Edgar J. Saxon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1877 |
| Died | 1956 |
| Occupation | Naturopath, writer |
Edgar J. Saxon (1877-1956) was a British environmentalist, naturopath and alternative health writer. He was a pioneer of the organic movement. [1]
Edgar J. Saxon | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | 1877 |
| Died | 1956 |
| Occupation | Naturopath, writer |
Edgar J. Saxon (1877-1956) was a British environmentalist, naturopath and alternative health writer. He was a pioneer of the organic movement. [1]
Saxon was born Ernest Savage and later changed his name to Edgar J. Saxon. [2] He was born at the East End of London and moved to Wimbledon as a child. [1] He worked for an office firm but took a day off in 1897 to walk the hills to the River Dee. [3] He suffered from foot pain so decided to take his boots off and put his feet in a waterfall. [3] He stated that his feet had been cured the next morning by an energy in the water unknown to science and he considered himself restored by a "nature cure". He believed that people in modern society had become alienated from the healing properties of nature. [3]
In 1908, Saxon met Charles William Daniel at his bookshop in Amen Corner, off Ludgate Hill. [2] In 1911, Daniel founded The Healthy Life magazine, of which Saxon became editor and owner in 1920. [1] It was renamed Health and Life in 1934 and Saxon edited the magazine until his death in 1956. [4] The magazine has been described as an "essential source for students of the alternative health movement in Britain". It promoted health foods, herbal medicine, homeopathy and social nudism. [1]
Between the wars, Saxon created the first health food restaurants known as "Vitamin Cafés" and a naturopathic centre in Wigmore Street, London. [1] Saxon established a bookstore, school of reform and lectured at Conway Hall. [1] He was founding member and former president of the Nature Cure Association of Great Britain. [5]
Saxon advocated organic farming and raged against the industrialization of modern society. [3] He criticized chemical companies and the use of fertilizers. He wrote against adulterated foods, pollution and waste. [3] Saxon promoted a diet of "honest foods", by this he meant whole foods, which are grown without artificials or processed and refined. [1] He campaigned against the use of sugar and white bread. [1] Saxon's books were published by Charles William Daniel. [6]
Saxon promoted vegetarianism but criticized veganism as he believed it would lead to impoverished soil through lack of humus. [7]
No-dig gardening is a non-cultivation method used by some organic gardeners. The origins of no-dig gardening are unclear, and may be based on pre-industrial or nineteenth-century farming techniques. Masanobu Fukuoka started his pioneering research work in this domain in 1938, and began publishing in the 1970s his Fukuokan philosophy of "do-nothing farming" or natural farming, which is now acknowledged by some as the tap root of the permaculture movement. Two pioneers of the method in the twentieth century included F. C. King, Head Gardener at Levens Hall, South Westmorland, in the Lake District of England, who wrote the book "Is Digging Necessary?" in 1946 and a gardener from Middlecliffe in the UK, A. Guest, who in 1948 published the book "Gardening Without Digging". The work of these gardeners was supported by the Good Gardeners Association in the UK. No-dig gardening was also promoted by Australian Esther Deans in the 1970s, and American gardener Ruth Stout advocated a "permanent" garden mulching technique in Gardening Without Work and no-dig methods in the 1950s and 1960s.
John Robbins is an American author, who popularized the links among nutrition, environmentalism, and animal rights. He is the author of the 1987 Diet for a New America, an exposé on connections between diet, physical health, animal cruelty, and environmentalism.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to organic gardening and farming:
Vegan organic gardening and farming is the organic cultivation and production of food crops and other crops with a minimal amount of exploitation or harm to any animal. Vegan gardening and stock-free farming methods use no animal products or by-products, such as bloodmeal, fish products, bone meal, feces, or other animal-origin matter, because the production of these materials is viewed as either harming animals directly, or being associated with the exploitation and consequent suffering of animals. Some of these materials are by-products of animal husbandry, created during the process of cultivating animals for the production of meat, milk, skins, furs, entertainment, labor, or companionship; the sale of by-products decreases expenses and increases profit for those engaged in animal husbandry, and therefore helps support the animal husbandry industry, an outcome most vegans find unacceptable.
