Homepage of Paul Krafel – Naturalist, charter school founder, author

The Upward Spiral – My blog.

Selections from Cairns

Essays, short and long, from twenty-five years of Cairns of HOPE, my quarterly newsletter.

Toward a Commons culture

This 2024 essay describes an Upward path towards a culture that nourishes its Commons. This essay synthesizes many of the ideas and visions most important to me.

Videos and Podcasts

A variety of presentations of different length in different settings

Shifting (third edition)

I self-published Shifting in 1989. I sold several printings of this first edition. Then Chelsea Green re-published the book as Seeing Nature, what I consider the second edition. It eventually went out of print.

Three years ago two people independently called me within a month of each other, saying the world needed to have Shifting/Seeing Nature back in print. They offered to help make it happen and help get the word out. Eric Bear said that internet publishing had made distribution much easier and took on the whole project as a gift to the world and a challenge for himself. Heather Rangell (who had been telling many about the book) helped secure the copyright to the Seeing Nature illustrations. I thank them both so much. And now my book from 35 years ago has been updated and is available again for a new activist generation. It’s available as both a hardcover and a softcover.

If you are a fan of the book, you can help it by adding your review to that webpage.

Roaming Upward: Encounters along a 45-year Quest – My free, on-line book tells of my 45-year quest to find an upward way to live within a world shaped by the downward flow towards greater entropy.

For those who prefer an e-book type format, a wonderful professor in Japan converted the book for himself and sent me the links. What a wonderful gift. Leaves me delightfully unsure what is possible.

Here are three links:

1] PDF :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sle9kci0vw7g581/Roaming%20the%20Fifth%20Dimension%20-%20Paul%20Krafel.pdf?dl=0

EPUB:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r17ithn78ahy957/Roaming%20the%20Fifth%20Dimension%20-%20Paul%20Krafel.epub?dl=0

KINDLE:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i5cqringvzqrv3u/Roaming%20the%20Fifth%20Dimension%20-%20Paul%20Krafel.mobi?dl=0

And then another man gave me a wonderful gift. Yannick, a man in France, translated Roaming Upward into French.

He did it in a two-step process. He used the deepl translation program to get a rough translation of the complete book. Then he and his bilingual friends read through the translation correcting or improving the translation.

Because deepl can translate into many languages, we realized bilingual readers could translate Roaming Upward into a variety of languages. (I published it under a Creative Commons so readers can make it available to others.) Therefore, Yannick wrote this guide based on his experience.

Download the Word document from this link.
Go to the deepl website and subscribe to the free trial.
Upload the doc and select the language (you might have to split it into 2 parts if it’s too big).
Upload the result on this folder.
Share the link with everyone who might be interested in helping.
Adjust the sentences. Deepl does a pretty good job but it’s not perfect.
Once you’re done, add your names at the bottom, download them as a pdf and an epub file and send an email to paul@krafel.info to let him know :-).

To contact me: paul@krafel.info or 18080 Brincat Manor, Cottonwood, CA 96022