Ethical money This article is more than 19 years oldObituaryJohn Seymour
This article is more than 19 years oldAn ecological pioneer championing the cause of living simplyJohn Seymour, who has died aged 90, was best known as the author of The Complete Book Of Self Sufficiency, in which he advocated a lifestyle lived as close to nature as possible. First published in 1976, it became a vital resource for disillusioned city dwellers seeking a more wholesome existence in the countryside.
In all, John produced 41 books, covering travel, rural crafts and gardening, but his abiding mission was to preach the gospel of self-sufficiency. It was a theme that came to him as a young man, when his family moved from Hampstead, north London, where he was born, to Frinton-on-Sea, Essex. There, he experienced a bygone world of farming with shire horses, and people living off the land and the sea.
His stepfather's chewing-gum business held no interest as a career for John. Instead, he went to study agriculture at Wye College, Kent, after which, at the age of 20, he moved to South Africa, where he managed a sheep farm, worked in a copper mine and joined the government veterinary service.
He spent much time with Bushmen, whose assured hunter-gatherer lifestyle in a semi-desert environment profoundly influenced his thinking; he said that they took from nature only as much as they needed for survival. He came to realise that much of human knowledge and culture is an ancient inheritance, and not primarily the product of urban progress.
During the second world war, John served with the King's African Rifles, and saw service in Ethopia and Burma. After returning to England in 1945, he decided to travel overland from Europe to India, experiencing a vast variety of cultures still dominated by peasant farming. Back once again in the UK, he worked for a time on one of the last sailing barges on the east and south coasts. He learned many sailors' songs, and, later in life, loved reciting them around campfires and at rowdy parties.
John's primary concern was that we should not readily give up a world that had been so long in the making - a world of hunter-gatherers, small-scale farmers, sailors and foresters. Should we not think twice, he would say, before we launched head-long into a plastic, fossil-fuel powered, environmentally destructive age?
In the late 1950s, taking his wife Sally, a potter whom he had married in 1954, and their three young daughters, John moved to five acres of land near Woodbridge, in Suffolk. In BBC radio programmes, and in such books as The Fat Of The Land, he celebrated the concept of self-sufficiency, which he saw as an antidote to the emerging dependence culture that robbed people of dignity and self-respect. He wanted people to declare their independence from industrial society, emphasising that there was more to life than a 9-5 job.
None the less, although John was not fond of urban life, some of his best friends, among them the poet William Empson, were city-dwellers, and he was thus at the heart of many a London party, and loved a lavish Chinese meal in Gerrard Street.
His greatest success was The Complete Book Of Self-Sufficiency, which came at a time when doubts first set in about a way of life entirely dependant on fossil fuels - the 1973 oil crisis and the miner's strike. The title helped launch a new publishing phenomenon, Dorling Kindersley. The highly illustrated work sold more than a million copies in some 20 languages. Its appeal was to those who wanted to learn about such skills as growing their own vegetables and making their own cheese.
John and his family had, by now, moved to Pembrokeshire, west Wales, and readers streamed to his farm near Newport. All were given a meal and a bed, sometimes in the hay barn. The royalties from the book were spent as quickly as they accrued - on hospitality, on rebuilding the barn after it was burned down by careless guests, and on repairing farm equipment wrecked by clumsy visitors. Yet in the middle of this turmoil, John kept on writing, producing on average two books a year on aspects of rural living.
In the 1980s, John and I made a BBC series, Far From Paradise. This took us to many parts of the world - the ancient city of Ur and the salty wastes of Mesopotamia, the last remaining villages in Europe where people still farmed without tractors, the acid-rain damaged forests of Germany, the eroding farmlands of Kansas and the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The series was a first attempt to take stock of the ever- increasing impact of an industrialising, urbanising humanity on its host planet.
To counter this rather depressing experience, we co-authored Blueprint For A Green Planet (1987), one of the first books emphasising the opportunities of green consumerism in countering environmental destruction. Sadly, the publishers refused to include a chapter linking personal responsibility and collective action.
John continued to write books celebrating all aspects of rural life. For most of the last two decades, he lived in County Wexford, Ireland, and, even though age started to take its toll, he still ran courses on such topics as milking cows or curing ham. Participants signed up from all over the world. Evenings were for storytelling, playing the harmonica and singing sailors' songs - John had the extraordinary memory of a man who refused to clutter his mind with television programmes, even if he loved presenting them.
In the last 18 months, he was back on his beloved Pembrokeshire farm with his daughter Ann, telling stories to his grandchildren and writing rhyming poetry, with an acerbic wit that was his last weapon against what he saw as our destructive era.
John was as much at home in the humblest house on a hillside, as in the manor house of landed gentry. He was like a force of nature, always willing to listen, always interested in learning about new - or very old - ways of working the land. He was a one-man rebellion against modernism, and his absence will be felt by millions of readers the world over.
He is survived by his wife and three daughters.
· John Seymour, author, born June 12 1914; died September 14 2004
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