FERN’s Back Forty: A committed dropout’s pursuit of a low-carbon life
Simon Fairlie’s entertaining memoir, Going to Seed, functions as an argument against the Establishment in pursuit of a low-carbon agrarian life. The surprise isn’t that so many of his experiments in communal living fall apart; it’s that this “committed dropout” comes out the other side, after 40 years of trial and error, having mostly achieved his high-minded goals.
The son of a heavy-drinking Fleet Street journalist who proved an erratic provider, Fairlie cycled through a range of English prep, public and private schools, challenging authority and skipping class. Finding Cambridge University “monochrome” and its lectures “a disappointment,” he quit after two semesters to march against nuclear power and the war in Vietnam while supporting himself with casual labor. His grubstake secured, he traveled — by thumb and local buses — through the Middle East and India, claiming to have gained more from his seven-month journey than he could have learned in three years at university.
Observing that late 20th century capitalism, combined with overpopulation, was “not only killing people, it was killing the planet,” Fairlie devoted himself to righting social and environmental wrongs. Back in England, he avoided paying rent by squatting but also worked to secure housing for pensioners evicted by developers. He battled Margaret Thatcher’s massive road-building programs alongside “a bunch of undisciplined and penniless misfits living under canvas on a diet of veggie slop…and dope.” He goes to jail for a fortnight (the stint “provided a well-earned rest in an environment that was like boarding school, except you didn’t have to do anything”) and comes to recognize, through living on protest sites, that the act of occupying is just as important as one’s political message. These historic demonstrations were also instructive for NGOs, like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, which had declined to get involved; only after the fact did they grasp that it was “the threat of riot and chaos that made their demands seem reasonable.”
Fairlie flitted from working at music festivals to teaching himself stonecutting, from collecting garbage to harvesting sea coal. Eventually, a better-funded friend bought rocky land in southern France, where Fairlie learned to build reciprocal roofs (cheap and functional); work with grape vines (for cash and wine, which “represented at least 30 percent of our entire caloric intake”); and produce “onions the size of strawberries and cabbages the size of onions.”
The soil was more fertile at his next experiment in communal living, in England, on a plot that had a sizable woodlot, a potential source of income. Felling and moving half-ton logs required eight people on a rope — the group eschewed petrol-powered tools — but “the tricky bit was getting eight hippies all in the same place at the same time.” It never happened: Fairlie solved the problem with Samson, a shire-cross gelding who apparently loved to pull.
As our pilgrim progressed, he learned. Even the most together of communes, those achieving high levels of self-sufficiency, he notes, can fall apart when “problem people are let in, standards drop, old timers leave in despair, and a vicious circle of decay sets in.” As he struggled with his town planning board, whose policies stifled low-impact development, Fairlie came to realize that the biggest problem with living off the land in England (as elsewhere) is securing the land itself. And once you get it, you need cash to buy things — like gum boots or solar panels — you cannot produce locally. The solution was to do short stints of work in the “rich world,” but because that paid so much better than, say, pulling a rope in your woodlot, it discouraged residents from working on their own land.
Over the years, Fairlie went off-farm to work for the respected Ecologist magazine and to write a critique of town planning. It’s notable that this book sold just 2,500 copies, but Fairlie was able to live off the proceeds for three years and fund further publications. Later, he turned to importing and selling European scythes and co-founded The Land, a magazine that covers land rights.
Fairlie has a refreshingly declarative style: he’s analytical, funny and self-aware, even as he rails against hippy narcissism and waxes dogmatic against the promoters of oat milk over cow milk and people with “dietary idiosyncrasies.” His memoir has much to offer anyone interested in movement history or in the future of intentional communities. It closes with Fairlie employed as the land manager at a cooperative estate, a Victorian pile called Monkton Wyld Court, that runs a small organic farm and micro-dairy. It seems like an ideal setup, but it can’t run, alas, and pay its workers a living wage without cash influxes from paying guests, who arrive for conferences, weddings, yoga retreats and the like.
It’s a slightly discouraging takeaway, but the reader has been well prepared for it, and Fairlie, approaching his dotage, seems more than content with his lot. He expresses great affection for his small bovine herd — which provides residents with fat, protein, grazing services, manure and whey, which in turn feeds the farm’s pigs — and wraps up with a series of prescriptions for reconnecting people and the land.
One senses some personal wreckage in Fairlie’s past, but very little regret. As he concludes, “Anything that aspires to establish an alternative to the manic pursuit of economic growth through unbridled consumerism has to be worth trying.”