The Small Farm Future Blog

122 responses to “Newsflash No.3 – Lights in a Dark Age”

1. Eric F says:

   November 17, 2024 at 18:12

   Congratulations Chris on all the new news!

   Interesting too, how (in my mind anyway) the questions at the front of your post fold together with the questions at the end.

   So, back to front:

   Yes, many of my friends are bereft at the outcome of the recent presidential election here in the US. I’m not. Or, not specifically for election reasons. It seems that I mourn my country more or less regularly, whoever is in power.

   I voted for one of the few Anti-Genocide candidates. Who didn’t have a chance, of course. And who I had to write in on the line so assigned on my ballot. Interestingly, the main candidates have a line for president and vice president, but if you write-in, you only get a line for president. More evidence that nobody will ever get elected that way. Which is fine with me. Being able to say I didn’t vote for either one of those bastards is valuable to me.

   I expect Trump 2 to be a disaster. I would have expected Harris to be a disaster too, except that I didn’t expect her to win. The genocide will continue. And for all the talk about women’s issues, the Democratic party could have done some real action before this and didn’t. Remember that Roe v. Wade was killed during a Democrat administration.

   So, disaster, generally. But it continues to amaze me how much disaster this country can absorb and still maintain a veneer of normalcy. We keep having more destitution popping up here and there, but the system rolls along. Baffling, but still trending worse…

   Yes, the way around inheritance taxes is to incorporate. Elect your children to the board. We have inheritance tax on land in the US, and it doesn’t effect any of the lower classes because they don’t have enough capital. But why would England enact that tax if it didn’t effect anybody? They wouldn’t get any money out of it.

   As for the dark ages here on what was once tall-grass prairie, I think it will take a while. A thousand years ago, nobody lived here full time. This was seasonal hunting & foraging land, and you were crazy to stay here all winter. But the land was managed by the natives here too.

   If eastern Kansas isn’t burned or plowed or paved over, it grows up in trees. The natives burned. Maybe if we merge into the eastern woodland, it might be more conducive to year-round living.

   But long before that is our dark age, right? Isn’t a dark age more or less a stable political situation? Or am I misunderstanding? After the imperial collapse of the US gets too far along to ignore, and the system starts to break down, I don’t see any political or social stability for a long, long time. This nation was founded on pillage, and building a different foundation will require a huge psychic shift.

   The warring period. I see warlords and all manner of extemporaneous nastiness. The bright spots would need to keep small and out of sight. The vastness of the prairie (especially with loss of easy transport) would be a great boon for this. But still, I don’t see any way forward that doesn’t require a major crash in human population, and that will likely be quite ugly.

   I have friends here who are trying their best to live a Small Farm Future, here and now. It’s really not possible at the moment, because money. But they’re mostly young and at least a little idealistic, and don’t share the values of the capitalist system. I expect them and their progeny to persist. But I don’t expect them to be able to build a working Small Farm Future until the current authorities fall apart. And when that happens I expect much instability.

   I’m having trouble imagining the difference between being weighed down by the money system, and being vulnerable to mobile group violence. I look at my fellow citizens, and many many are unfit, ill, and passive. But still, Americans can be generous and helpful, and then often incredibly violent. I don’t have much hope for our future, but there is some, and I’m old and don’t expect to see it.

   Thanks again

   Reply
2. Kathryn says:

   November 17, 2024 at 18:31

   1. Lights in a Dark Age

   Taking the title as your cue, what do you think such a book might be about, and what do you think should be in it?

   First of all, it isn’t currently fashionable (and perhaps was never accurate) to call the mediaeval period the “Dark Ages”. So I think you might be spending some time disabusing people of the notion that a low-energy localist agrarian future will be, of necessity, a miserable one. There is a local bakery which sells “healthy” baked goods alongside their sweet treats and we sometimes jokingly refer to such offerings as “knit your own lentils”. I’m reminded of the contrast between that conception of misery and, say, Alice Holloway’s vision of Care Home Farm as a place of artisanal luxury.

   …what I am getting at with this is the idea that how we envision a low-energy agrarian localist future is tinged with the lens of the present. And you know… if I were trying to live without any fossil fuels and with largely local self-provisioning in the context of Zone 3 London and no access to commons and nobody else around me specialising in the stuff I can’t make, it would be pretty miserable. But this individualistic framing is inadequate even for the present: today I do have some access to commons (e.g. foraging in urban parks), we purchase local honey when we can get it, my actual bicycle frame was built locally (even if the metal itself wasn’t mined in East London), I share winter squash with my neighbours. I am caught up in all kinds of compromises and just trying to muddle my way through and pick my battles, and I expect that in a future, rapidly-de-industrialised society I would also be muddling my way through, picking my battles and making some compromises. So would everyone around me. We’re just human beings, after all. And that would mean, sure, there’s going to be some artisanal luxury (I have some of that now, too), and sure, there’s going to be some… artisanal misery, I guess, some real hardship.

   So given that in any future Dark Age, humans will still be human, all bearing the image or our creator and all flawed and floundering… I think your book should be about the prefigurative refugia that are already present today, and how to create more of them. I think it should be about the ways that people can start to find responses to our current predicament, responses which maximise their agency and local connectedness, and minimise the ways in which they are beholden to the current system which encloses all of us. (Very short side tangent: the parable in which Jesus tells people to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” in response to the coin which bears the image of Caesar on it is relevant here: if we bear the image of God then we are to render our whole selves to the Divine.)

   And I hope that your book will be about what you are for. I hope you will show us some of what gives you hope for the future, and where you yourself look for meaning and purpose during this present age which can seem so very bleak.

   Imagine a future dark age in the place where you live. How might it emerge out of present circumstances, and what might it look like – how might people get by?

   I’d need to write a book of my own to answer this properly, Chris, and I already have two other books I’m failing to write.

   It might need to be a book of short stories, each a snapshot of a possible future in this place. I would write a snapshot of what happens when the local Transition group (which is quite active, and which I’m less involved in than I’d like) suddenly finds itself trying to teach hundreds of people how to grow food in less-than-ideal circumstances. I would write a snapshot of the awkward, horrendous period between when the sewers finally fail and when we set up more local safe clean drinking water facilities. I would write of my housemate, who has the knowing of electronics, going around and altering every chest freezer he can to run off salvaged car batteries that can be charged from a pedal generator when the solar panels are down. I would write of what the community looks like when there’s only one working chest freezer left, which is mostly used for temporary storage of beans and grains to kill the weevils that live in them otherwise. I would write of most ornamental street trees being cut down for firewood, then eventually replaced with hazels (for coppicing) or fruit trees. I would write of a lot of people leaving, with no clear idea where they’re going; I would write of new arrivals from places that are no longer habitable through being underwater or on fire, and the challenges and gifts of living alongside people who aren’t from here (I’m not from here either, but you wouldn’t know it to talk to my current neighbours). I would write of our own local fires, sure to recur n future droughts if we don’t sort out our management of Epping Forest. I would write of teaching children to read, to play instruments, to sing. I would write of the efforts of various local faith groups to relieve poverty while experiencing it themselves, the ways that mutual aid can flourish or falter. I would write of the thirty-mile journey to visit a dear friend of mine, who I currently see once a month when we meet “in the middle” near London Bridge. (Would I cycle? Walk? Ride a donkey? Well, that depends on what kind of dark age we’re talking about… but I can cycle thirty miles in a day without any difficulty, while walking thirty miles in a day is likely to be a tall order indeed, and the journey itself could be dangerous and also involves several river crossings which might be more difficult with higher sea levels. She would not be up for the journey alone, being that much older and frailer than I am. I hope that she would come to live with us.) I would write of new colonising plant species, some of them useful and others noxious. I would write of malaria, and attempting to treat it with mugwort, and failing more often than not. I would write of my techie friends trying to keep a Briar network linked to a downloaded copy of wikipedia going, by continuously salvaging and repairing old phones and tablets. I would write of missing my parents, who live in Canada, and my state of mind when I realise I may not see them again because travel is too expensive and too dangerous. I would write of a nurse performing minor surgery with help from a midwife, I would write of kids growing up without tetanus jabs, I would write of having two or maybe three sets of clothes available at any one time if and only if you can keep on top of the mending. I would write of the temporary problem of dealing with piles and piles of plastic junk after bin collections stop (a temporary problem because soon enough buying the plastic junk won’t be possible either), I would write of how hard it is to keep houses free of mould and rats and water when your available materials are all salvaged, I would write of the songs people would sing while they sow seeds, while they thresh beans, while they cut up clothing to make more clothing, while they mend shoes, while they carry water. I would write of the stories we would tell around the fire in winter and the secret summer blackberry spots (some of which everyone else knows about too, really).

   If I were being more systematic, I would look at our material needs and how to meet them as locally as possible. What are those? Food, water, shelter, clothing, heat, energy for food preservation, transport, the odd bit of machinery, fellowship… And what are the potential threats to meeting those locally?

   A lot of how that might play out would depend on the trajectory of London’s de-population or re-ruralisation or whatever. It’s fair to say that not everyone who lives here now would be able to continue living here; it’s also fair to say that people have been living here for centuries, it just wasn’t called part of London then. I’m also really bad at modelling the geopolitical stuff, I don’t really know what this place might look like during a war or occupation, though I don’t rule out the possibility of those happening.

   But I can say that there are local people here now who are producing food, who are collecting rainwater, who build structures (of varying safety!) out of salvaged materials, who make their own clothes, who enjoy a good fire, who check on vulnerable neighbours or build tools or identify plants… in some future dark age, I would desperately hope that those people would stick around and work together.

   Maybe the dark age isn’t evenly distributed either. I don’t want to be flippant about the immense ease of living in a fossil-enabled culture, but there is much about current times that feels pretty dark.

   I am really looking forward to this book.

