Most people are at least vaguely aware that the majority of people in the world live by one form of subsistence farming or another. However, this vague understanding is generally accompanied by a set of unsubstantiated assumptions that leads them to believe that subsistence farming is inevitably associated with poverty and deprivation, and that it…

Subsistence gardening involves working directly with nature to supply some of your needs. There is no reason why any money should be involved: the basic ingredients involved are sunlight, air, water and soil, all of which occur naturally, and in great abundance. Working in the garden to create food and other useful products, such as…

One of the major problems with which we are faced today, is the fact that our view of human history has been largely shaped by a highly unrepresentative group of people, whose view of life has evolved out of European society in the late Middle Ages. Their fundamental belief was that there was something inherently…

The traditional role of human beings is to look after trees. When one lives in an area that has been farmed for a long time, and which, until recently, has had a fairly dense human population, it is obvious that all the trees that are there, are there because people chose for them to be…

The big success achieved by subsistence gardeners has been their ability to keep producing crops to feed themselves and their communities from the same ground, for hundreds or thousands of years. They employ a system of land management that maintains, or even increases, soil fertility from one year to the next, while at the same…

When I was growing up, the subject of ecology was still very new. I remember reading books about animal behaviour in which the authors de-bunked ideas established in Victorian times, which were based upon studies of animals in London Zoo. Ecologists discovered that animals in the wild behave very differently from animals in captivity, and…