Going to Seed A Counterculture Memoir by Simon Fairlie, reviewed

We look at this new memoir by Simon Fairlie who looks back at his long and chequered anti-career in the ecological and sustainability sector. You can see more about his book, Going to Seed, on the Chelsea Green website here.

Going to Seed A Counterculture Memoir by Simon Fairlie, reviewed

Simon Fairlie has certainly had a long and interesting time campaigning to support more sustainable ways of living, and to tread more lightly on the planet. In some ways the prose in this book follows his slightly meandering and circuitous life. Fairlie has done many impressive things, and also followed the, in many ways logical progression, from finding himself, to protesting about what he cared about, to then looking at ways to act on his beliefs.

He leaves school, a few times, and also college too, and then goes to India to find himself, and is then also deeply immersed in the UK road protests of the, now, legendary, and, ultimately effective direct actions of Twyford Downs, Newbury and the M11 campaigns. Fairlie’s analysis of many of these events is honest, self aware and accurate.

While the Twyford Downs bypass got built, his use of the word pyrrhic victory is an accurate assessment of the impact on the UK government’s road building campaigns. It did provoke a drastic reassessment of whether new roads were actually needed, and the policing and security costs which overran so much that it reduced the capacity to build other new, also unnecessary, roads.

Fairlie moves onto living on the land projects like Tinker’s Bubble and others, where, again, he accurately assess what worked and what did not. He is brutally realistic in terms of the challenges of building intentional communities, and in particular the variability of how much work different people are willing to put into a communal living lifestyle. There is a lot to learn from the topics that he discusses and we enjoyed the content of this book.  There was just strangely something slightly impersonal about the tone of the book. Relationships are mentioned, but only in passing, partners come into his life and then exit again, with no real sense of who that person was, or what the spark was between them.

At times the breathless pace of people coming and going reminded us of Ginger Baker’s memoir, where, from his perspective he was merely at the maelstrom of a series of unfortunate events, which happened thorough no cause of his own. With Fairlie too, at times the book feels like the monologue of a ‘grumpy old man’. He is often fair and balanced, but at the same time the tone slipped into crankiness sometimes. Although Fairlie has plenty of writing chops it felt like this book needed a dispassionate editor to work all of this fascinating content into something that flowed a little better. Well worth reading, but a second edition might make the journey a little more readable for the reader.

More about the book here

At a young age, Simon Fairlie rejected the rat race and embarked on a new trip to find his own path. He dropped out of Cambridge University to hitchhike to Istanbul and bicycle through India. He established a commune in France, was arrested multiple times for squatting and civil disobedience, and became a leading figure in protests against the British government’s road building programs of the 1980s and—later—in legislative battles to help people secure access to land for low impact, sustainable living.

Over the course of fifty years, we witness a man’s drive for self-sufficiency, freedom, authenticity, and a deep connection to the land.

Fairlie grew up in a middle-class household in leafy middle England. His path had been laid out for him by his father: boarding school, Oxbridge, and a career in journalism. But everything changed when Simon’s life ran headfirst into London’s counterculture in the 1960s. Finding Beat poetry, blues music, cannabis and anti–Vietnam War protests unlocked a powerful lust to be free.

Instead of becoming a celebrated Fleet Street journalist like his father, Simon became a laborer, a stonemason, a farmer, a scythesman, and then a magazine editor and a writer of a very different sort. In Going to Seed he shares the highs of his experience, alongside the painful costs of his ongoing search for freedom—estrangement from his family, financial insecurity, and the loss of friends and lovers to the excesses and turbulence that continued through the 70s and 80s.

Part moving, free-wheeling memoir, part social critique, Going to Seed questions the current trajectory of Western “progress”—and the explosive consumerism, growing inequality, and environmental devastation laid bare in our daily newsfeeds—and will resonate with anyone who wonders how we got to such a place. Simon’s story is for anyone who wonders what the world might look like if we began to chart a radically different course.

More about the author

Simon Fairlie worked for twenty years variously as an agricultural labourer, vine worker, shepherd, fisherman, builder and stonemason before being ensnared by the computer in 1990. He was a coeditor of The Ecologistmagazine for four years until he joined a farming community in 1994 where he managed the cows, pigs and a working horse. He now runs a micro dairy at Monkton Wyld Court, a charity and cooperative in rural Dorset. Simon is a founding editor of The Land magazine, and he earns a living by selling scythes. He is the author of Low Impact Development: Planning and People in a Sustainable Countryside (1996) and Meat: A Benign Extravagance (2010).

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