Built on a the well known Rainworx platform EnergyBook’s processes will be familiar to many already and easy to learn for new users.
Although it is 100% free EnergyBook is packed full of features. Sellers are able to build a free store and can send invoices through an automated system. They can track payments and shipping through their online auction area. Listing items is easy and the site has a bulk re-listing process. Formats include classified, auction and buy-it-now. It is also possible to list with the professional listing tool Spoonfeeder, making using this great green marketplace even easier and faster.
Buyers and browsers are able to ask question prior to bidding or buying items through an advanced online e-mail system. They are able to keep track of their bids and offers through their own auction area and see when an item was shipped. With the ability to change currency and meet buyers nd sellers from around the world this site is fast becomimg a great alternative marketplace for all sustainable and green companies.
What’s more advertising revenue from the site is donated to charity – currently Kiva.org – by using this free marketplace you are helping others too.
So whether you want to list a single classified posting for your website or thousands of green products EnergyBook.biz is for you. Registration is easy, fast and free so you can have your first listing up in minutes, tweet your friends, browse the site and enjoy green marketing for free.
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What can SpoonFeeder do for sellers on Energybook?
- Gives sellers access to an industry recognized professional listing tool.
- Works with EnergyBook’s own category tree.
- Allow sellers on common auction websites to rapidly migrate all of their item listings and pictures, automatically, in bulk.
- Import databases of item listings from CSV file format. Mass import from drop ship catalogs.
- Helps increase site listing volumes, increases seller listing efficiencies.
- Utilize professional designer templates to make listings stand out.
- Start standard auctions repetitively, on schedule with inventory integration.
- Provides bulk submission of many items at once, or one at a time on demand.
- Adds advanced hit counters with analysis capability.
- Adds cross promotional gallery scroller to show off seller’s other items.
- Complete photo enhancement capabilities including resize, crop, rotate, brightness, contrast, color saturation, sharpen, twain integration etc.
- Can provide free unlimited picture hosting, reducing the burden on the Wensy server and helping improve site responsiveness.
- Integrated Spell Checker and Thesaurus
- Reusable pre-defined messages
- Multiple file search and replace
You can use virtually every listing capability offered by SpoonFeeder on EnergyBook!
Visit SpoonFeeder today for more information and get more out of the free and green marketplace - EnergyBook
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It is now possible to add all your products to EnergyBook by sending us your froogle feed – also know as google base. Using Spoonfeeder we are able to add all of your products as classified adverts to EnergyBook - free of charge.
All you need to do is send us the froogle feed file – txt, the category that you would like to list in (unfortunately we can only list in one category) and if possible your logo for inclusion in the add (or we can download it from your website. The posts will all take the customers from EnergyBook to your product page when they click on the link.
Please register with EnergyBook and let us know your username (not your password). Alternatively we will register for you.
This service is free of charge. Please send the email with froogle feed attached to froogle@onetoremember.co.uk and allow 48 hours for us to complete this service.
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We have added a lot of the OneToRemember books to Amazon.co.uk
OneToRemember on Amazon
The books are often a little more expensive on Amazon as the standard postage rate is 2.75 which doesn’t always cover the postage costs. Also Amazon charges a fee which we don’t charge ourselves on OneToremember. It’s up to you if you would rather buy on Amazon please take a look. There are a few books on amazon not on OneToremember and vice versa. Check them both out and you may spot a bargain!
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We are very pleased that we are now able to offer free postage for all sales from our OneToRemember site to customers in the UK.
Naturally ebooks are free anyway to all customers where ever you are in the world.
http://www.OneToRemember.co.uk
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Using EnergyBook is easy and free so once you have posted how do you get your post noted so that you get sales or referrals to your website? EnergyBook has been found by all the main Search engines and we regularly update our adverts around the web. we also you Google Adwords. Here are a few ideas of how you can help.
- If you have a Twitter account please use ‘Twit This. You will find the logo at the top of every page. When you are on your posted item just click and sign into your Twitter account. The widget will automatically pick up the page you are on and you can choose an introduction as well as edit the words. Twit This will create the right URL.