   2. Happy Anniversary! I am glad you have stuck your head above the parapet; my own life is better for it.

   3. since corporations are viewed as legal persons, perhaps they should now be treated as actual persons and liquidated after three score years and ten, with all assets subject to taxation and wide dispersal upon liquidation

   I like this idea very much. It has echoes of biblical Jubilee practices.

   4.
   I disapprove of Trump, but I very much consider him a symptom rather than a cause of our current malaise, which is as much to do with neoliberalism and media capture as anything else. So I’m with you on being mostly un-stoked… I was not surprised by the US election results, and my dismay about the potential consequences (including for some people I care about very much) is rather lost in the sea of general disillusionment with electoral politics as any kind of vehicle for change. Thanks for your links to various commentators, though I think the notion that e.g. inflation is the biggest problem is a bit worrisome in and of itself — can voters really not understand that current inflation is not only the result of the most recent government, and that changes to economic policy take time to translate into improvements in standard of living? Or is it more that the groups identified by Musa Al-Gharbi as swinging toward Trump are just as vulnerable to narratives involving the scapegoating of immigrants as (some) working class white people are? That is, maybe it’s not the racism, but the xenophobia surely plays a role.

   (In general I think economic crashes can happen quickly, but economic improvements that actually impact standard of living for the majority of the population take ages — the benefits of faster economic booms are almost entirely used to increase the wealth of the very richest people.)

   First, I understand from news reports that some of the voter enthusiasm for the Republicans was around a sense they’d do a better job with the economy. Yet the protectionist policies they’re trumpeting seem unlikely to deliver on those expectations, albeit probably more likely in an economy with the size and power of the USA than anywhere else. So how will this play out? I’m broadly in favour of protectionist economic policies, but I don’t think they’re easily justifiable in terms of short-term economic betterment using conventional metrics, especially in rich countries. How can they be realised politically, and what happens if they fail?

   It will play out badly, I think. Whatever improvements in standard of living result from the Democrats’ policies of the last four years will be taken as evidence that Trump is good at the economy, and anything bad will be blamed on “the mess” left by the Democrats (much as the Tories were still blaming Labour for economic disarray when they’d been in power for well over a decade). The economy won’t really get much better unless there’s some kind of real support for agrarian localism, which doesn’t seem like something Trump will offer.

   Second, as I also understand from news reports, Harris made quite a play in her campaign on women’s rights issues, but it didn’t work out well for her electorally in terms of women’s votes. What happened?

   I really didn’t follow election coverage closely at all but I’m assuming some of this was about reproductive health care. An awful lot of women think that they won’t personally need reproductive health care, or don’t realise that the far right would like to take away more forms of contraception. Plus, all health care in the US is costly. There’s not much point having the right to terminate a pregnancy or get a tubal ligation or whatever if you can’t afford it anyway.

   I think (but don’t have a citation to hand) that the thing that most closely predicts fertility rates is infant mortality. When infant mortality is high, women have more children (including more that survive to adulthood). When infant mortality is low, women have fewer children. It might be interesting to look at the pattern of women’s voting, claims made about reproductive health care, and infant mortality.

   Third, it’s looking like one result of the election might be more political distancing by some states from the federal centre. How might that play out longer term?

   Mumble mumble supersedure mumble mumble.

   I think it could be a very interesting experiment! Which states will encourage a populist agrarian localism, and which will suffer land grabs by corporations that want the space for solar farms, data centres and alleged carbon sequestration? How will things play out in states that just don’t have much water (Arizona, Texas, parts of California) vs ones that do? I’m going to assume that no state is completely immune from climate-driven catastrophe like hurricanes, floods, fires… but some will have better resources for recovery than others, and they might not be the historically wealthy places.

   What will be really interesting to me is if freedom of movement between states starts to become substantially harder.

   Sadly we can’t fast forward twenty or fifty years and see how the experiments play out.

   Reply
3. Bruce says:

   November 17, 2024 at 20:41

   I felt pretty similar to you about Trump’s election – a bit of me wondered if I was in some sort of denial about how bad things might be with him in charge – and looking at the people he’s picking for his government I think it’s going to be bad. I think I’m sanguine about this for several reasons. The first is that I don’t think it changes the trajectory of our culture/civilization much – for instance the US under Biden rejoined the Paris climate deal but then produced more oil and gas than ever before – Trump will max out oil production and not bother pretending otherwise. Secondly I think his administration and the project of which it’s a part will be undone by the unintended/unforseen consequences of the (massive) changes they want to make to global trade, the middle east, the US state etc – American support for Israel has already led to joint Iranian Saudi military exercises – such things could accelerate. I was heard Norman Tebbit say none of the Conservatives of his generation had forseen the social consequences of their remaking of economic relations in the UK – decline of the traditional family, loss of respect for cultural institutions, increased immigration etc.

   Speaking of unintended consequences I think you’re absolutely right that inheritance tax on farmland will probably just increase the average owned by corporate type farms – I know a contractor locally who ‘farms’ land bought by investors – these people don’t actually care particularly about the profitability of their farms – the land (asset) is appreciating nicely and operating losses can be written off against profits elsewhere in their portfolio. Will Hutton wrote a piece in the Guardian today saying IHT would lead to increased land sales, lower land prices and more new entrants to farming who would drive up productivity etc. I’m not convinced.

   As for the dark ages – pretty sure we’re on the edges of them but no idea if or where lights may appear or even really what such lights may look like – or need to look like – if we’re to successfully navigate through dark times

   Reply
4. Bruce Steele says:

   November 17, 2024 at 22:25

   We are assuming climate tipping points are some future potential rather than something already locked in. And even as we have passed that point when we lost all control ,we to a man believe we still steer the outcome rather than instead the outcome driving our decisions.
   We ignore the fires in Canada, Russia, and the Amazon basin as flukes rather than a function of what changed when the sinks weakened and then no longer gave us room to dump our fossil fuel dream of omnipotence on the rest of the planet. But when we see, when there is no longer room to bury our heads in A/C and pipe dreams , then the dark ages are over and we begin our journey . It will get hotter as sinks switch to sources, everyone will know because even as the cars, and planes, and everything fast grinds down ,each year will progress as hotter than a decade before.
   It is the realization that will have changed. That people no longer followed the demigods, that instead grandpa and his memories regained import. And stories grew around the campfires, and bards to tell them. And that the stories were told true and carried village to village by storytellers.
   Craftsmen, apprentices, and masters learned the trades to ease somewhat the toil of daily living but the bards warned of any return to ease of the ancients and the wickedness their values. The weather enforced the message as each year burned further into where we could still live. A clean break from the past where we could vilify excess and pride and anything but keeping the family fed, and loyalty to the clan that kept the stories that mattered and the collective knowledge of how to carry on. When to plant, when to forage the forest or the schooling fish in the channel. When to move to winter fields and when to move back to the forest and the caves for the long heat of summer. What seeds to keep, what trees to protect, what wells still yield good water. Like an old matriarch elephant who the herd can trust. When truth and hardship are friends and memories of how we got through.

   Reply
5. Walter Haugen says:

   November 18, 2024 at 13:55

   Since you asked:

   Q: How will protectionist policies play out?
   A: Trump’s reduction in the income tax is the rationale for increased tariffs. The protectionist policies are the umbrella for this and other proposed policies. It will not work out well, as tariffs just increase inflation and the indirect tax on consumer goods paid by – you guessed it – the poor and middle class. It is a mistake to be “broadly in favor of protectionist policies.” It is a continuum you do not want to be on. It is the same problem as befalls Daly’s steady-state economy idea. The micromanagement is so critical, it is an impossible task. Same goes for modern monetary theory.

   Q: Harris’ support of women’s issues.
   A: This was just to fill time. All the voters knew she would be in favor of this issue. It had no power to persuade.

   Q: Political distancing by states.
   A: This has been in the mix since the 1960s. George Wallace, for one, positioned Jim Crow into “states’ rights.” It was just a cover for the Dixiecrats, who defected to Nixon anyway. You can read more on this in Nixonland by Rick Perlstein (2008) if you are interested. In the long term, states’ rights will allow more local control and more things getting done at the local level, which will feed the momentum it already has. The righwingers will look at this success and say, “See, we were right” and try to take credit for a demographic inevitability.

   As for the coming Dark Age, it will not be like the last one because slavery is not institutionalized like it was during the Roman Empire. Slavery will have to be re-imposed and there will be lots of resistance. [Sidebar: Without fossil fuels, energy will come from humans again.] Also, the prevalence of personal weapons that can kill at a distance and quite rapidly will mean that the violence will be exponentially worse. There will be pockets where it will proceed more slowly, but only a fool would feel secure just because they have food storage and own their own land. Where we are at 500 meters in the Pyrenees, we will likely have it better for longer than those in the cities, but I am not sanguine about it. Hypercomplexity requires hyperawareness.

   The coming Dark Age will be quite dark, with the occasional shaft of light. But that is the state of the world right now, isn’t it?

   Reply
6. Martin says:

   November 18, 2024 at 14:44

   I think ‘progressive’ political parties are almost (and sometimes even more) deluded as conservative ones about the nature of the problems we face and keep making terrible choices about how to align themselves.

   My polite reaction to this is, boringly, to agree with you. I made a superficially similar journey a few years before you – superficial because I was never ‘identified’ as ‘progressive left’, and indeed had no really deep engagement with or understanding of political thinking. (It took me a pandemic and working-from-home extra time to get around to reading reflections on the french revolution). I did however subscribe to all the usual views – but now I’m more inclined to think there’s no value in having an opinion about things one doesn’t actually know much about.

   As to the ‘dark age’ – would you (or anyone) care to put some timsescales on that? I’ve said before that I think things will crumble rather than collapse – but that’s only a matter of scale, and what I (only a few years older than you Chris) will experience will feel like a crumble not a collapse.

