It's a dream come true when you finally get a piece of land or join an eco-community, and start to plan your sustainable land-based enterprise; but all too often the dream is spoiled by lack of money, stress, exhaustion and poor time management, and your work and future plans can dissolve into discord, illness and poverty.
Smallholdings provide food, home, fuel and employment for those who run them, and local, seasonal, often organic and ethical food and timber for an expanding market.
Surviving and Thriving on the Land looks at ways in which projects can be designed that care for the people involved in them as well as the earth that they are trying to protect. If land-based ecological projects are to offer a realistic solution to the problems we face in the twenty-first century, it is imperative that they should be sustainable in terms of human energy. This book offers a framework, backed up by real life examples, of issues to consider when setting up a new project, or for overcoming human-energy-based problems in existing projects.