- Open a store. As always with EnergyBook opening a store is free. Once you have done this you can add information about you and your products as well as place links to other websites. Opening a store can be completed through ‘My Account’ . the only thing that you will need is a picture or logo to add to the store page. You can edit the page as many times as you like. You can see other stores here
- Place links to your store or posts on your emails, website, letterhead, etc. Get the URL out there and you will attract visitors form all over the world to your free EnergyBook store.
- If you have a URL you can forwarded it to your store URL. It doesn’t change once you have created your store.
- Add logos, banners and text links to your webpage. You can choose our banners and buttons from Clixgalore. This has the added benefit of earning you revenue every time you refer a member to EnergyBook . So not only do you get more visitors to your posts you earn too. Here is the link to our Clixgalore page - registration is easy and free.
- Tell your friends about EnergyBook the URL is easy to remember or the can Google or Bing the site. www.EnergyBook.biz or EnergyBook.co.uk
- Check out our pages on social media websites and refer to them from your webpages. Here are some links.
Facebook
Valor.TV
Ning
If you have anymore ideas then please post them below in the comments section and I will add them to this list. together we can build a successful free and green marketplace.
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Abbey was born in the Pittsburgh DMA town of Indiana, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Home, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1944 he headed west, and fell in love with the desert country of the Four Corners region. He wrote, “For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same.” He received a Master’s Degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico and also studied at the University of Edinburgh. In the late 1950s Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States Park Service at Arches National Monument (now a national park), near the town of Moab, Utah, which was not then known for extreme sports but for its desolation and uranium mines. It was there that he penned the journals that would become one of his most famous works, 1968’s Desert Solitaire, which Abbey described “…not [as] a travel guide, but a eulogy.”
Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and even Thoreau’s Walden. In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical landscapes of Southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a backcountry park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what he terms the “industrial tourism” and resulting development in the national parks (”national parking lots”), rails against the Glen Canyon Dam, and comments on various other subjects.
Abbey died in 1989 at the age of 62 at his home near Oracle, Arizona.
Abbey’s abrasiveness, opposition to anthropocentrism (sometimes mischaracterized as misanthropy), and outspoken writings made him the object of much controversy. Conventional environmentalists from mainstream groups disliked his more radical “Keep America Beautiful…Burn a Billboard” style. Based on his writings and statements (and apparently in a few cases, actions), many believe that Abbey did advocate ecotage. The controversy intensified with the publication of Abbey’s most famous work of fiction, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel centers on a small group of eco-warriors who travel the American West attempting to put the brakes on uncontrolled human expansion by committing acts of sabotage against industrial development projects. Abbey claimed the novel was written merely to “entertain and amuse,” and was intended as symbolic satire. Others saw it as a how-to guide to non-violent ecotage–the main characters do not attack people. The novel inspired environmentalists frustrated with conventional methods of activism. Earth First! was formed as a result in 1981, advocating eco-sabotage or “monkeywrenching.” Although Abbey never officially joined the group he became associated with many of its members, and occasionally wrote for the organization.
Sometimes called the “desert anarchist,” Abbey was known to anger people of all political stripes (including environmentalists). In his essays the narrator describes throwing beer cans out of his car, claiming the highway had already littered the landscape. Abbey has been criticized by some for his comments on immigration and women. He differed from the stereotype of the ‘environmentalist as politically-correct leftist’, by disclaiming the counterculture and the “trendy campus people” and saying he didn’t want them as his primary fans, and by supporting some conservative causes such as immigration reduction and the National Rifle Association. He devoted one chapter in his book Hayduke Lives to poking fun at left-green leader Murray Bookchin. However, he reserves his harshest criticism for the military-industrial complex, “welfare ranchers,” energy companies, land developers and “Chambers of Commerce,” all of which he believed were destroying the West’s great landscapes. Abbey refused to be ideologically pigeon-holed by the left or the right; above all he was a staunch advocate for wilderness preservation and ecological protection. Abbey thrived on controversy and his
Abbey was born in the Pittsburgh DMA town of Indiana, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Home, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1944 he headed west, and fell in love with the desert country of the Four Corners region. He wrote, “For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same.” He received a Master’s Degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico and also studied at the University of Edinburgh. In the late 1950s Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States Park Service at Arches National Monument (now a national park), near the town of Moab, Utah, which was not then known for extreme sports but for its desolation and uranium mines. It was there that he penned the journals that would become one of his most famous works, 1968’s Desert Solitaire, which Abbey described “…not [as] a travel guide, but a eulogy.”