   Reply
   • Walter Haugen says:

     November 18, 2024 at 17:13

     My timeline back in 2013 was that dieoff would start sometime between 2020 and 2030 and that we would be back to <1.5 billion humans on the planet by 2100. I am still sticking to that timeline. As for collapse vs. crumble; I like it. However, since my latest brainstorm is that we are now a hypercomplex society in the US, I see collapse in the US rather than a crumbling. I live in France now and I see it struggling and then adapting to contraction – call it a crumbling because it is only a complex society rather than a hypercomplex society. Same for Germany and the UK. The US is hypercomplex because it depends on an acceleration of the acceleration of the growth rate (3rd derivative or "jerk" rather than 2nd derivative or "acceleration"), rather than just an acceleration in the growth rate. France is just fine right now even with a growth rate close to zero. Same with Germany, which is actually contracting in the growth rate. If the US just had a little sense and limited its warmongering, it could actually ramp down to the 2nd derivative and therefore be able to adapt to the coming contraction of its economy. But it doesn't have much sense and it won't adapt. It will collapse.

     Reply
7. Steve L says:

   November 18, 2024 at 15:00

   That working title (Lights in a Dark Age) could head in many directions. Is there a secondary title? What it evokes for me is reflected in this imagined secondary title:

   Beacons of Humanity Amidst the Insanity

   Such as, with examples of how people can try to get their needs met in challenging times, through human connection and caring. At one extreme, I’m reminded of Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” with its descriptions of generosity and meaning found in concentration camps. A more recent work provides “inspiring examples of community development and ecological sanity” such as “in Brazil where landless peasants are taking on big landowners, in Bangladesh where peasant women are using micro-credit to restore their sense of self-esteem and independence, in Kenya where poor villages are creating their own tree nurseries, in India where farmers are directing their own seed research, and in Wisconsin where farmers are using cooperatives effectively.” (This is quoted from a review of “Hope’s Edge” by Anna Lappé and Frances Lappé, 2002)
   https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/3740/hopes-edge

   However, I’m hoping that “Lights in a Dark Age” goes well beyond the scope of previous works, into territory where a social-science-professor-turned-small-farmer author is especially qualified to guide us.

   Reply
8. Diogenese10 says:

   November 18, 2024 at 17:28

   https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/a-diesel-powered-civilization
   Worth the time to read …
   IMHO , Trump is the last gasp president of the oil age , in four years oil production will have started to fall and the industrial base of our society will be shrinking , and he probably knows this , soon it will cost more energy to drill a hole than the energy produced by it .
   Import duties might help by bringing back industries ( but smaller ) to make things that there will be no diesel to import and that will become the swan song of heavy industries in the west , ( at least we will have the machines to make sowing needles in the last gasp of industrialised society . )
   If farmers in the UK can keep going for another decade the game will be up , the idea that Britain can import food without oil powered ships or airplanes and no exports to pay for them is insanity .
   Forget ” net zero ” there is not enough energy or materials to get you there .
   I wait with anticipation for your next book !!!

   Reply
9. Diogenese10 says:

   November 18, 2024 at 18:09

   And now for what some think as tin foil hat time .
   I think that western governments know all about peak oil ,over the last decade they have used the smokescreen of global warming to kneecap their own economies to bring about a slow collapse rather than a fast one , ( Germany being the poster child ) the US gas lighting of the one $ trillion budget deficit every 100 days is certain to tank the currency , Britains dumping of industry relying on ” the city of London ” to hide the fact the rest of the country resembles the third world , Germany’s ” energy wend ” ( if
   that’s how you spell it ) is all engineered to lower expectations instead of them facing pitchforks . Western civilization is walking lock step into a low energy future hoping it gets there without chaos .

   Reply
   • Kathryn says:

     November 18, 2024 at 21:52

     This ascribes a high degree of intent and competence to the respective governments!

     Reply
   • Walter Haugen says:

     November 19, 2024 at 10:39

     I agree with Kathryn. You are ascribing waaayyy too much competence to shadowy government agencies.

     Reply
     • Simon H says:

       November 19, 2024 at 16:05

       What about intergovernmental agencies?
       https://slaynews.com/news/dutch-government-official-admits-covid-pandemic-military-operation-ministry-health-obeys-nato/

       Reply
       • Diogenese10 says:

         November 19, 2024 at 17:07

         https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/labour-racks-up-2-3-million-air-miles-attending-u-n-climate-conference/

         Gas lighting the public , austerity is for the peasantry .

         Reply
     • Diogenese10 says:

       November 19, 2024 at 17:16

       The Global economic forum is the lightening rod , they don’t hide their dystopian ideas and near all western politicos and top civil servants take the trip to Davos when there is a
       meeting …
       Plus the KOP meeting in Kazan is hosted by Vladimir Putin ,sanctions anyone ??

       Reply
10. Matt Colborn says:

    November 19, 2024 at 10:24

    Hi Chris—

    Insightful as always, and I’m already looking forward to the book!

    1. ‘Dark ages’ I tend to resist this framing. I’ve just been reading G.Clark’s Late Antiquity a very short introduction and the term ‘dark age’ now tends to be avoided because it’s part of a grand narrative that I think can be misleading.

    2. I’m afraid I’m not as sanguine about Trump’s victory. I take the point about not looking to centralised governments for salvation but I do worry about things like infrastructure, medical care etc. in a post-collapse world. Government in some form seems necessary for this. Just think about the state of the roads, say, in c 17th, c. 18th England….. are we to return to that? And what about dentists and GPs etc?

    Second; bad government can cause untold damage and harm and their legacy might be a hostile, aggressive culture in a post-collapse world. (Or worse, nuclear war). The regime taking shape in America looks like it’s going to be throughly vile. Ece Temelkuran (along with George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and others) have pointed to the problem of moral corruption in these sorts of regimes, that saturates everything. This seems to me to endanger any pathway to a benign post-collapse, small farm future in the US and anywhere this kind of authoritarianism/fascism emerges. Anyway, my take is here;

    https://open.substack.com/pub/mattcolborn/p/avoiding-dystopia?r=56rtx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 22, 2024 at 10:36

      A nest of vipers they are indeed with a mad king in cognitive decline it seems. It is a thoroughly bad situation and yes, the amount of hatred and division they are stoking means that the path to a benign small farms future is shaky in the US. The moral bankruptcy is astonishing.

      Reply
11. Chris Smaje says:

    November 19, 2024 at 14:22

    Thanks for a very interesting bunch of comments & suggestions. I’ve read all of them with great interest and learned from them, but in view of my time limits I’m only going to dash out a comment on a few points where I’d especially welcome further discussion.

    – On the ‘dark ages’ theme, yes agree with Matt/Kathryn that the conventional usage of the term is a problematic grand narrative. I’ll be playing with the idea of dark ages as times of innovation and opportunity for ordinary people. I guess the question is whether the term ‘dark ages’ is too inherently compromised as is. I also like the vibe of inverting the title, ‘Dark in a light age’ in view of likely energy futures.

    – Walter on protectionism. Agree it’s not a good continuum to be on in terms of existing politics of nation states. The same applies to anti-protectionist policies in terms of lower prices to the working class for consumer goods. But ultimately, barring a situation of such total collapse that there’s no abstract capital left, I believe that local material economies need to find ways of protecting themselves from siphoning by the non-local abstract economy, so I’d welcome discussion of how to do that.

    – Walter on US hypercomplexity & 3rd derivative – very interesting. I’d like to hear more about why you see the US as a 3rd derivative & European countries more as 2nd derivatives. Contrasts with Peter Zeihan’s probably over-sanguine view of the US as more collapse-proof in terms of its natural resource & geopolitical advantages.

    – Walter & Eric. I’m not very convinced about Walter’s slavery point, but maybe the wider issue of interest touched on also by Eric’s ‘This nation was founded on pillage’ is the extent to which particular socioeconomic structures and cultural orientations continue to condition responses to events in new historical circumstances.

    – Matt, thanks – I read your piece & mostly agreed with it. Probably one point of difference is that I don’t see the Democrats (or Labour) as avoiding the oligarchy/collapse couplet, and I see processes like COP not as moribund but as actively constructive of climate breakdown. While I’m probably the wrong person to be reading an essay that invokes George Monbiot approvingly, I think it encapsulates the problem: people like him, and the Dems and Labour, can eloquently invoke concepts like decentralized democracy and ecological civilization, but when it comes down to it they serve the ecocidal machine at every turn. I used to give them the benefit of the doubt, and like you I used to find the ‘blame the progressives’ game a bit annoying, but I don’t really any more. It’s fair to point to the dark money & the rigged game, but I think real progressive politics will keep losing if we leave it at that – Musa al-Gharbi’s point that disadvantaged and minority communities rightly don’t see the Democrats as being on their side needs taking seriously IMO. But I don’t want to be too accelerationist about a Trump victory, so I’m interested in more discussion around these points. Also more discussion on post-collapse politics & supersedure states (appreciate the nod to that from Matt & Kathryn). My take is that yes dentists, doctors and (more ambiguously) roads are things it’d be good to have in a post-collapse world … I’m just not sure the residue of the state in London or DC will be the best agencies to deliver it. We need government, but not necessarily the centralized state…

    – Finally, I liked this gentle remark of Martin’s “I did however subscribe to all the usual views – but now I’m more inclined to think there’s no value in having an opinion about things one doesn’t actually know much about.” I’m in the odd position of being someone who’s always been quite political and opinionated, but now find myself being political and opinionated about the need to support non-political people who just want to get on with making practical livelihoods. Modernity has made it easy to have lots of opinions, to not know much about anything, and for it not to make much difference to everyday life. I suspect all that will change.