The organic movement broadly refers to the organizations and individuals involved worldwide in the promotion of organic food and other organic products. It started during the first half of the 20th century, when modern large-scale agricultural practices began to appear.
The Soil Association is a charity based in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1946, its activities include campaign work on issues including opposition to intensive farming, support for local purchasing and public education on nutrition; as well the certification of organic food.
Sir Albert Howard was an English botanist, and the first westerner to document and publish the Vedic Indian techniques of sustainable agriculture, now better known as organic farming. After spending considerable time learning from Indian peasants and the pests present in their soil, he called these two his professors. He was a principal figure in the early organic movement. He is considered by many in the English-speaking world to have been, along with Rudolf Steiner and Eve Balfour, one of the key evangelists of ancient Indian techniques of organic agriculture.
A lacto-vegetarian diet is a diet that includes vegetables as well as dairy products such as milk, cheese, yogurt, butter, ghee, cream, and kefir.
Sebastian Kneipp was a Bavarian priest and one of the forefathers of the naturopathic medicine movement. He is most commonly associated with the "Kneipp Cure" form of hydrotherapy, the application of water through various methods, temperatures and pressures which he claimed to have therapeutic or healing effects, thus building several hospitals in Bad Wörishofen.
Traditional farming was the original type of agriculture, and has been practiced for thousands of years. All traditional farming is now considered to be "organic farming" although at the time there were no known inorganic methods. For example, forest gardening, a fully organic food production system which dates from prehistoric times, is thought to be the world's oldest and most resilient agroecosystem. After the industrial revolution had introduced inorganic methods, most of which were not well developed and had serious side effects. An organic movement began in the 1940s as a reaction to agriculture's growing reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The history of this modern revival of organic farming dates back to the first half of the 20th century at a time when there was a growing reliance on these new synthetic, non-organic methods.
Montague Edward Fordham (1864–1948) was an English agriculturalist and advocate of rural reform. He belonged to the Religious Society of Friends, and was a historian and barrister and by profession.
Lebensreform was a social movement in the late 19th-century and early 20th-century German Empire and Switzerland that propagated a back-to-nature lifestyle, emphasizing health food/raw food/organic food, vegetarianism, nudism, sexual liberation, alternative medicine, and religious reform, and at the same time promoted abstention from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and vaccines.
William A. Albrecht (1888–1974) chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, was the foremost authority on the relation of soil fertility to human health and earned four degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. As emeritus professor of soils at the University of Missouri, he saw a direct link between soil quality, food quality and human health. He drew direct connections between poor quality forage crops, and ill health in livestock and from this developed a formula for ideal ratios of cations in the soil, the Base Cation Saturation Ratio. While he did not discover cation exchange in the soil as is sometimes supposed, he may have been the first to associate it with colloidal clay particles. He served as 1939 President of the Soil Science Society of America.
Twenty years before the phrase 'environmental concern' crept into the national consciousness, he was lecturing from coast to coast on the broad topic of agricultural ecology.
" The soil is the ‘creative material’ of most of the basic needs of life. Creation starts with a handful of dust.” Dr. William A. Abrecht.
Frank Newman Turner, NDA, NDD, FNIMH, was a British pioneering organic farmer, writer and broadcaster, who, based on his experience of natural treatment of animals, later became a consulting medical herbalist and naturopath. His books Fertility Farming, Fertility Pastures, and Herdsmanship are regarded as classics of practical organic husbandry.
Emmet Densmore was an American businessman, physician and natural hygiene advocate who promoted an early version of the Paleolithic diet.
Theodor Hahn was a German hydrotherapist, naturopath and vegetarianism activist.
Friend Sykes (1888-1965) was an English organic farmer and writer.
Guy Theodore Wrench was a British agronomist, nutritionist, and physician. He was a pioneer of the organic movement.
Daniel Hartman Kress was a Canadian physician, anti-smoking activist, Seventh-day Adventist missionary and vegetarian.