Edward Abbey
Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and even Thoreau’s Walden. In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical landscapes of Southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a backcountry park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what he terms the “industrial tourism” and resulting development in the national parks (”national parking lots”), rails against the Glen Canyon Dam, and comments on various other subjects.
Abbey died in 1989 at the age of 62 at his home near Oracle, Arizona.
Abbey’s abrasiveness, opposition to anthropocentrism (sometimes mischaracterized as misanthropy), and outspoken writings made him the object of much controversy. Conventional environmentalists from mainstream groups disliked his more radical “Keep America Beautiful…Burn a Billboard” style. Based on his writings and statements (and apparently in a few cases, actions), many believe that Abbey did advocate ecotage. The controversy intensified with the publication of Abbey’s most famous work of fiction, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel centers on a small group of eco-warriors who travel the American West attempting to put the brakes on uncontrolled human expansion by committing acts of sabotage against industrial development projects. Abbey claimed the novel was written merely to “entertain and amuse,” and was intended as symbolic satire. Others saw it as a how-to guide to non-violent ecotage–the main characters do not attack people. The novel inspired environmentalists frustrated with conventional methods of activism. Earth First! was formed as a result in 1981, advocating eco-sabotage or “monkeywrenching.” Although Abbey never officially joined the group he became associated with many of its members, and occasionally wrote for the organization.
Sometimes called the “desert anarchist,” Abbey was known to anger people of all political stripes (including environmentalists). In his essays the narrator describes throwing beer cans out of his car, claiming the highway had already littered the landscape. Abbey has been criticized by some for his comments on immigration and women. He differed from the stereotype of the ‘environmentalist as politically-correct leftist’, by disclaiming the counterculture and the “trendy campus people” and saying he didn’t want them as his primary fans, and by supporting some conservative causes such as immigration reduction and the National Rifle Association. He devoted one chapter in his book Hayduke Lives to poking fun at left-green leader Murray Bookchin. However, he reserves his harshest criticism for the military-industrial complex, “welfare ranchers,” energy companies, land developers and “Chambers of Commerce,” all of which he believed were destroying the West’s great landscapes. Abbey refused to be ideologically pigeon-holed by the left or the right; above all he was a staunch advocate for wilderness preservation and ecological protection. Abbey thrived on controversy and his popularity has proven to span generations.
Find books by Edward Abbey at OneToRemember
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Dave Foreman (born 1947) is a US environmentalist and co-founder of the radical environmental movement Earth First!
The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organisation Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.
Foreman had been interested in environmental issues since childhood, and from 1971, he became involved with wilderness protection. Between 1973 and 1980, he worked for The Wilderness Society as Southwest Regional Representative in New Mexico and the Director of Wilderness Affairs in Washington, DC. From 1976 to 1980, he was a board member for the New Mexico chapter of The Nature Conservancy.
By the late 1970s, Foreman had become increasingly disillusioned by what he viewed as the “professionalisation” of the environmental movement. After the United States Forest Service’s Roadless Area Review and Evaluation II resulted in the opening of thirty-six million acres (146,000 km²) of land for logging in 1979, Foreman left Washington and abandoned his job as an environmental lobbyist.
In April 1980, Foreman and friends Howie Wolke, Bart Kohler and Mike Roselle took a week long hiking trip in the Pinacate Desert. It was during this trip that Foreman is believed to have coined the phrase “Earth First!”
