Death of an activist

My most treasured book is a volume of humorous verse called Playing It For Laughs: A Book of Doggerel. Its author is John Seymour, world-renowned godfather of the sustainability movement, who passed away peacefully in the loving company of his daughter and grandchildren. He was ninety two years old.

John handed me his poetry book, just off the press, back in 1998, during a rowdy drinking session in a County Wexford pub. A group of us were together to discuss tactics for the court case that he and I and five others were fighting at the time. We’d been caught uprooting – or ‘de-contaminating’, as we preferred to say in court – a genetically modified sugar beet test site in Arthurstown, County Wexford, owned by US biotech giant Monsanto. Unfortunately for Monsanto, John Seymour lived on a farm nearby. He found out where the carefully hidden GM test-site was, and was first over the fence to destroy it.
We were facing a pretty scary charge of criminal damage, carrying a year-long prison sentence and costs of £16,000. Despite the seriousness of the occasion, spirits in the pub were extremely high, as they always were when John – one of the most vivacious, hilarious and extroverted people that I’ve ever met – decided to party.
John winked at me flirtatiously and scribbled on the title page of his book, “To Adrienne: the glamour component of the Arthurstown Seven”. I was so chuffed getting a compliment from this youthful 86-year-old, who besides being the author of more than forty books, was also a BBC broadcaster and documentary maker, a master storyteller, singer, musician and poet, a pioneer and teacher of self-sufficiency, a world traveller and revolutionary, a farmer, father and grandfather, and a lovable old rogue who maintained pulling power with young women well into his 70s (his last partner was half a century younger than him).
John Seymour loved life and lived it to the max. He took shit from no one and followed his dreams. When he was twenty he moved to South Africa, where he managed a sheep farm and worked in a copper mine. He was enormously inspired by the African bushmen, admiring the way they took from nature only what they needed for survival. During World War Two John fought against the Japanese in Burma, and after returning to England in 1945 decided to travel overland from Europe to India. He was greatly influenced by the variety of cultures he experienced en route, many of them still working the land in time-honoured and sustainable fashion.
In the late 1950s, John moved with his wife and three young daughters to five acres of land in Suffolk, declaring his independence from industrial society and the slavery of the rat-race. He wrote many books on living freely and self-sufficiently, considered bibles in the sustainability movement. At the age of 67 he moved to a small farm in Killowen, County Wexford, setting up a self-sufficiency school – run now by his partners Angela Ashe and Will Sutherland – and still visited today by people from around the world. I had a wonderful time at this magical little farm, enjoying the hedgerow wine and home-produced food, and the music and stories that it’s famous for.
John was a compassionate man who fought injustice wherever he saw it. He seemed to believe in a personal, non-dogmatic God, and Nature as a force unto itself. During our trial preparation, while the rest of us frantically researched the scientific hazards associated with GM – trying to prove that we were compelled to break the law in order to prevent GM contamination – John just laughed, utterly confident in his simple defence that he had acted to protect God’s creation. John was very much the ringleader of the GM damage, and it was incredibly reassuring during the stress of the trial to have someone so wise and funny and calm around. Even Monsanto, with all their cash and political clout and big bully tactics of spying, hadn’t a hope in hell of intimidating this brave and noble man. John would gladly have gone to prison for a year over the GM issue. No doubt he would’ve made a lot of new friends, because people loved him wherever he went.
Though he railed against the dead-ends of industrial society, John made great use of computers and the web, downloading books and composing his verse onscreen in 90-point type when his eyesight was failing. In his later writings he literally laughed in the face of death and gave profound thanks for the amazing life that he’d led.
Goodbye and thank you, John Seymour, lover of wine, women and song, of nature and the human spirit in its struggle to be free. May we revel again in the stars. Rest in peace.

John Seymour – Born 14-6-1912, died 14-9-2004.