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
‘The source of our collective insecurity has its roots in the land – and has erected fences to keep us out. Chris Smaje’s erudite and compassionate investigation shows that our own wellbeing cannot be secured without Earth’s. He offers a vision for how we, the people, can secure our future by giving the labour of our bodies to the land and to each other. In a time of warring narratives, Smaje’s call for sovereignty invites us to tear down the fences that exile us from our own histories.’
Rachel Donald, creator and host, Planet: Critical podcast
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. …
‘The source of our collective insecurity has its roots in the land – and has erected fences to keep us out. Chris Smaje’s erudite and compassionate investigation shows that our own wellbeing cannot be secured without Earth’s. He offers a vision for how we, the people, can secure our future by giving the labour of our bodies to the land and to each other. In a time of warring narratives, Smaje’s call for sovereignty invites us to tear down the fences that exile us from our own histories.’
Rachel Donald, creator and host, Planet: Critical podcast
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
“Everyone in the food business needs to read this book. If you think the future rests in time-tested local authenticity, Smaje’s arguments sound like affirming angels. If you think the future lies in techno-sophisticated urban manufacturing plants, you owe it to yourself to learn the best arguments from the opposing view.
For many of us in the local authentic food space, George Monbiot is our nemesis in the public debate of food’s future. Will it be local, democratised and heritage driven, or will it be manufactured by techno-sophisticates suddenly converted to humble, charitable ends? Smaje cuts precisely and directly, eviscerating Monbiot with superb and quotable verbalese.
Never have I enjoyed reading a blow-by-blow narrative as much as this lively and superbly written polemic.”
Joel Salatin, co-founder of Polyface Farm, and author of You Can Farm and Polyface Micro
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 …
“Everyone in the food business needs to read this book. If you think the future rests in time-tested local authenticity, Smaje’s arguments sound like affirming angels. If you think the future lies in techno-sophisticated urban manufacturing plants, you owe it to yourself to learn the best arguments from the opposing view.
For many of us in the local authentic food space, George Monbiot is our nemesis in the public debate of food’s future. Will it be local, democratised and heritage driven, or will it be manufactured by techno-sophisticates suddenly converted to humble, charitable ends? Smaje cuts precisely and directly, eviscerating Monbiot with superb and quotable verbalese.
Never have I enjoyed reading a blow-by-blow narrative as much as this lively and superbly written polemic.”
Joel Salatin, co-founder of Polyface Farm, and author of You Can Farm and Polyface Micro
My first book
Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
“We are facing an existential crisis with species extinction, climate catastrophes, desertification of soil, disappearance of water, pandemics of infectious and chronic diseases, hunger and malnutrition. Industrialized, globalized agriculture based on the myth that it feeds the world is driving the multiple, interconnected crisis. Eighty percent of the food we eat comes from small farms. Chris Smaje s A Small Farm Future shows that the choice is clear. Either we have a small farm future, or we face collapse and extinction.”
Vandana Shiva, author of Oneness vs. the 1% and Who Really Feeds the World?
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, …
“We are facing an existential crisis with species extinction, climate catastrophes, desertification of soil, disappearance of water, pandemics of infectious and chronic diseases, hunger and malnutrition. Industrialized, globalized agriculture based on the myth that it feeds the world is driving the multiple, interconnected crisis. Eighty percent of the food we eat comes from small farms. Chris Smaje s A Small Farm Future shows that the choice is clear. Either we have a small farm future, or we face collapse and extinction.”
Vandana Shiva, author of Oneness vs. the 1% and Who Really Feeds the World?
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 July 9, 2026 | 7 Comments
Every year I take a look at the annual energy data published toward the end of June by the Energy Institute in order to ask the big question: Has the energy transition that everyone keeps talking about actually started yet? So far, the answer has always been no. Every year since 1983, total global fossil fuel supply has increased, apart from in 2009 (financial crisis) and 2020 (Covid), when the entire energy system nosedived in relation to those crises before rebooting to the status quo ante. And so we come to the recently published 2025 figures, where the answer is …
Continue readingPosted on June 30, 2026 | 22 Comments
This week sees a more personal anniversary for me than the Brexit celebrations/recriminations last time: it’s three years since I published my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. In it, I criticised the idea that factory-produced bacterial food could be a realistic and significant ‘farm free’ alternative to food from agricultural land, as touted by George Monbiot in his book about the food system, Regenesis. I also criticised various other aspects of George’s takes on the food system, and briefly set out an agrarian localist alternative – not, for the most part, a vision I especially want to see, …
Continue readingPosted on June 14, 2026 | 14 Comments
There are a few anniversaries in the air at the moment. The one that looms in British politics is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, which was held on 23 June 2016. I daresay the media will soon be full of opinion pieces about it, so I thought I’d get mine in early and move on. It would be possible to write at great length about the numerous ins and outs of the Brexit process over this last decade. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog – a weekly compendium of heavyweight political …
Continue readingPosted on June 8, 2026 | 25 Comments
In this post I reflect on the main things I think will be necessary for ‘surviving the future’, to channel David Fleming. The post was prompted by comments under my last one, especially ones by Kathryn, Steve C and Walter. I was going to write my own comment underneath in reply, but I thought it warranted a somewhat lengthier treatment. At a high level of generality, I’d suggest on the back of those comments that fundamentally people need to attend to four things in navigating the collapse of our present high-energy, stable-climate, urban-industrial edifice: Skills of practical livelihood-making Physical capital …
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