The movement that subsequently bore that name was inspired, in some part, by the writings of Edward Abbey, author of the satirical novel The Monkeywrench Gang. In contrast with the cautious lobbying efforts of the established environmental organisations, “monkeywrenching” – industrial sabotage traditionally associated with labor struggles – would become the chief tactic of the Earth First! movement in the 1980s; the Earth First! Journal, which Foreman edited from 1982 to 1988, featured lively debates on the ethics and effectiveness of this controversial tactic.
In 1985, Foreman published the first edition of the book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, sharing the editing credits with one “Bill Haywood”. Ecodefense collected articles published in Earth First! Journal’s “Dear Nedd Ludd” column, which provided advice to would-be monkeywrenchers on sabotage techniques.
In 1990, Foreman was one of five people arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation following operation THERMCON, in which FBI agents infiltrated an Arizona Earth First! group, encouraging them to sabotage a powerline feeding a water pumping station. While Foreman had no direct role in the attempted sabotage, he was arrested on a charge of conspiracy. He was permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for handing two copies of Ecodefense to an FBI informant, and received a suspended sentence.
Following his 1990 arrest, Foreman ceased acting as a spokesperson for Earth First! In 1991, he co-founded the Wildlands Project, which aims to establish a network of protected wilderness areas across North America. From 1995 to 1997, he served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors, but departed after the organisation rejected his proposed policy on restrictive immigration. In 1997, Foreman co-founded the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. In 2003, Dave Foreman and the board of directors of the Wildlands Project founded a new think tank, the Rewilding Institute, dedicated to “the development and promotion of ideas and strategies to advance continental-scale conservation in North America and to combat the extinction crisis.”
Foreman is the author of The Lobo Outback Funeral Home, a novel, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, a collection of essays, and Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. He also co-authored The Big Outside with Howie Wolke.
Dave Foreman (born 1947) is a US environmentalist and co-founder of the radical environmental movement Earth First!
The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organisation Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.
Foreman had been interested in environmental issues since childhood, and from 1971, he became involved with wilderness protection. Between 1973 and 1980, he worked for The Wilderness Society as Southwest Regional Representative in New Mexico and the Director of Wilderness Affairs in Washington, DC. From 1976 to 1980, he was a board member for the New Mexico chapter of The Nature Conservancy.
By the late 1970s, Foreman had become increasingly disillusioned by what he viewed as the “professionalisation” of the environmental movement. After the United States Forest Service’s Roadless Area Review and Evaluation II resulted in the opening of thirty-six million acres (146,000 km²) of land for logging in 1979, Foreman left Washington and abandoned his job as an environmental lobbyist.
In April 1980, Foreman and friends Howie Wolke, Bart Kohler and Mike Roselle took a week long hiking trip in the Pinacate Desert. It was during this trip that Foreman is believed to have coined the phrase “Earth First!”
The movement that subsequently bore that name was inspired, in some part, by the writings of Edward Abbey, author of the satirical novel The Monkeywrench Gang. In contrast with the cautious lobbying efforts of the established environmental organisations, “monkeywrenching” – industrial sabotage traditionally associated with labor struggles – would become the chief tactic of the Earth First! movement in the 1980s; the Earth First! Journal, which Foreman edited from 1982 to 1988, featured lively debates on the ethics and effectiveness of this controversial tactic.
In 1985, Foreman published the first edition of the book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, sharing the editing credits with one “Bill Haywood”. Ecodefense collected articles published in Earth First! Journal’s “Dear Nedd Ludd” column, which provided advice to would-be monkeywrenchers on sabotage techniques.
In 1990, Foreman was one of five people arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation following operation THERMCON, in which FBI agents infiltrated an Arizona Earth First! group, encouraging them to sabotage a powerline feeding a water pumping station. While Foreman had no direct role in the attempted sabotage, he was arrested on a charge of conspiracy. He was permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for handing two copies of Ecodefense to an FBI informant, and received a suspended sentence.
