![]() ![]() His purpose was to determine how easily a man could provide for his own needs once these were reduced to their simplest elements. It tells the story of Thoreau’s two-year experiment in self-sufficiency, living in the woods near his home town of Concord, Massachusetts, in a cabin he had built with his own hands. ![]() Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, published in 1854, has an assured place on any short-list of great American books, alongside Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and Leaves of Grass. ![]() But equally appealing to many latter-day voluntary peasants was an earlier and very different prophet of self-sufficiency: Henry David Thoreau. His contention, that a free and modestly prosperous peasantry is the best basis for a strong and stable society, was powerfully made by his writings and example, and remains, I believe, valid today. ‘Back in the days’, as we survivors of the Sixties like to say, self-sufficiency was the watchword, and the guru of that era’s back-to-the-landers was John Seymour (See SF No. There we continued, in cheerful penury, for the next twelve years. In 1973, my wife and I left a flat in St John’s Wood for a decrepit 5-acre smallholding in West Wales. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |