{"id":62743,"date":"2022-05-26T06:12:28","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T11:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62743"},"modified":"2022-05-26T06:12:28","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T11:12:28","slug":"it-takes-an-ecovillage-some-thoughts-on-going-to-seed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62743","title":{"rendered":"It takes an ecovillage\u2026: some thoughts on \u2018Going to Seed\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1953\">It takes an ecovillage\u2026: some thoughts on \u2018Going to Seed\u2019<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>I enjoyed writing a book review for my\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1949\">last post<\/a>\u00a0so much that I\u2019m going to write another one this time around. But whereas last time it was a long review of a very long book addressing itself to a large slice of human history, here I offer you a short review of a much shorter book about the life of a single man.<\/p>\n<p>The man in question is Simon Fairlie, and the book is\u00a0<em>Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir<\/em>\u00a0(Chelsea Green, 2022). Disclosure: I know Simon a little, as I suspect do many people in England with more than a passing involvement in the movement for local, sustainable agriculture \u2013 testament either to the still regrettably small corps of people the movement commands, or perhaps more positively to Simon\u2019s tireless efforts in making the case and spreading the word on numerous fronts. I\u2019ve written for Simon\u2019s excellent periodical\u00a0<em>The Land<\/em>\u00a0and there\u2019s an endorsement from me inside his book. So, needless to say, I am not an unbiased observer.<\/p>\n<p>Parts of Simon\u2019s life story were therefore familiar to me as I read his memoir: cofounder of the influential low impact agricultural community, Tinker\u2019s Bubble; land rights activist and rural planning expert; reviver of the fine art of scything; acutely perceptive agricultural thinker, whose book\u00a0<em>Meat: A Benign Extravagance<\/em> is still the best-articulated vision of a just and sustainable small farm future I know. Other parts were newer to me: an upper-crust if unconventional childhood, dropping out in the 1960s and joining the hippy trail to India, 1990s road protesting and a brief stint in jail as a member of the Twyford Six (\u201can unwarranted honorific given the minimal degree of martyrdom we had to undergo\u201d), work as a stonemason high aloft at Salisbury Cathedral&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It takes an ecovillage\u2026: some thoughts on \u2018Going to Seed\u2019 I enjoyed writing a book review for my\u00a0last post\u00a0so much that I\u2019m going to write another one this time around. But whereas last time it was a long review of a very long book addressing itself to a large slice of human history, here I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1760,15683,6987,32919,9738],"class_list":["post-62743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-book-review","tag-chris-smaje","tag-ecovillage","tag-low-impact-agriculture","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62744,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62743\/revisions\/62744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}