Following his 1990 arrest, Foreman ceased acting as a spokesperson for Earth First! In 1991, he co-founded the Wildlands Project, which aims to establish a network of protected wilderness areas across North America. From 1995 to 1997, he served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors, but departed after the organisation rejected his proposed policy on restrictive immigration. In 1997, Foreman co-founded the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. In 2003, Dave Foreman and the board of directors of the Wildlands Project founded a new think tank, the Rewilding Institute, dedicated to “the development and promotion of ideas and strategies to advance continental-scale conservation in North America and to combat the extinction crisis.”
Foreman is the author of The Lobo Outback Funeral Home, a novel, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, a collection of essays, and Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. He also co-authored The Big Outside with Howie Wolke.
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Jeremy Leggett is chief executive of solarcentury, the UK’s largest independent solar electric solutions company, one of the UK’s fastest growing tech companies, and winner of the FT-Treasury Inner City 100 Greenest Company award. After a D.Phil in earth sciences at Oxford, Jeremy began his career at Imperial College consulting for the oil industry and researching earth history. He won two major international awards for his research on the history of oceans. His work on oil source rocks was funded by BP and Shell.
In a second career as an environmental campaigner for Greenpeace International, he won the US Climate Institute’s Award for Advancing Understanding, at which time the Washington Post described him as “one of the half-dozen experts most responsible for putting climate change on the international agenda.” In his third career, as a social entrepreneur, he is in addition to his solarcentury role a director of the world’s first private equity fund for renewable energy, Bank Sarasin’s New Energies Invest AG, and a member of the UK Government’s Renewables Advisory Board. His critically-acclaimed account of the first ten years of global warming, The Carbon War, was published by Penguin in 1999. His account of peak oil and its conflation with global warming was published in November as The Empty Tank in the US (Random House) and Half Gone in the rest of the world (Portobello Books).
The Financial Times has described Leggett as having “done more to change attitudes towards the (solar) resource than almost any other individual,” and Time magazine – confused among other things by an absence of grey hair – has profiled him as “one of the next generation of young leaders.”
Jeremy Leggett is chief executive of solarcentury, the UK’s largest independent solar electric solutions company, one of the UK’s fastest growing tech companies, and winner of the FT-Treasury Inner City 100 Greenest Company award. After a D.Phil in earth sciences at Oxford, Jeremy began his career at Imperial College consulting for the oil industry and researching earth history. He won two major international awards for his research on the history of oceans. His work on oil source rocks was funded by BP and Shell.
Jeremy Leggett 2007
In a second career as an environmental campaigner for Greenpeace International, he won the US Climate Institute’s Award for Advancing Understanding, at which time the Washington Post described him as “one of the half-dozen experts most responsible for putting climate change on the international agenda.” In his third career, as a social entrepreneur, he is in addition to his solarcentury role a director of the world’s first private equity fund for renewable energy, Bank Sarasin’s New Energies Invest AG, and a member of the UK Government’s Renewables Advisory Board. His critically-acclaimed account of the first ten years of global warming, The Carbon War, was published by Penguin in 1999. His account of peak oil and its conflation with global warming was published in November as The Empty Tank in the US (Random House) and Half Gone in the rest of the world (Portobello Books).
The Financial Times has described Leggett as having “done more to change attitudes towards the (solar) resource than almost any other individual,” and Time magazine – confused among other things by an absence of grey hair – has profiled him as “one of the next generation of young leaders.”
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John Seymour
For books by John Seymour click here
John Seymour (12 June 1914 – 14 September 2004) was an influential figure in the self-sufficiency movement. Precise categorisation is difficult: he was a writer, broadcaster, environmentalist, smallholder and activist; a rebel against: consumerisation, industrialisation, genetically modified organisms, cities, motor cars; and an advocate for: self-reliance, personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, conviviality (food, drink, dancing and singing), gardening, caring for the Earth and for the soil.
