Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Hi, and welcome to my site. I’m an author, small-scale farmer and sometime academic social scientist, writing about this moment of vast change as the dynamics of climate, energy, politics and natural ecosystems upend familiar assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. I’ve written two books, numerous articles and a long-running blog that looks at all this from a variety of angles, but mostly grounded in the belief that we need to develop low-energy localisms that give people the means to make a practical livelihood from their surrounding ecological base – a small farm future, the title of my first book.
Do have a look around my site, and contribute to the discussion if you wish.
Please note that although my blog is long-running, this is a new site as of June 2023 and there are parts of it that I’m still building, so you may find that the content is cursory in places.
Chris
Finding Lights in a Dark Age
Sharing Land, Work and Craft
‘Incisive and irenic, this is Chris Smaje at his wide-ranging best, exploring the territories of liveable-but-realistic human futures. Chris sweeps away the cobwebs of late-modern thinking to sketch what a sober pathway through the coming morass might look like. A guiding light!’
Carwyn Graves, author of Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape
My new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age is being published in the UK in October 2025 and the US in November 2025. Global society is unquestionably heading into a period of grave crisis, when the modernist gods of state and market, left-wing and right-wing, will need to be abandoned. …
‘Incisive and irenic, this is Chris Smaje at his wide-ranging best, exploring the territories of liveable-but-realistic human futures. Chris sweeps away the cobwebs of late-modern thinking to sketch what a sober pathway through the coming morass might look like. A guiding light!’
Carwyn Graves, author of Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape
My new book, critiquing food techno-fixes and making the case for local food systems
The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
One of the few voices to challenge The Guardian’s George Monbiot on the future of food and farming (and the restoration of nature) is academic, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje. In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Smaje presents his defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of …
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
My first book
Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world. With fierce intelligence and rich evidence, he explains the vital role that small farms must play in this emerging future, artfully weaving together neglected strands of economic, ecological, cultural and political thought.”
David Bollier, director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics; coauthor (with Silke Helfrich) of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
From the back cover: “A Small Farm Future is a ground-breaking debut, destined to become a modern classic – planting a flag at the intersection between economics, agriculture and society during a time of immense crisis. Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje makes the case for organising human societies around small-scale, …
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world. With fierce intelligence and rich evidence, he explains the vital role that small farms must play in this emerging future, artfully weaving together neglected strands of economic, ecological, cultural and political thought.”
David Bollier, director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics; coauthor (with Silke Helfrich) of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
I’ve been blogging about farming, ecology and politics since 2012. I welcome well-tempered discussion. Please note that if you’re a new commenter, or if you include a lot of links, your comment will go into the moderation queue before publication. I sometimes miss comments in the queue so feel free to nudge me via the Contact Form if your comment fails to appear.
Posted on January 13, 2026 | 20 Comments
Happy new(ish) year. As hinted by the second part of my title, this post isn’t a two-part retrospective on the Beatles, with a follow-up on John and Ringo. Instead, it’s mostly a sort-of review of Paul Kingsnorth’s recent book Against the Machine (henceforth ATM). But while thinking about Paul Kingsnorth, I find it hard not to think also about George Monbiot – sometime friends and fellow travellers in the broadly left-wing environmentalist movement whose intellectual, political and spiritual journeys have now diverged sharply. Also, arguably the two most prominent contemporary English writers on the conjunction of politics, nature and society. …
Continue readingPosted on December 22, 2025 | 52 Comments
I said my next post would cover my discussions with Tom Murphy, but I’m afraid time has caught up with me and I’m going to sign off for the year with this more general offering involving snippets from here and there. I promise that I’ll get to the Tom Murphy discussion early next year. There have been a few other promised posts I’m yet to deliver on too. I’m feeling the stress of next year’s blogging already. Ah well, I did manage to put out twenty-six posts in 2025 (or a round twenty-five if you exclude Eric F’s guest post). …
Continue readingPosted on December 7, 2025 | 57 Comments
I’ve been having an interesting offline debate recently with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the excellent Do the Math blog. I’ll write about it in my next post. In essence, Tom is more certain than I am that human agricultural civilization is a busted flush. Since I generally get it in the neck for my doominess on this point, it’s nice to be in discussion with someone who’s further down that line – especially when it’s as interesting and friendly as the one I’ve had with Tom. But in this post I’m going to mention a different interlocutor – one …
Continue readingPosted on November 11, 2025 | 58 Comments
To coincide with the US publication today of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I think it’s time to start writing some blog posts about it. I have a bit of unfinished business in relation to other projected posts, but hopefully I can sweep them up somewhere along the way. It’s going to be a slow tick over, though, because I don’t currently have much capacity to turn out blog posts at speed. I’ll begin by linking something I mention at the very start of the book with something I mention at the very end. At the …
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