Free range people

I've been flicking through "The complete book of self sufficiency" by John Seymour. Its a real page turner. Here is the foreword:

"... We can do things for ourselves or we can pay others to do them for us. These are the two 'systems' that support us; we might call them the 'self-reliance system' and the 'organization system'.
In the modern world, during the last hundred years or so, there has been an enormous and historically unique shift: away from self-reliance and towards organization. As a result people are becoming less self-reliant and more dependent than has ever been seen in history. They may claim to be more highly educated than any generation before them; but the fact remains that they cannot really do anything for themselves. They depend utterly on vastly complex organizations, on fantastic machinery, on larger and larger money incomes. What if there is a hold-up, a breakdown, a strike, or unemployment? Does the state provide all that is needed? In some cases, yes; in other cases, no. Many people fall through the meshes of the safety net; and what then? ... "

They suffer because they cannot help themselves. The book goes on to show us how to help ourselves by showing us how to bake bread, brew beer, grow crops for food or energy, build solar panels and water mills, keep livestock, compost, make bricks, smoke bacon, tan leather and so on for 300 pages. You can either live by this book (perfectly feasible) or as a reference to slowly become less dependent on these systems - which I think is a good idea.

Its definintely worth having. So here is a link to the same pdf that I downloaded:

http://rapidshare.com/files/109834236/The.Complete.Book.of.Self.Sufficiency.rar