    Reply
    • Walter Haugen says:

      November 19, 2024 at 18:57

      Since you asked:

      Protectionism: ” . . . local material economies need to find ways of protecting themselves from siphoning by the non-local abstract economy, so I’d welcome discussion of how to do that.”

      Right now, the “non-local abstract economy” is siphoning off most of the capital generated by the 1st tier economy (gratis from nature) through control of the 2nd tier economy (zero-sum game where most of the economic interaction occurs) based on their creation of capital out of nothing (the 3rd tier economy). As economics becomes more and more local this siphoning falls away. I see the protectionist policies doomed to obsolescence at that point. As you buy food locally and sell your products locally using some form of currency or barter or scrip, the non-local abstract becomes a non-entity.

      Hypercomplexity:
      As Joseph Tainter describes it in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), complex societies reach a point where the marginal returns move towards a point of using more and more resources to get to smaller and smaller returns. The point at which this “tips over” into negative territory is the inflection point, which is the second derivative. Tainter doesn’t use this terminology, but that is what it is. At the inflection point, the curve changes shape from convex to concave – or vice versa AND it changes sign. Look at a sine wave for a graphic representation. Many people confuse the inflection point with the saddle point. They also don’t look at the micro view of the saddle point (where we are now) as the “bumpy plateau.”
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection_point
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_derivative

      The third derivative (the rate at which the second derivative, or the rate of change of the rate of change, is changing) is like a micro view of what is happening at the inflection point. In my current thinking, we are at an inflection point with the interest on the US national debt at 1 trillion USD. As Warren Buffet has pointed out, on this trajectory the interest on the US national debt will rise to a point where it consumes ALL government revenues. There will be a rocky road as we approach this point of course. This is why I call it hypercomplex rather than just complex. It is the acceleration of the acceleration. France, where I live, has almost the same percentage of national debt to GDP as the US (around 120-130%), but France has a thriving black economy and only half the per capita energy use of the US. It becomes a question of scale. To be blunt, the US is going down the toilet at a faster rate than France or Germany. Because of the lower energy use, adaptation to contraction is easier. So . . . my idea is both theoretical and empirical.

      Slavery:
      You don’t have to buy my slavery idea. Not many people do. In fact, it is one of the reasons I was canceled by Resilience. [The moderators were even offended by my bringing up the subject.] However, since you had a chance to study with Marshall Sahlins, you are probably aware of Elman Service and his classification of human social organization into bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. My statement that “slavery is a requirement of state-level societies” comes right from him. I expand on it at length in my first book, The Laws of Physics Are On My Side (2013). In my research for this book I could not find any pre-fossil-fuel state level society that did not have either chattel slavery or corvee (corvée with the French grammar), which is a step down from chattel slavery. If you don’t do it and they put you in jail or take your land, it is still slavery. Now we have fossil fuel slaves and we think we are so clever, democratic and free. Once the oil EROI slips below 5:1, we will have to do something to grow food and cotton for the elites who control us. The whip hand will no longer be just a metaphor. Most people don’t want to hear this, of course. But then, very few people think they will have to get by on much fewer resources in the future either. They think this phony-baloney affluent society will continue ad infinitum.

      Reply
      • Chris Smaje says:

        November 19, 2024 at 20:56

        Thanks Walter.

        On protectionism, yes I agree with your analysis in relation to a total collapse scenario – the issue then is probably military or political rather than economic protectionism. But other scenarios of attempted siphoning are surely possible – perhaps it’s a case of James Scott’s illegibility. Maybe the most interesting case is small countries or regions opting to protect a more bioregional economy and trying to use their political power to do so. Admittedly a long way from anything Trump is trying to do.

        On hypercomplexity, yes that makes sense – so essentially it’s the level of US debt that’s the difference? The MMT people’s argument seems to be essentially that a country like the USA is ‘too big to fail’ but it wouldn’t be good to stress test it.

        On slavery, my point was partly about the slackening of slavery precisely because of the contraction of the state in the ‘dark ages’, but yes broadly I’d agree that slavery is and was an enduring possibility for state political organisation – one reason I’m not a fan of states and would prefer to see them diminishing. But at a more granular level there was ongoing conflict & contestation about slavery in premodern states, and its substantial absence in many times and places along the lines of Patterson’s ‘social death’ argument. Hence my question about the persistence of institutional structures.

        For info, I got an offer to study under Sahlins at Chicago and met the great man a couple of times as a callow youth, but never went to Chicago or studied under him. The later Sahlins of the Culture & Practical Reason styling was quite a different beast to the one of Sahlins & Service fame. I’d be interested in his thoughts on this question of slavery but alas he is now a metaperson.

        Reply
        • Walter Haugen says:

          November 20, 2024 at 07:48

          ” . . . one reason I’m not a fan of states and would prefer to see them diminishing.”

          You are light years ahead of most social scientists Chris. Most cannot comprehend a different form of social organization and those that do quickly realize they would have to give up some of their cushy benefits under a different form. This is THE major paradigm shift.

          As for what makes the US hypercomplex, debt is indeed the major driver. I blame Nixon for many things, including moving off the gold standard in 1971, which allowed debt to increase massively. Our financial overlords have become more sophisticated in using it over the last couple of decades.

          Good luck in your publishing efforts.

          Reply
      • Kathryn says:

        November 20, 2024 at 05:54

        A counterpoint to slavery:

        Once the elites do not have enough energy available to enforce slavery (or the land enclosures and taxes that are necessary to create conditions of wage-slavery), the balance of power shifts, a lot.

        My understanding of both chattel slavery for farming cotton and sugarcane, and land enclosures in England, is that they were done to increase the wealth of investors. Wool barons really didn’t need all that wool themselves, they wanted to sell it. Chattel slavery was broken as much by depressions in the price of sugar and cotton as by anything else, though it would certainly be remiss not to credit the (many) rebellions of enslaved people as part of that picture too: but enslaved people were not growing the sugar for the personal use of their alleged owners, but for their owners to sell on global markets.

        I do think today’s powerful will fight tooth and nail to maintain the global markets that give them their so-called wealth. When that wealth can no longer be used in exchange for goods and services — when it can no longer be used to compel people to labour for others, or to requisition the fruits (perhaps literal) of that labour, it ceases to be meaningful. A huge amount of that power is currently predicated on fossil fuels, as is a huge amount of the ability to trade globally. Compulsion and trade for financialised extraction in a non-fossil-based economy will require very different physical infrastructure, which there isn’t a lot of time left to build.

        So I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that we will see a smooth transition from current conditions to chattel slavery, any more than we will see a smooth transition from current conditions to electrification of everything. I’m also not prepared to rule out chattel slavery as a model that will arise somewhere, because it’s still pretty close to what happens already in a piecemeal fashion (human trafficking for sex work and drugs is a huge problem even today).

        In addition to access to a global market that can purchase sugar/cotton/whatever, large scale chattel slavery production requires a stable enough climate that monocropped sugarcane/cotton/whatever can be profitable. This seems less likely to be the case moving forward. Again, I’m not ruling out the possibility, but…. I don’t think it is inevitable.

        Reply
        • Walter Haugen says:

          November 20, 2024 at 10:05

          ” . . . large scale chattel slavery production requires a stable enough climate that monocropped sugarcane/cotton/whatever can be profitable.”

          So, an unstable climate reduces (or even destroys) the underpinnings of the slavery system. Brilliant!

          Many people think the “economies of scale” only work one way and it is always “bigger is better.” Not so. Sometimes smaller is more efficient – i.e. “smaller is better.” The more localized economy where I live in the Pyrenees provides a cushion against collapse.

          Reply
          • Kathryn says:

            November 20, 2024 at 12:51

            I mean, an unstable climate also erodes the underpinnings of settled agriculture and city-states.

            My understanding (and I might be wrong, and I can’t remember where I actually got these numbers) is that in pre-modern Europe there was crop failure about one year in five in most places, and that was okay, but when there was crop failure two years in a row it would set off a local famine.

            We currently use fossil fuels to mitigate the effects of climate instability on cereal crops: pre-harvest dessication, giant drying machines, climate-controlled storage and industrial processing of grains into shelf-stable products (such as pasta and couscous) and probably some technologies I’m missing out mean that we can store our surplus with less concern about spoilage and rodents than our ancestors had to contend with. When crops do fail we have the ability to ship in surplus from other countries, rather quickly if necessary.

            That is going to go away. But the climate that gave us crop failure about one year in five (…or whatever) is already gone.

            A major advantage of small farms over mechanised cereal production is that small-scale horticulture can be very much more diverse. In my own growing spaces if I tried to stick to three or four (fairly similar) crops I might do less work over the course of a growing season, but I would be in danger of not having the labour available to process the crops when they are ripe, as I nearly experienced this year with my oilseed pumpkins. With wheat that would mean losing a lot to birds and rodents; with potatoes, slugs; with maize, deer and parakeets; with nuts, squirrels. But I can grow a bit of each and lose less of the harvest because they don’t all ripen at once and I am free to harvest (winter) wheat then hazelnuts then maize then spuds and squashes. (I actually grow many, many more species than this, and also forage quite a bit; at some point I should add up my walking areas in my regular foraging rounds but after living in this area since 2009 I am still finding new spots.)

            This approach may not be enough that settled agriculture (or horticulture I guess) can continue: a bad enough flood or drought will take out everything I am growing. But it’s many times more resilient and adaptable than the large-scale cereal production.

