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This website provides a large number of free e-books available for immediate download. The books are mainly about holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living. There are secondary collections about social criticism and transformational psychology. No fees are collected for this service. Upon special request the Soil and Health Library provides custom-made digital copies of a far wider range of books in the same subject areas for its patrons, delivered on CD-ROM by post. There is a small fee for this service. All the library's subject areas can be comprehended as an inter-related whole and when this is done its books constitute a self-guided course of study or a self-teaching curriculum that connects agricultural methods to the health of animals and humans, shows how to prevent and heal disease and increase longevity, suggests how to live a more fulfilling life and reveals social forces working against that possibility.
The Free Digitalized Library: There are four major subject areas:
The Actual Library The "actual" Soil and Health Library is in Tasmania, Australia. After June 15th, 2007 it will be open to contributing members who wish to read one of these books or just to visit the librarian and have a cuppa. The library does not yet have regular hours; an appointment must be booked. Write to Steve Solomon, PO Box 524, Exeter, TAS 7275 Australia or ring 03 6330 1113. Eventually, most of the titles in the in-print-on-paper collection will be converted to searchable-text e-books. Until these books are made into free-to-download e-texts a copy of most of them may legally be delivered to patrons who request one in an electronic format similar to a photocopy. The copy is delivered in the form of a PDF containing a high resolution scan burned on to a CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM). Scanning-upon-demand and mailing a PDF recorded on a CD-ROM costs considerably less than making and mailing a traditional library photocopy on paper. PDF documents can be printed out at any copy shop that can process digital files, may be printed on your own PC's printer, or viewed on your PC monitor without using up any paper or other supplies. To view a low-resolution sample of what you will receive if you request a custom made copy, a few pages of a book rendered into this PDF format, maybe be downloaded by clicking here. The sample download is 500 kb. If you request a copy you will receive high-resolution images of the complete book, in its original pagination, including front matter, index (if the book has one), etc. Every title in the "actual" library catalogue that is labeled "public domain" or "out of print," is available to be scanned upon your request. To view a catalogue of the holdings of the Soil and Health Library click here:
How To Obtain a Copy To see a schedule of copy fees and instructions for ordering a copy, click here: The actual library collection is being expanded as fast as income is received by the library through membership contributions and other donations of both cash and books. To see our financial statement, click here.
Books (in-print-on-paper) Wanted To see a list of books wanted for inclusion in the Soil and Health Library click here. Most of the funds received from membership contributions will be spent upon acquiring these titles. You are invited to assist us in this area in two ways. The easy part of building this library is acquiring important books that are known about, but are not possessed yet. These are listed here. If you have any of these titles, please consider donating them. The intention is that the actual library will become a permanent planetary resource housed in a safe and stable environment. It is not absolutely necessary to donate the actual book; a scan made to our specifications can serve. Please contact the librarian about this. The harder part is finding out about important books that fit the library's subject area but that are not yet known to the librarian. If you know about any books that should be in the Soil and Health Library but are not, and are not listed in "Books Wanted," please advise the librarian.
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ALSO:
The Purpose of Soil And Health Library The wisest student learns from the originators of a body of knowledge because those who later follow in the founders' footsteps are not trailblazers of equivalent depth. This is especially true of the writings from many post WWII academics and professors who mainly write because they must publish . . . or perish. 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—whilst on some levels, some things hardly ever change at all. There are powerful forces on Earth obscuring the foundations of 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 ever-wider areas of scholarship, 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. You may find Lundberg's book in the Social Criticism collection. Here's an example of the result of foundation- and industry-influenced "science." Despite all the apparent advances in broadacre industrial 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, whilst 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 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 social liberties. This is what happened: since 1870 as the industrial food system became ever more "efficient" it lowered 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. The ones 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, 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.) It was a sage who 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 written by amazing individuals, books that offer major illumination to those who can already see, books that speak the truth to those who can still hear.
How You Can Help
If you admire what is being done here and wish to assist this
effort: This site is created by Steve Solomon. Click here to go to his personal page and find out about him. Click here to communicate
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