Category: books

The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency

Read free. “Self-sufficiency does not mean “going back” to the acceptance of a lower standard of living. On the contrary, it is the striving for a higher standard of living, for food which is fresh and organically-grown and good, for the good life in pleasant surroundings, for the health of body and peace of mind which come with hard varied work in the open air, and for the satisfaction that comes from doing difficult and intricate jobs well and successfully.”

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Ecovillage living : restoring the earth and her people

Read free. “Today, many people dream of community, beautiful surroundings, and meaningful jobs. These people have an inner craving for a more balanced and spiritual life, a loving place for their children to grow up, and a lifestyle which does not force them to leave their children all day as a price for being full members of society. A place full of life, joy and sharing, of living close to nature with plants and animals around them, where love is more possible. All the necessary wisdom, knowledge and technology are available to help this dream come true for everybody on this planet. Ecovillages are emerging attempts at realizing it, or at the very least parts of it. They are paintings in progress, of an envisioned Paradise on Earth.”

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The art of natural building : design, construction, resources

Read free. “Representing every major natural building technique, and written by some of the most prominent innovators and advocates in the field, this collection … this book is far more than just a survey of techniques. It provides a philosophical framework for the entire natural building movement, as well as a set of design principles broadly applicable to ecological design projects everywhere. Our goal is a whole systems approach to natural building.”

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The Wild Food Trailguide

Read free. “This book is designed to enable the amateur plant hunter to make accurate and certain identifications of edible plants. The 85 plants that are covered were selected because they can be easily recognized, can supply a wide range of food products throughout the year (although the pickings are necessarily somewhat leaner in the winter months), and can be found over broad sections of the U.S. and southern Canada. These 85 plants alone provide 28 different salad greens, 18 cooked vegetables, 8 substitutes for potatoes, 18 sources of flour, 5 cooking oils and butters, 21 cold beverages, 23 substitutes for coffee and tea, and 7 sources of sugar as well as numerous potherbs, fruits, confections, jams and jellies, pies, vinegars, and even salt.”

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Future Is Now

Read free. “What do the facts of precognition mean? Do they point to any particular view regarding the nature of the universe? How can the Future exist Now? In the light of these facts, how must we regard the law of cause and effect? What significance has precognition for living? Are our lives predestined or free? These and many other questions crowd upon the mind, for it is clear that we are face to face with data of crucial importance. I have tried not to shirk the issues, and have drawn certain conclusions regarding the nature of Reality and what they involve for our personal daily living.”

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Instead of Education

Read free. “This is a book about people doing things, and doing them better; about the conditions under which we may be able to do things better; about some of the ways in which, given those conditions, other people may be able to help us (or we them) to do things better; and about the reasons why these conditions do not exist and cannot be made to exist within compulsory, coercive, competitive schools.”

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1,001 Activities for Children

Read free. “It is my hope that your child will find these ‘wonders’ simple, uncomplicated, and ‘ordinary.’ I refer to such things as playing with pots and pans, sorting knives, forks, and spoons, or just picking up a knife and looking at it.”

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Where There Is No Dentist

Read free. “Where There Is No Dentist is a book about what people can do for themselves and each other to care for their gums and teeth. Just as with the rest of health care, there is a strong need to ‘deprofessionalize’ dentistry—to provide ordinary people and community workers with more skills to prevent and cure problems in the mouth.”

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The Secret of Light

Read free. The Secret of Light is Walter Russell’s seminal work in which he lays out a unified theory of the universe, based on the concept that light—not matter or energy—is the fundamental substance of reality. He presents a vision of the cosmos as a spiritual, rhythmic, and electrical phenomenon, governed by divine intelligence rather than mechanistic forces. Russell asserts that light is the source and substance of all things. Everything we perceive as matter, energy, motion, and form is a manifestation of light, which is divided into pairs of opposites (such as light/dark, male/female, heat/cold) through rhythmic processes.

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Community Building

Read free. “Conditions for Establishing Interpersonal Relationship that Builds Up Community: To build up a community one must be (1) sensitive, (2) open, (3) sharing (receiving and giving), (4) one must call others into existence, and (5) love, (6) in an atmosphere of freedom, confidence and understanding.”

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A New Science of Life

Read free. “According to this hypothesis, systems are organized in the way they are because similar systems were organized that way in the past. For example, the molecules of a complex organic chemical crystallize in a characteristic pattern because the same substance crystallized that way before; a plant takes up the form characteristic of its species because past members of the species took up that form; and an animal acts instinctively in a particular manner because similar animals behaved like that previously.”

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Community building : renewing spirit & learning in business

Read free. “This compilation of essays represents a wide variety of perspectives of what it will take to renew one of our most depleted resources—a sense of community with each other. In our modern quest for the ‘perfect part’ we have lost touch with the ‘interconnectedness of the whole’—a byproduct of our fixation with the Industrial Age and its requisite mechanistic thinking.”

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A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Read free. “In this book, we present one possible pattern language, of the kind called for in The Timeless Way. This lan­guage is extremely practical. It is a language that we have distilled from our own building and planning ef­forts over the last eight years. You can use it to work with your neighbors, to improve your town and neighbor­hood. You can use it to design a house for yourself, with your family; or to work with other people to de­sign an office or a workshop or a public building like a school. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.”

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Environmental Design Science Primer

Read free. Environmental Design Science Primer, by Howard Brown, Robert Cook, and Medard Gabel, undated. From the Foreword: “In order to have a significant effect on vital environmental and social issues, people need to acquire the skills that will allow them to act as planners and participants, rather than as spectators in the defining and solving of problems….”

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Designing Earth Anew Together

Read free. Designing Earth Anew Together is a proposal for creating large-scale social and ecological change through collaborative global planning. Jan Hearthstone argues that humanity must move beyond isolated efforts and develop tools for co-designing solutions to today’s crises — including climate change, war, inequality, and environmental degradation.

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Farmers of Forty Centuries

Read free. Farmers of Forty Centuries; or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan is an early 20th-century work by American agronomist F.H. King. It documents his 1909 journey through East Asia, where he studied how densely populated nations managed to sustain agricultural fertility for over 4,000 years.

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