    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 22, 2024 at 23:50

      I’m trying to get my head around the concept of modernity as a destructive force. I’m learning. Am onto my next book now. Hospicing Modernity, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. It’s something I have asked my XR psychotherapist to work through with me. I don’t mind admitting that I am undergoing a period of deep grief for the Creation, Chris. I’m not sure where I am going to end up, only that any works I undertake, whether it’s local or work in support of my indigenous brothers and sisters in my beloved home country of Malaysia needs to be based on spiritual bedrock, and not sand, to paraphrase the saying from Luke’s gospel

      Reply
    • Matt Colborn says:

      November 28, 2024 at 06:11

      Hi Chris —
      Many thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my essay. On our points of difference:

      1. I actually agree that the democrats in the US and Labour in the UK will not be the agents who save us from oligarchy. (This will have to be a grassroots effort, if it happens at all). I’m actually deeply critical of two-party states — in part because they seem to have a tendency to degenerate into one-party states. My own political inclinations are indeed in the direction of deepening democracy (or better yet, something like demarchy), making work democratic, decentralisation etc. I also don’t believe that any one individual should have the executive power of a president. Brian Martin’s comments are useful here: https://comments.bmartin.cc/2017/08/02/questioning-a-trump-making-system/
      Maybe new social/political experiments will be possible in your future….
      2. George Monbiot: my feelings towards George have become ambivalent of late. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I think he’s way off base. I thought his turn to cultured food was a mistake, and that your book refuted the claims in Regenesis pretty convincingly. I’ve yet to hear a convincing reply from him on this. But serving the eco-destroying machine: maybe, at times this is true. We were all raised in modernity, so its basic assumptions and prejudices have become pretty ingrained and hard to shake off. I’d include myself here. I see the flaws in modernity, but I find myself still thinking like a ‘modernist’ quite a bit.
      3. “but I think real progressive politics will keep losing if we leave it at that – Musa al-Gharbi’s point that disadvantaged and minority communities rightly don’t see the Democrats as being on their side needs taking seriously IMO.” I agree, although I still find it alarming how easily large populations vote fascist when they have been disappointed by ‘centrist’ parties. The question for me is why people who have been abandoned by mainstream liberal parties so readily turn to the far right or fascism for solutions. Trump’s victory could not have happened without mass compliance, and I find that deeply disturbing.
      This is a damaging aspect of industrial consumer societies that will also need to be addressed in your future. Again, I think writers like Adendt and Orwell remain pretty good sources here, but also Ece Temelkuran’s How To Lose Your Country. (And Mary Midgley in chapter 6 of her book Wickedness; neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor’s book Cruelty is also a key source). I’d also point to the deeply pessimistic writings of philosopher Steven Bartlett on human evil. Brian Martin discusses Bartlett’s work in his writings on evil: https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/evil.html
      In short: I think the problem of human destructiveness needs to be addressed more honestly and comprehensively by anyone trying to imagine a benign human future. This for me is less from a moralistic standpoint, and more in terms of prevention. How can we create social structures in a post-collapse world that encourage the best in human beings and contain the worst?

      Reply
12. Bruce says:

    November 19, 2024 at 16:43

    “Modernity has made it easy to have lots of opinions, to not know much about anything, and for it not to make much difference to everyday life.” I think this is very true – we have huge amounts of knowledge about things over which we have no control – I guess its a scale problem – our systems and societies just don’t work at a human scale.

    I’ve recently been rereading Ted Kaczynski writing about complex systems. His position is that such systems can’t be reformed because any change sufficient to alter the long term dynamic/trajectory of such a system would result in a completely different system and faced with any reform that didn’t create that level of change a complex system will just revert to its long term dynamic. So for instance you can knock quite large holes in a rainforest and given a little time that land reverts to rainforest but at some point, if the holes are big enough that land will start growing something else – a tipping point where one system becomes another system with none of the charateristics of the first. Kaczynski uses this to argue that technological society can’t be reformed and that revolution is therefor necessary but he is also clear that revolutionaries can’t predict the outcome of their revolution – not in the sense of whether they’ll succeed or not but more in the sense of its impossible to know the shape of what comes after – it’ll be a new system the characteristics of which aren’t visible from within the old system.

    I find the argument persuasive and its sort of led me to give up on politics as a way of dealing with the ecological crises that we face. It doesn’t mean I think all will be well – I really don’t and so developing local resilience seems a far more urgent goal than trying to convince anyone that backing this or voting for that will make that much difference to the trajectory of our culture. Strangely I find this perspective much less depressing. I still like to have an opinion, read incessantly and even to argue about all this but I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re really not in control and probably never were so my opinions, arguments etc are really just a form of entertainment for an over active mind.

    Debating the nature of ‘Dark Ages’ seems a little obscure – I think most people have a general sense of what’s implied – its like the term has a ‘myth’ like nature – a meaning that might not be academically rigourous but has a certain ‘truthiness’ to it. A collapse of centralised/larger scale systems of power – that has both positive and negative aspects.

    Reply
    • Walter Haugen says:

      November 20, 2024 at 10:15

      I admire the fact that you can actually wade through Kacynski’s writing. I tried a couple of times, but didn’t get far. Your point about not being able to see the characteristics of the new system while in the old is well taken. As is your solution of local resilience as an urgent goal. There are a bunch of us working on these things and we have to make contact through sites such as Chris’ blog and other blogs and podcasts. I regularly comment on Nate Hagen’s podcasts and I am pleased at how many people are actually lighting a candle in a dark, dark time.

      Yes, the term “Dark Ages” has a mythic nature. But I regard that as a good thing. As I travel forward in my research I don’t want to “myth” the point.

      Reply
      • Bruce says:

        November 21, 2024 at 12:17

        I agree that at times Kaczynski can be a bit tedious and repetitious but I still think he’s worth reading – although he happily admits his ideas aren’t original and that he draws on earlier thinkers – Jaques Ellul in particular I think and he’s hardly a light read.

        I was listening to Radio 4 this morning ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002552j ) where they were exploring the idea of the ‘deep state’. Listening it occurred to me that Kaczynski’s view of the world is essentially the same as that of Kevin Kelly – they’re simply looking at the same process from different perspectives – Kelly came up with the term ‘Technium’ and wrote a book called ‘What Technology Wants’; for Kelly a positive thing for Kaczynski less so.

        For both there’s a process at work within human affairs over which we are powerless, that’s proceeding according to its own logic. I guess Nate Hagens would call this ‘the super-organism’. Trump et al (Liz Truss anyone?) might label this the deep state or the administrative state while those of the left might bemoan how unaccountable global capital which has shifted beyond political control is shaping the world. The common thread is that sense of the world having moved beyond our collective control – our politics simply shape our idea of too where we think the locus of control has moved.

        So it seems that something is emerging into our collective understanding of the world – a sense that we’re really not in control – I wonder if we can take that on board, stop believing that if only A.N. Other was as we think they should be all will be well. And if we could would it produce a level of humility that might craft a better response to the crises that we face?

        For me such a change in our understanding would be a source of light in a dark age – perhaps we can’t fix everything but we could stop trying to and then at the least we might find the hole we’re in stops getting deeper – surely a good place to start

        Reply
        • Simon H says:

          November 22, 2024 at 07:34

          Thanks Bruce. The deep state banter brings to mind (somehow) the individual free will/determinism debate, coming down on the side of determinism on a macro level.
          Back to who pulls the strings, or can’t help but pull the strings in the wider world, I think it’s worth considering Iain Davis’ Global Public Private Partnership diagram, postulating ways power cascades down to our governments (the ‘Policy Enforcers’) and on down:
          https://iaindavis.com/what-is-the-global-public-private-partnership/
          There can be a comfort to the feeling – be it truth, illusion or delusion – of control in one’s own life. Come to think of it, letting go can be pretty exhilarating too. I guess, between thought and deed, we wend somewhere in between. Any way, here’s today’s Meditation Tip from Dōgen Zenji:

          Truth is not far away.
          It is nearer than near.
          There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it.

          I rather light that

          Reply
          • Bruce says:

            November 22, 2024 at 08:26

            I think if we all spent more time pondering Dogen the world would be a better place – at the very least it would keep our monkey minds from making mischief

13. Clem says:

    November 20, 2024 at 18:18

    Congrats on the book contract. Sharing thoughts about potential content therein – working on it.

    As a US citizen with middle to left leaning tendencies – but related to and sympathetic with many who voted differently on the 5th of this month; I’ve been watching and reading a good deal of the Monday Morning Quarterbacking. Thus, your link to Musa al-Gharbi above is appreciated. A rather longish piece (which I’m still chewing on) – but he offers a 10 minute video of a talk he gave that hits some high points. Also – he has some inciteful discussion with some of his commenters.

    Locally, an acquaintance of blue persuasion won his bid for an open seat in the Ohio legislature. This district is on the fringe of hardcore red and hardcore blue (peri-urban) districts. In two years there will be another election for Federal House seats. I watch this development with keen interest.

    To your comment concerning
    the Republicans was around a sense they’d do a better job with the economy. :

    Better perhaps to look further than the top spot on this issue. Many pundits want to paint Trump’s Republican party as a house of sycophants… and it is a picture easy to see. But l particularly like a couple of the warnings that Musa offers in the link mentioned above. I see there being at least a handful of Republicans who could serve to temper the more outrageous of Trump’s bellicose and blusterous rantings. Outcomes from the economy are too frequently credited to or blamed upon the president. That’s not how it works. I’ll agree, the Orange man will impact the coming US economic situation more than I will. But Chairman Powell and a host of significant Congressfolk will still have very significant contributions to make. The follow on question might be to wonder whether the voting public appreciates the distinction. On that I have no data… but I’m not convinced other talking heads have either.

    Reply
14. Diogenese10 says:

    November 21, 2024 at 02:18

    I can’t help thinking that Trump has read the fall of complex societies taking a axe to the ever increasing number of ” civil servants ” and their endless duplication of rules / regulations that are slowly choking the USA to death .
    As my old CEO stated” no middle management person will ever set on someone who is more competent than they are ” . that’s the crux of the political and corporate problem , incompetent people surround themselves with even more incompetent people .

    Reply
15. John Adams says:

    November 21, 2024 at 11:50

    Lights in a Dark Age???????

