profit association incorporated in
New South Wales, Australia.

*Values*

   - We recognize the seed/soil/water/air environment as the basis of human
   health.
   - We wish for all beings to enjoy deep physical, social and spiritual
   health.
   - We reject the perpetration of greed, hatred and confusion.
   - We support wisdom and clarity in our individual, spiritual and
   community lives.

*Mission*
To preserve key original agriculture, health, spiritual freedom, personal
sovereignty and environmental publications, and make them available on the
internet.

*Vision*
To make works available that empower people to grow their own food, be
healthy and think for themselves. Self-empowerment is true freedom.


*Why Focus On Older Books *The wisest student learns from the originators
of a body of knowledge because those following the founders’ footsteps are
not trailblazers of equivalent depth. This is especially true of post WWII
academics and professors that must publish . . . or perish. Even when the
earliest works in a field contain errors because their authors lacked data
or had a fact wrong, their books still contain enormous wisdom.

There are powerful trends obscuring older 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, 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
<https://soilandhealth.org/copyrighted-book/the-rich-and-the-super-rich/>
explains exactly how this works.

Here’s an example of the result of foundation- and industry-influenced
“science.” Despite all the apparent advances in broadacre agriculture, the
nutritional quality of our basic foodstuffs has declined during the last
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.

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 liberty.

Starting about 1870 the industrial food system became ever more
“efficient,” lowering 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. People 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, 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
<http://soilandhealth.org/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
<http://soilandhealth.org/book/the-wheel-of-health/>* in the Longevity
Library. See also: Shelton’s *Orthotrophy
<http://soilandhealth.org/book/the-hygienic-system-vol-ii-orthotrophy-sixth-edition/>,*
Chapter 36.)

Frank Zappa, the rock and roll sage 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 that offer major illumination to those who
can already see, books that speak the truth to those who can still hear.