The Practical Guide to Man-powered Bullets

The Practical Guide to Man-powered Bullets

Author: Richard Middleton

Publisher: Stackpole Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780811701563

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People have long been shooting small stones and carefully rounded bullets of clay, glass, steel, and lead from weapons without using gunpowder. And the bow and arrow has been man's choice all over the world and throughout history at times when modern firearms have been unavailable or unsuitable. In America, there is currently an explosion of interest in making primitive archery tackle--wooden bows, flint arrowheads, natural fiber strings. The author has made and shot flint-tipped arrows from many bows of his own making. He first noticed, twenty years ago, that no one has written a book on catapults, and started to keep records of his own experiments in that and other related fields, leading to this book, which explores many of the ways, old and new, in which people have shot bullets by force of their own muscles.


The Organic Farming Manual

The Organic Farming Manual

Author: Ann Larkin Hansen

Publisher: Storey Publishing

Published: 2010-03-17

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1603424792

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Providing expert tips on tending the land, caring for animals, and necessary equipment, Ann Larkin Hansen also covers the intricate process of acquiring organic certification and other business considerations important to a profitable operation. Discover the rewarding satisfaction of running a successful and sustainable organic farm.


New Pioneers

New Pioneers

Author: Jeffrey Jacob

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780271018287

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&"[P]ractically everyone I know is nursing fantasies about escaping the life they're trapped in and creating one that makes more sense,&" writes the editor of Utne Reader in a recent issue. &"The people I most admire, though, are those who actually do it&—who break free and pursue a higher calling no matter how great the risk.&" New Pioneers is about one such group of people&—the hundreds of thousands of urban North Americans who over the past three decades have given up their city or suburban homes for a few acres of land in the countryside. Jeffrey Jacob's new pioneers are ordinary people who have tried to break away from the mainstream consumer culture and return to small-town and rural America. He traces the development of the movement and identifies seven different kinds of back-to-the-lander: the weekender, country romantic, purist, country entrepreneur, pensioner, micro-farmer, and apprentice. From over 1,300 survey responses, interviews, and in-depth case studies, at both the regional and national levels, of representative back-to-the-landers, Jacob analyzes their values, use of appropriate technology, family division of labor on their acreages, and predisposition toward environmental activism. Jacob finds that back-to-the-landers for the most part are not completely independent of the mainstream economy, and consequently, their lives do reflect the contradictions between the available conveniences of a high-technology culture and the movement's goals of self-reliant labor. He analyzes their ambivalent attitudes toward technology&—hoes and shovels versus mini-hydroelectric systems, wood stoves versus microwave ovens, and so on. After examining the experiences of the back-to-the-country people who live on the margins of a postindustrial society, Jacob creates a clearer appreciation of the preconditions necessary to translate the idea of sustainable living into concrete action on a society-wide scale. While New Pioneers describes an important social movement, it also shows how far a group of highly motivated individuals and families can go, by themselves, in breaking away from the prevailing consumer culture. The dilemmas, frustrations, adaptations, and triumphs of these neo-homesteaders offer valuable insights to anyone contemplating a move &"back to the land.&"


Fighting for the Farm

Fighting for the Farm

Author: Jane Adams

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0812201035

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In North America industrial agriculture has now virtually displaced diversified family farming. The prevailing system depends heavily on labor supplied by migrants and immigrants, and its reliance on monoculture raises environmental concerns. In this book Jane Adams and contributors—anthropologists and political scientists among them—analyze the political dynamics that have transformed agriculture in the United States and Canada since the 1920s. The contributors demonstrate that people become politically active in arenas that range from the state to public discourse to relations between growers and their contractors or laborers, and that politics is a process that is intimately local as well as global. The farm financial crisis of the 1980s precipitated rapid consolidation of farms and a sharp decline in rural populations. It brought new actors into the political process, including organic farmers and environmentalists. Fighting for the Farm: Rural America Transformed considers the politics of farm policy and the consequences of the increasing alignment of agricultural interests with the global economy. The first section of the book places North American agriculture in the context of the world system; the second, a series of case studies, examines the foundations of current U.S. policy; subsequent sections deal with the political implications for daily life and the politics of the environment. Recognizing the influence of an array of political constituencies and arenas, Fighting for the Farm charts a decisive shift since the early part of the twentieth century from a discursive regime rooted in economics to one that now incorporates a variety of environmental and quality-of-life concerns.