    I read that to mean, a look at social structures that existed in the “Dark Ages” after the fall of Rome and that times might have not been that “Dark” after all.
    Then projecting some of those social structures onto a possible future????

    Bit like what Graeber and Wengrow were getting at in The Dawn of Everything.

    Looking at the gaps between “civilisations” where things aren’t necessarily being recorded but where people are still existing and creating social structures. Structures that aren’t necessarily based on domination and oppression.????

    But……. “The telling of history is always political” 🙂

    On Trump…………

    I too, am not overly concerned by Trump himself.
    He will ultimately fail.
    He can’t change the fundamentals.
    Declining cheap, abundant energy.
    (I do worry for those unfortunate souls who are going to get the blame when things don’t work out, though.)

    MAGA. I’m not sure which period of American history, this applies to???? Pre 1776 perhaps??? 🙂

    We use lots of abstract words/concepts on this blog such as peak oil, de-growth, ECOE, collapse, supercedure etc.
    Trump is part of the reality of all these concepts. We are going to see a lot more snake oil salesman as things start to unwind. It’s going to be an uncomfortable ride!!!!

    Reply
16. Hoon Seong Teo says:

    November 21, 2024 at 16:45

    All I have to say is that we have started to look at forming a Salford food grower’s network. I am having a hard time dealing with my dread that things are accelerating fast, with the only places that are still standing being authoritarian states like the Chinese Republic, and only because it has a long, long history of being a centrally managed state. I’m talking hundreds of years aside from what Chinese historians refer to as the ‘century of humiliation’ when it was divided up between colonial powers. Or they might crumble too, only not as fast. Have just finished ‘Work in the Ruins’ by Dougald Hines, formerly of Dark Mountain who incidentally quotes you a lot, Chris. In it he states that picking up the threads of works that require doing in a time of endings has to start where the ending is already up to people’s knees. So we’re looking at linking all the growing groups (including farms), allotments, community gardens, urban diggers etc. and then we’re going to talk about how we will feed ourselves and our neighbours. Will it be enough? Damned if I know.

    Reply
    • Kathryn says:

      November 22, 2024 at 07:19

      Will it be enough for what?

      Will it be enough to build community connectedness and solidarity, to give people the opportunity to build relationships and work together who otherwise might not? It sounds like it might.

      Will it be enough to feed everyone in the event of catastrophic changes? Almost by definition, no: a sufficient catastrophe will be enough to topple any and all preparation efforts, whether that’s severe flooding, multi-year drought, violent land appropriation by corporations, or virulent disease with a high fatality rate (note that COVID had a relatively low fatality rate). If it were possible to perfectly prepare for all things then they wouldn’t be catastrophic.

      Is the work worth doing anyway? Absolutely yes. The increased cooperation and coordination, the mutually interdependent
      relationships that can grow out of these kinds of projects, will still put the whole community in a better place to deal with whatever catastrophe might come. So: more power to your elbow. Your fears are well-founded but the very best thing you can do is transform them into agency.

      If you have a local Transition Towns group it might be worth talking to them about a growers’ network. (Or it might not, they might all be raging eco-modernists. But our local one had a “matching people who want to grow vegetables with people who can’t maintain their gardens” list for a while, which was great, and I think the local fruit picking network is still active too.)

      Reply
      • Hoon Seong Teo says:

        November 22, 2024 at 10:07

        I don’t imagine that it’ll be enough to feed people, no. It wasn’t my idea, but it came out of informal conversations within the Salford CVS network, resulting from third sector organisations who were helping people with the cost of living crisis, which hit people here really hard as Salford had a lot of poverty to begin with. What I am hoping it will be is to be ‘the seed of something unimaginable’ as described by Hines.
        What will the catastrophe be? We don’t know, and we cannot know the future with certainty. It’s ‘to lean into the mystery’ as Hines suggests. A vast transformation is certain, that’s for sure.
        Also Kathryn, I know it’s a pretty old fashioned word, but if the food network reinvigorated the concept of love for thy neighbours and embeds it, then yes I do wish that it will form one of the seeds that will bring in a world worth living. The hatred and division we are seeing now everywhere won’t

        Reply
17. Ben Johnson says:

    November 22, 2024 at 09:41

    Hi Chris, great news. Looking forward to reading your next book. Gonna proceed by assuming that a “dark age” is what comes during/after a “collapse” event similar to the fall of the roman empire.

    It seems to me “collapse” in the rich countries in the short to medium term will just be them becoming more like poorer countries in terms of less reliable infrastructure and state control and maybe violence (as you talk abt in SFF). To me “lights in a dark age” would be a sort of survey of people and places facing “collapse” today and what people do in response to it. Sometimes there may be some bright lights to share. In the rich countries I think Living Energy Farm would be cool to talk about.

    Theres a fair amount of Degrowth books about how we could theoretically get by on less but one of the things I found interesting abt SFF was that you argued that what may be ideal might not be possible (for me an ideal would be something closer to what your critics H&H would hope for). This book might be a good place to provide more evidence to that, I suspect you may be right but I don’t know. This book might be a good way to add case studies.

    I suspect a future dark age will be a lot like the synopsis I’ve heard of The Sovereign Individual (not read it) where nation states basically collapse and there are a bunch of poor people living underneath the super rich who stride the world like collossuses. The best hope in such a circumstance is that you can live out your life without these people seeing you or stealing your stuff. At a macro scale this looks like apocalypse but maybe at an individual scale it can have its joys. Again, as someone living in a rich country this idea is a bit alien to me.

    I’ve been watching computing history videos recently (Computerphile on YouTube – I recommend) and I’ve been amazed about what people managed to do with very bad hardware and how many of those people are still alive today, so I’m currently interested in post-collapse computing, as it seems the computing supply chain is particularly vulnerable and this breaking down seems to me one of the most impactful “one things” that will happen (if we think the food supply chain is fragile the computing one is even more so). Even in a world of small agraianism, climate change means we won’t be able to rely on seasons as we may have done in the past, so I reckon weather models will still be highly desirable. I wonder if another “bright point” in these dark ages would be centres of computing where scientists are still trying to get weather forecasts out of aging tech.

    Another point will be th effort that will have to go into archiving data currently stored on (in the scheme of things) very unstable computer memory. The future role of things like the Internet Archive might be another bright point.

    Getting into speculative fiction with the above but I think those potential heterogeneities in tech could be interesting bright points in a dark age. Solar punk art captures this vibe well I think.

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 22, 2024 at 10:23

      Not read it, either, but have looked up the summary, and it seems to be the fever dream of a pair of entitled rich white men. We used to call this warlordism. It never ends well, either for the warlords or the people that have to put up with them. I’m sorry but I’m bang out of patience with Rees-Mogg and his ilk. They actively want this state of affairs to puff up some unconscious spiritual malady of theirs. They would love to be little gods. Their heads [have become detached from embodied reality]. Feel free to edit, or not approve, Chris, but I find it hard to be dispassionate around people like these

      Reply
      • Ben Johnson says:

        November 22, 2024 at 16:38

        Sorry Hoon, hope I didn’t come across as ‘handing it to a Rees Mogg’!

        My understanding of the book is that it predicts that nation states will become increasingly irrelevant to the super rich who will hoarde resources ad infinitum, and I think if things continue on present trajectories that’s probably true. I think people like Peter Thiel and probably Musk are actively planning for this future and trying to bring it about.

        None of this is to say I want it to happen.

        Reply
        • John Adams says:

          November 22, 2024 at 19:50

          This episode of The Coming Storm covers The Sovereign Individual

          https://open.spotify.com/episode/2qhxCVcaFlRLZipNFrtq9S?si=hN5HlpUJRU-47N64pFzXng

          Reply
        • Hoon Seong Teo says:

          November 22, 2024 at 23:06

          Yes in their hubris they probably are. However they’re not as clever as they think. And if the past 10 years is anything to go by it is apparent that nothing works out the way anyone predicts it’s going to. It’s become just too unstable

          Reply
          • John Adams says:

            November 23, 2024 at 20:25

            I’m not too worried about a world envisioned in The Sovereign Individual.
            The tech underpinning the whole idea, is not going to be viable as energy scarcity increases.
            (I’m not sure that an increase in scarcity is the correct turn of phrase?)

    • Kathryn says:

      November 23, 2024 at 07:05

      nation states basically collapse and there are a bunch of poor people living underneath the super rich who stride the world like collossuses. The best hope in such a circumstance is that you can live out your life without these people seeing you or stealing your stuff

      I mean, this isn’t very far off the experience of most poor people now, so I’m not sure it’s predictive of the future except insofar as the future is already here but not evenly distributed, as William Gibson might put it. There’s certainly an argument to be made that many nation states the world over are essentially puppets of large corporations headed by the super-rich.

      As far as computers go, I think people will try very, very hard to hang onto fast and convenient communication, for as long as possible. Weather modelling without a way to tell people about it is only minimally useful. However I am no further into my solarpunk bicycle-messengers-with-wifi-hotspots-visiting-agrarian-villages cli-fi novella than I was last time I made a comment along these lines. (It wouldn’t necessarily be an internet, as such, so much as a mobile intranet — remember the static versions of those? — with very high latency.)

      Reply
      • John Adams says:

        November 23, 2024 at 20:32

        @Kathryn

        “As far as computers go, I think people will try very, very hard to hang onto fast and convenient communication, for as long as possible.”

        I guess that my digital communication is ultimately “discretionary” in the greater scheme of things.

        My daily, face to face, relationships, will be of more relevance to me, than keeping in touch with old college friends.

        So, with limited energy/capacity, I’m not sure I would be prioritising digital communications.

        Reply
        • Kathryn says:

          November 23, 2024 at 22:08

          Your digital communication might well be largely discretionary, but this doesn’t mean that you want to do without communication at all.