John Seymour was born in London, England; his father died when he was very young, his mother remarried and the family moved to Frinton-on-Sea in north-east Essex. A fashionable seaside town with a golf club, a tennis club and a population of 2,000 might seem an unlikely place to develop Seymour’s later philosophy of life. It was however surrounded by agricultural land, where the horse was king; the sea was on his doorstep, there were quiet backwaters where he could learn to sail within a couple of miles of his home. The life lead by those on the land and in small boats would have laid a foundation for his later vision of a simple cottage economy with farming and fishing providing the essentials of life.
After schooling in England and Switzerland Seymour studied agriculture at Wye College, which was then a school of the University of London.
In 1934, at the age of 20, he went to Southern Africa where his wish to experience life took him in through a succession of jobs. In the Karoo as a farmhand and then manager of a sheep farm; from Walvis Bay in South-West Africa (now Namibia) as a deckhand, later as a skipper, on fishing boats; in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in copper mines as a trainee mining engineer; later working for the Northern Rhodesia Veterinary Service as a livestock officer; making a game survey of the Luangwa River valley for the Game Department. Whilst in Africa he spent some time with bushmen where he gained friendship and an insight into the life of hunter gatherers.
1939 to 1951
At the start of World War II in 1939 John Seymour travelled to Kenya where he enlisted in the Kenya Regiment and was posted to the King’s African Rifles, a colonial regiment of the British army with white officers. He fought with them against Italy in the Abyssinian Campaign in Ethiopia. After defeating the Italians the regiment was posted to Sri Lanka (then a British colony called Ceylon) and afterwards to Burma where allied forces were fighting against Japan. For Seymour the war ended on a low note, he expressed his disgust when the Allies used fission bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On arrival in Britain after the war Seymour worked for a while on a Thames sailing barge, these traditional craft were still operating around the south and east coasts of England, here he picked up the folk songs of a disappearing occupation. After working as a civil servant (labour officer for the Agricultural Committee) finding agricultural work for German prisoners of war (some had still not returned home in 1950) he found an opening into broadcasting when he created a series of short programmes on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), speaking on subjects that interested him. He then travelled overland to India for the BBC gaining experience of the subsistence farming still common in eastern Europe and the Asia. His experiences on this journey led to his first book The Hard Way to India, published in 1951.
The Smallholdings
Seymour was living aboard a Dutch sailing smack when he married Sally Medworth, an Australian potter and artist, in 1954. In this they travelled around the waterways and rivers of England and Holland, journeys later described in Sailing through England. As their first daughter grew older they felt that a landbase would be more suitable. They leased two isolated cottages on 5 acres (2 hectares) of land near Orford in Suffolk. The manner in which they fell into self-sufficiency on this smallholding is recounted in The Fat of the Land (1961).
At the beginning of the 1970s the family moved to a farm near Newport in Pembrokeshire. This decade saw Seymour’s publication rate reach a maximum, In 1976 The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency was published, a guide for real and dreaming downshifters. Published shortly after E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful – a study of economics as if people mattered (1973) and, more mundanely, The Good Life’s first showing on British television (1975), the sales of the new book exceeded all expectations. It was also set to establish the reputation of two young publishers, Christopher Dorling and Peter Kindersley who had commissioned and edited the work. His writing was not restricted to self-sufficiency: he wrote four guide books in the Companion Guide series and was now being asked to speak of his vision at conferences.
In the 1970s and 1980s he was also making television programmes: an early series followed the footsteps of George Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862), later he spent three years making the BBC series Far From Paradise (with Herbert Girardet) which examined the history of human impact on the environment.
His farm in Wales welcomed visitors seeking guidance on the smallholders life a project which expanded to the School for Self-Sufficiency when he moved to County Wexford in Ireland during the 1980s. Here in 1999 he was taken to court for damaging a crop of GM sugar beet.
John Seymour
For books by John Seymour click here
John Seymour
John Seymour (12 June 1914 – 14 September 2004) was an influential figure in the self-sufficiency movement. Precise categorisation is difficult: he was a writer, broadcaster, environmentalist, smallholder and activist; a rebel against: consumerisation, industrialisation, genetically modified organisms, cities, motor cars; and an advocate for: self-reliance, personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, conviviality (food, drink, dancing and singing), gardening, caring for the Earth and for the soil.
