Category: books
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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….”
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.
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.
Help with Using HTML to Make Kindle Books
There are times when nothing will give you a good Kindle book like doing it in HTML. It’s a formatting language. It’s what KDP understands. You can get in there and tell it to do anything within its powers. And it’s not difficult. Back in 2015, I wrote up the instructions for how to use HTML to format Kindle books in Control Your Kindle Book Formatting: Simple Step-by-Step Instructions. You can read it here for free.
Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet • by Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith
Borrow for free. “The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. It also means defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking, but it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.”