          With lots of people moving longer distances because of changing climate, keeping in touch with family and close friends will still be important to people. Despite the embedded materials costs and the energy involved in the transfer, it is still orders of magnitude cheaper to send an email than a letter.

          I’m certainly not promising that quick digital communication will be available forever, but I absolutely think people will be very, very reluctant to part with it, and will absolutely prioritise some form of communication network once immediate physical needs are met.

          Reply
          • Simon H says:

            November 24, 2024 at 08:43

            Couple of musings: On modern methods of communication and climate/economic/other migration patterns, it occurs to me that, failing the existence of email/smart phones and all the cabling and space hardware it entails, anyone considering emigrating might think twice. If you can’t easily keep in tough with family left behind, send money home etc, would you still leave? Or would you leave only if you could all stick together? I guess the answer is ‘it depends’. The character Pa, in Little House on the Prairie, walks 200 miles to work on a harvest, sends two letters to his wife and family during the weeks he is gone, then walks back home when the job is done. What goes around comes around.

            Second musing, lying in bed in the village dark on a below-freezing night, hearing the electric power cut in and out a few times during the night (I have a kitchen device that beeps every time this happens… maybe I should unplug it?), was how on earth can the grid cope with ever more electric cars, electrified everything, if it’s struggling now at minus seven? It is noticeable that any new build or renovation here tends to go with air con/heat pumps, probably sold on their touted fantastic efficiency, i.e. cheap (if noisy) to run. But as your main or only heat source? Using convection to heat the air? Need I go on? I for one was glad of the tiled wood stove, radiating heat in the house, though being trapped between two cats on the duvet was snug too, and probably also why I was struggling to nod off in my straitjacket.
            PS Excellent documentary from 1992 for anyone interested in NATO/CIA involvement in Europe post WW2, with the stay-behind units of Operation Gladio keeping an eye on the Commies, bombing innocent civilians to sow terror as a way to further manipulate consent in the population, etc. Fascinating stuff, straight out of le Carré. You couldn’t make it up!
            https://asawinstanley.substack.com/p/watch-the-bbcs-forgotten-series-on

          • John Adams says:

            November 24, 2024 at 15:17

            @Simon H

            For people emigrating from Europe to the “new world” or Antipodes in the 1700s or 1800s, it would have been a one way ticket. People would have knowingly been seeing their families for the last time.
            Quite a decision to make!!!!

            On CIA shenanigans, I watched Soundtrack To A Cout d’etat last week. Very good. Well worth a look.
            Came out thinking that geopolitics has always been a messy business. The world today is nothing new!!!

          • Kathryn says:

            November 24, 2024 at 20:57

            Simon H

            I certainly don’t think we can (or should) electrify everything. I think there are three big areas where electrification is quite difficult: heating (and increasingly, cooling), fast transport, and food production. Thankfully, these are all things (with the exception of meaningful cooling) we can actually do without using fossil fuels or electricity… provided we are willing to massively change the entire structure of our economy. Oh. So yes, a bumpy ride while we figure that one out.

            The reason I think people will hang onto fast digital communication for as long as they possibly can (which is not to say I think it will be around forever!) is that I work with people every week who don’t have reliable mains electricity at home (because they can’t afford to top up the meter) and still use smartphones to keep in touch with relatives, some of whom are in other countries and also don’t have mains electricity at home. And the cables and space junk, while necessary for the current paradigm, are not at all necessary for (e.g.) smartphones or repurposed computers or whatever to communicate: I have an app on my phone that allows me to communicate with other people using only Bluetooth — no satellites, wiring etc required. (Annoyingly, almost nobody else I know has said app, but I think that would change pretty fast in a situation of more intermittent internet access.) Additionally an awful lot of people I know have some sort of spare power brick for charging phones on the go, and a non-trivial number of people I know have some kind of small cheap nasty solar panel they can use, in extremis, to charge said power brick, or a bicycle with a hub dynamo that could be adapted to do the same while you ride the bike around during the day. Having something already is not a guarantee you’ll have it in the future too, of course, but there are also an awful lot of people who replace their phones long before they need to; an awful lot of desk drawers with a couple of older models of smartphone in them, “just in case”.

            So to me, the question isn’t whether we can make a functional communication network with that assortment of e-waste: we can, though it might be limited to text and maybe audio rather than video, and it seems likely that working devices will be shared between people rather than people having one each or possibly more — but I never claimed “fast digital communications as we know them now”. The real question is whether we will have the caloric surplus such that people like my housemate and his ex and a friend of mine, who between them have the knowledge to cobble that kind of thing together and maintain it, are able to do that rather than earthing up spuds. But… then I’m back to my observations of soup kitchen guests who don’t have heating or lighting but somehow find a way to keep a phone running. I observe that at least some humans who are undergoing catastrophe earlier than the rest of us make communication a higher priority than personal comfort. I have no reason to believe that set of priorities will suddenly change.

            On a more systemic level, fast communication — and especially encrypted communication — confers an enormous military advantage on parties that have access to it, as well as enormous financial advantages on corporations that have access to it. So I can see communication as something that will attract fairly large amounts of funding by both the rich and the powerful.

            Again, I’m not saying everything will always be like it is now. I’m expecting communication to get harder and more expensive than it is now, within my lifetime.

            I don’t know whether we’ll get to a point of decentralised electronics manufacturing in time to be able to maintain a lower-power, completely recycled, cobbled-together peer-to-peer non-satellite network indefinitely. There’s some hopeful stuff going on with 3D printing, but as ever the feedstock is a major issue. The HyPELignum project is looking at wood rather than plastic, which is a start, and a few years ago now I stumbled across this project looking at using wild clay and silver: https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Clay-PCB-Tutorial

            Of course, I also don’t know whether we’ll get to a point of being able to maintain sedentary agriculture indefinitely.

          • Simon H says:

            November 25, 2024 at 09:29

            Have smartphones become modernity’s umbilical cord?
            Hi Katherine. I know you have a sober outlook on these things and I agree most people will want to hang on to mobile phone technology – like any convenience we get used to – for as long as humanly possible. Ditching the device now is seen as a drastic step, and there is the small issue that we have become almost obligated to use it, and I guess that trend will only continue. Though I decided against having a mobile phone, annoyingly I still have to use one to get around the two-factor authentication step that often comes up when ordering or banking online. It seems the architecture for this way of going about business is being built around us all the time. My mother still banks without a smartphone though, so I suppose the exit is still clear – I maybe should join a Building Society with a nearby branch and not own a computer.

            But I’ll jump in with a friend’s response when I asked if she liked her Nissan Leaf electric car (yes she did) and how long the batteries last before they need replacing. She answered “I think they’ll last forever.” Unfortunately, a few weeks later the car collided with a speeding motorcyclist on a country road bend, and though no one was hurt badly, the car was a write-off, largely because the insurance company would not reinsure an electric car with chassis and battery damage. She now drives a Hyundai Kona (even more electromagnetic radiation exposure for the e-car occupants there).

            Bluetooth still needs a working battery, and these eventually need replacement. I would see that as an Achilles heel. But I’m more ‘anti’, if you like, the mobile/smart phone for reasons most people don’t seem to give a fig about, or see as superstition, even borderline idiocy, and that’s largely down to just the way I am. It is a fact that electromagnetic radiation causes, among other things, slight heating, in metals in particular, and some believe insects may be particularly sensitive to this, and that this may be contributing to insect decline (many living things seem to be declining at around 1-2 per cent annually, which is shocking, if accurate, and largely goes unnoticed by humans, who will notice loss, but tend to have a blind spot to rates of decline unless they are active researchers). The more we vote with our pockets for 5G, 6G etc, purportedly for improvements in speed (er, problem?) and coverage as I understand it, the more we can expect to see antennae on every LED lamppost. Even if you only use a Bluetooth app, you still need the device and the means to keep charging it and maintaining it, and I believe in general that the smartphone is not at all beneficial to human relationships. The longer the distance of the call, the stronger the electromagnetic frequency. There’s also the effect of all this on fertility, sperm motility. Apparently we’ve reached peak smartphone, so that’s possibly a silver lining.

            But they are so addictive! I think your observation about people experiencing a crisis putting (electronic) communication above personal comfort speaks to this to a certain degree. Surely we’ll prioritise food and sedentary agriculture over mobile phones? Who’s to say. My prepping (I say prepping, this guy is actually prepped full stop) neighbour recently suggested we both get a device that you can build yourself to allow walkie-talkie type connection and SMS among the two or three linked devices (I forget the name of this electronica now). By this time, I realised I prefer to not to receive communication via a device when I am out and about, plus the village is so compact, a yodel would do it.

            Finally, speaking of yodelling, I was struck recently by the prescience of Kate Bush’s “Deeper Understanding”, first released in 1989, regarding our relationship with computer technology. She nails it! I believe you appreciate the human voice, so you might like the Trio Bulgarka backing vocals on this. I’ll link to the lyric version if you’re not familiar with the song:
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpQnjY9pj5s
            And thanks John for the film suggestion – looks good, and the soundtrack part reminds me of the jazz drumming film Whiplash, which we enjoyed recently. Very intense!

          • John Adams says:

            November 25, 2024 at 11:26

            @Simon H

            Hope you enjoy the film.

            Using Jazz to project USA soft power!!!
            Who knew!!??

            On communication………

            Like with all things, it’s a double edged sword.

            The reason why a minority elite can rule over vast “subjects/plebs” is because the elites are organised and have good “Comms”. The “subjects/plebs” do not, so can’t organise themselves to challenge the elites.

            So there will be a digital communications system maintained as long as possible but us “plebs” won’t have access to it!!!!

