Our Next Frontier: A Personal Guide for Tomorrow's Lifestyle

by Robert Rodale

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0878573658
• ISBN13: 9780878573653
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Rodale Books
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

For those who question the quality of supermarket food

The first frontier for America was the vast, seemingly limitless plains and the second was seemingly limitless cheap energy. The next frontier will be the age of energy conservation and renewable resources and a life style where people collect the sun to heat their homes, cycle to work to save energy and keep fit, use as little water as possible, produce their own vegetables and thereby enhance the quality of their lives and environment. Organic gardening composes a major part of the book because it promotes the idea of self-reliance and encourages people to examine their lifestyle and patterns of consumption; it leads to the idea of homesteading where personal productivity becomes part of a family's lifestyle by bringing the production of food back into the hands of the family that will eat it. Cheap energy and food provide little incentive to plan a frugal way of life and seek the joy that comes from simplicity, smallness, quiet and meditation; garden homesteading is one of the few tangible ways of experiencing the thrill and satisfaction of building your own secure reserves and seeking relief from habits of waste and consumption.Organic thinking began with Sir Albert Howard in the 1920s with farming systems based entirely on renewable resources through recycling of animal manures and left over plant materials by composting at high temperatures through bacterial action. Howard perceived danger in the advocacy of synthetic substitutes that ignored the organic portion of the plant and predicted declining fertility, hunger, increased disease and pollution. Rodale's father seeing Howard's predictions coming true during the Dust Bowl era and grasping the wisdom of his methods created a research farm using only manure and wasted organic matter as fertilizer without using any poisonous pesticides and found he had fine crops, healthy animals, productive gardens and bigger harvests. As these results gained importance with the energy crisis, environmental contamination by agricultural chemicals, destruction of the ozone layer, methods adopted by the food processing industry, inflation and the complex and an expensive food distribution system the author established a second 305 acre farm devoted to finding how to do more with less and improving the efficiency of organic methods. New gardeners frequently make the mistake of planting what they want to eat, rather than what grows healthily, inviting disease because climate, soil or moisture conditions are not right for every plant. Old gardeners have learned what nature will allow them to do successfully and have learned to use ecological sense and adopt a live-and-let-live approach to pests and disease, preferring to build up soil fertility so it will be healthy and productive, giving plants the health to combat natural enemies. Earthworms and other organisms killed by agricultural chemicals produce a natural plant growth stimulant; nitrogen-producing bacteria boost the capacity of the land by building the