John Seymour was born in London, England; his father died when he was very young, his mother remarried and the family moved to Frinton-on-Sea in north-east Essex. A fashionable seaside town with a golf club, a tennis club and a population of 2,000 might seem an unlikely place to develop Seymour’s later philosophy of life. It was however surrounded by agricultural land, where the horse was king; the sea was on his doorstep, there were quiet backwaters where he could learn to sail within a couple of miles of his home. The life lead by those on the land and in small boats would have laid a foundation for his later vision of a simple cottage economy with farming and fishing providing the essentials of life.
After schooling in England and Switzerland Seymour studied agriculture at Wye College, which was then a school of the University of London.
In 1934, at the age of 20, he went to Southern Africa where his wish to experience life took him in through a succession of jobs. In the Karoo as a farmhand and then manager of a sheep farm; from Walvis Bay in South-West Africa (now Namibia) as a deckhand, later as a skipper, on fishing boats; in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in copper mines as a trainee mining engineer; later working for the Northern Rhodesia Veterinary Service as a livestock officer; making a game survey of the Luangwa River valley for the Game Department. Whilst in Africa he spent some time with bushmen where he gained friendship and an insight into the life of hunter gatherers.
1939 to 1951
At the start of World War II in 1939 John Seymour travelled to Kenya where he enlisted in the Kenya Regiment and was posted to the King’s African Rifles, a colonial regiment of the British army with white officers. He fought with them against Italy in the Abyssinian Campaign in Ethiopia. After defeating the Italians the regiment was posted to Sri Lanka (then a British colony called Ceylon) and afterwards to Burma where allied forces were fighting against Japan. For Seymour the war ended on a low note, he expressed his disgust when the Allies used fission bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
John Seymour
On arrival in Britain after the war Seymour worked for a while on a Thames sailing barge, these traditional craft were still operating around the south and east coasts of England, here he picked up the folk songs of a disappearing occupation. After working as a civil servant (labour officer for the Agricultural Committee) finding agricultural work for German prisoners of war (some had still not returned home in 1950) he found an opening into broadcasting when he created a series of short programmes on the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4), speaking on subjects that interested him. He then travelled overland to India for the BBC gaining experience of the subsistence farming still common in eastern Europe and the Asia. His experiences on this journey led to his first book The Hard Way to India, published in 1951.
The Smallholdings
Seymour was living aboard a Dutch sailing smack when he married Sally Medworth, an Australian potter and artist, in 1954. In this they travelled around the waterways and rivers of England and Holland, journeys later described in Sailing through England. As their first daughter grew older they felt that a landbase would be more suitable. They leased two isolated cottages on 5 acres (2 hectares) of land near Orford in Suffolk. The manner in which they fell into self-sufficiency on this smallholding is recounted in The Fat of the Land (1961).
At the beginning of the 1970s the family moved to a farm near Newport in Pembrokeshire. This decade saw Seymour’s publication rate reach a maximum, In 1976 The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency was published, a guide for real and dreaming downshifters. Published shortly after E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful – a study of economics as if people mattered (1973) and, more mundanely, The Good Life’s first showing on British television (1975), the sales of the new book exceeded all expectations. It was also set to establish the reputation of two young publishers, Christopher Dorling and Peter Kindersley who had commissioned and edited the work. His writing was not restricted to self-sufficiency: he wrote four guide books in the Companion Guide series and was now being asked to speak of his vision at conferences.
In the 1970s and 1980s he was also making television programmes: an early series followed the footsteps of George Borrow’s Wild Wales (1862), later he spent three years making the BBC series Far From Paradise (with Herbert Girardet) which examined the history of human impact on the environment.
His farm in Wales welcomed visitors seeking guidance on the smallholders life a project which expanded to the School for Self-Sufficiency when he moved to County Wexford in Ireland during the 1980s. Here in 1999 he was taken to court for damaging a crop of GM sugar beet.
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