Founded by Steve Solomon, the Soil and Health Library – http://www.soilandhealth.org/ – is a source of rare and out-of-print books about agriculture, natural health, personal sovereignty and spiritual freedom. The library is arranged in these four main categories and has been available for more than a decade. Steve Solomon started the site in 1997. Justin Crawford took it over in 2010 and is now maintaining it. There is also a fairly active mailing list to discuss matters of agriculture, health and freedom at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/soilandhealth/

The website provides free e-books, 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 the use of this service.

There are four major subject areas:

Radical Agriculture. The nutritional qualites of food and consequently the health of the animals and humans eating that food are determined by soil fertility. This section’s interest is far wider than organic gardening and farming; other health-determined approaches to food-raising are also included. See the Agriculture Library

The Restoration and Maintenance of Health. Nutritional medicine heals disease, builds and maintains health with diet—and sometimes heals with fasting or other forms of dietary restriction. There are many approaches represented in this collection. There is also a collection concerning longevity and nutritional anthropology. A new medical reference library has been added to this collection. See the Health Library

Achieving Personal Sovereignty. Physical, mental, and spiritual health are linked to one’s lifestyle. This collection focuses on liberating activities, especially homesteading and the skills it takes to do that—small-scale entrepreneuring, financial independence, frugality, and voluntary simplicity. There is also a collection of social criticism, especially from a back-to-the-land point of view. See the Personal Sovereignty Library

Achieving Spiritual Freedom. There are many seemingly-different self-betterment roads. The books in this collection seek to empower a person to effect their own development in an independent manner. See the Spiritual Freedom Library.

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.