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 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, 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.)
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.