          • Eric F says:

            November 26, 2024 at 15:52

            FYI From Wikipedia, and another cell phone oriented site whose name I already forgot:

            Mobile phones are limited to an effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) output of 3 watts, and the network continuously adjusts the phone transmitter to the lowest power consistent with good signal quality, reducing it to as low as one milliwatt when near the cell tower. Tower channel transmitters usually have an EIRP power output of around 50 watts.

            Five bands of cellular signal, between 698 and 2155MHz, remain the backbone of cellular communications.
            New low band 5G networks include 600MHz mid band 5G at 2.3GHz, 3.5GHz, and 3.7GHz

            Radio waves decrease rapidly in intensity by the inverse square of distance as they spread out from a transmitting antenna. So the phone transmitter, which is held close to the user’s face when talking, is a much greater source of human exposure than the tower transmitter, which is typically at least hundreds of metres away from the user. A user can reduce their exposure by using a headset and keeping the phone itself farther away from their body.

            Also remember that your laptop, etc. will use similar frequencies (at low power) for WiFi routers and Bluetooth.

            For reference, a microwave oven operates at 2.45GHz at a power between 600 and 1200 watts.

      • Ben Johnson says:

        November 25, 2024 at 15:13

        Thanks Kathryn. Yes I agree that future is here but not evenly distributed. I think that it’s here for the working classes in the West, and coming for the middle classes.

        Regarding communication you’re right, but assuming comms and limited computing would be desirable (I think it would) there would be ways of making it work. Some interesting ideas here https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-internet/ (the website is a good e.g. of the kind of thing that might work)

        Even if you don’t believe this technology could be manufactured from scratch after a “collapse” scenario, there’d probably be a fair bit of salvageable tech that could be fashioned into useful things.

        Reply
        • Kathryn says:

          November 26, 2024 at 07:07

          Indeed.

          I mean, people in my household purchase new phones less often than average and we still have enough random “old” kit lying around to set up a rudimentary local network if we had to. Repeaters to get as far as the allotment aren’t within my household’s material capabilities with what’s already lying around, but we aren’t exactly the only people living within that two and a half mile distance, and while some people are very good at decluttering old devices, others have a drawer full of old phones and chargers.

          I do agree with Simon H that batteries are a major weakness here. I’m just not sure they’re an insurmountable one, especially if we don’t need the devices to be mobile. And there’s a huge difference between someone with a landline telephone and home internet connected deciding not to use a smartphone (or not much), and someone for whom a mobile phone is their only telephone and also their only computer, and judging the latter as evidence of some kind of addiction rather than what such people actually say (which is that they use these devices to keep in touch with family) isn’t particularly helpful.

          This doesn’t change the reality of our energy predicament, of course. A cobbled-together internet resembling the forums of the late 1990s is not going to save us from the reality that our lives will need to change.

          But it means we cannot assume our future path involves a return to information dynamics that existed when people only had in-person communication plus the occasional expensive handwritten letter carried by a messenger. You can pick your time period and the argument still holds: even if we lose electricity completely, which I think is largely unknowable from where we are now, I don’t think movable type printing is going away. Even that is a huge game-changer if one group of people has access to it and another doesn’t, and arguably some of our older institutions still haven’t really recovered from the impact.

          Reply
          • John Adams says:

            November 26, 2024 at 08:26

            @Kathryn

            “I mean, people in my household purchase new phones less often than average and we still have enough random “old” kit lying around to set up a rudimentary local network if we had to.”

            Local stuff can be maintained by “runners” and word of mouth. Pony Express etc.

            Keeping in touch with people over distances greater than the Pony Express will be the difficult stuff.

            But perhaps, what’s happening far away will be of little relevance to every day life anyway. (Except for those in charge)

          • Simon H says:

            November 26, 2024 at 12:31

            Maybe some sort of generator linked to a batteryless mobile phone could work, though I guess you’d need to regulate the current in use.
            Back to my earlier thought, I wonder how would your friend tolerate their distance from loved ones without their phone? And how might that influence their steps? Would a public pay phone be an acceptable stand-in (hard to find these days, it’s true)?
            I find myself very much aligned with Naydler in relation to much of today’s technology, seeing it as deleterious in all sorts of ways, notably spiritual.
            https://forestofthought.com/e24-in-the-shadow-of-the-machine-jeremy-naydler/

          • Kathryn says:

            November 26, 2024 at 19:06

            Simon H

            I think you may be making some incorrect assumptions about why asylum seekers and other soup kitchen guests might be far away from their family of origin.

        • Simon H says:

          November 27, 2024 at 11:53

          Thanks for that, Eric F.
          I did wonder what kind of shaky ground I was on with aspects of my smartphone opinions as it’s been a few years since I read about the technology.
          But first – Wikipedia: Just prior to the recent ‘pandemic’, Wikipedia’s Spanish flu page revised the case fatality rate of that flu down from 10-20 per cent, to 2-3 per cent, just before the WHO (which had already itself downgraded what it would consider a pandemic in the preceding years) declared Covid 19, at that time estimated to have a fatality rate of you guessed it, to be our latest pandemic. It might be worth considering whether Wiki is a reliable source of dis/information. Quickly looking in to it, it seems the CIA are involved here as well.
          But even giving Wiki’s cell phone figures the benefit of the doubt, there appears to be no safety data research conducted from the industries involved with 5G, according to the response given to Senator Blumenthal’s questions in that regard at a Senate hearing of Feb 6 2019 (on yt, 5mins).
          Furthermore, the net being what it is, it’s easy to find studies supporting almost any view on this subject, pro or con, so let’s say it’s inconclusive with regard to human health, and probably not a health worry for ‘users’ at all.
          As for insects, which cannot regulate their own body temperature, and whose size is closer to that of EMF waves in the mm range, it seems entirely possible that this is yet another assault – just one of a thousand cuts, by all means not the worst – that we inflict on them because, in this case, we’ve come to find a gadget indispensable, a gadget which is always receiving some kind of signal, for constantly ascertaining location to receiving incoming texts, etc.
          One example, a study by Tirkel, “Effects of Millimeter Wave Exposure on Termite Behavior” (2011) found that when termites 12mm long were exposed to EMFs of 28.2GHz at 1.3 Watts power, they sent out distress signals, which attracted other termites, the result being that they all died huddled together from the slight increase in body temperature they were each experiencing.
          Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that flying ants, which used to swarm our conservatory a few times each summer, have stopped doing so in such overwhelming numbers since our WiFi router cable was run through the little hole they were using. Coincidence maybe.
          There are many similar studies of other insects (bees appearing to show disorientation being a common one) but also amphibians, birds, plants, the compromised ability of fruit flies to grow and reproduce, etc, etc. If we set any store whatsoever by these findings, it seems reckless then to intensify the network further, via the internet of things in a smart home setting, but that appears to be the path we are on.

          Reply
          • Eric F says:

            November 27, 2024 at 17:21

            Simon,

            Yes, I have no expertise or knowledge as to EMF effects on living organisms. I just like to quantify the issue where information is available. Yes, Wikipedia is certainly unreliable for political information, but I’ve found it quite concise and accurate on most technical topics. Also, usually fairly easy to verify.

            So I don’t have any idea what that microwave radiation might be doing to us, or to any other organism(s), but I think it bears remembering that your own phone will give you a higher dose than any cell tower, unless you climb it.

            But those flying insects swarming the towers could get lightly cooked.

            I have a friend who works with military radar, and he tells stories about radar techs cooking chickens in front of the transmitters. Or flocks of birds flying too close to a high-power beam getting burnt and falling out of the sky.

          • Simon H says:

            November 27, 2024 at 18:58

            Eric, I’m in the same category as yourself regarding expertise and knowledge here. I get stirred when tech of this nature is going visibly full-tilt in what seems an unwise direction, with no consultation whatsoever. Also, due to their ubiquity, “why don’t you have a mobile phone?” is a question that crops up surprisingly often, so you have to have some ammo ready, though I usually neglect to mention bugs.
            I agree that Wikipedia can be useful despite the odd editing shenanigans; the page you quoted from had more info than I expected on potential cell damage, cancer and fertility concerns. What with the facility to use microwaves as weaponry, Havana syndrome stories and so on, it remains an area with many unknowns.

18. Chris Smaje says:

    November 22, 2024 at 13:53

    Just a few points briefly –

    (1) Thanks to everyone for an interesting and wide-ranging set of suggestions regarding the content of my book. I fear there’s no way I can adequately meet all of them in the short time & word length available to me, so I’m in expectation management mode already. But it’s been useful and informative to me to get a snapshot of people’s thinking.

    (2) Good to hear your voice here again Hoon. In relation to your local food work, small local steps with uncertain outcomes that feel unequal to the task seem a million times more worthwhile to me than grandiloquent techno-modernist attempts to ‘solve’ global problems. Uncertainty about their adequacy is a good trait … I only wish the techno-modernists had a bit more of that humility.

    Interesting point about China. Maybe a problem it faces is that its attempt to end the century of humiliation is based on the same virtualised economic model as the powers that humiliated it, which may result in the same fate, whereas its strength in premodern times arose from its ability to sustain a strong but non-virtualised commercial economy.

    Regarding Messrs Rees-Mogg & Davidson, I’ve determined that your comment falls just the wrong side of my editorial line so I’ve taken the liberty of rewriting it with a small edit in square brackets. If you’d prefer some other wording, feel free to submit it in a duplicate comment and I’ll delete that one.

    (3) On Bruce’s and Simon’s points, yes I think it’s interesting the way variants of ‘the deep state’ figure positively or negatively in various political imaginaries, and how this changes over time. Thanks Simon for Dōgen Zenji, uplifting lines to pin to the desk as I try to get as close as I can to the truth as I write.

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 22, 2024 at 15:50

      That is an excellent paraphrase and I’m really sorry I lost my temper. The arrogance just grates so that’s probably why I responded so

      Reply
      • Chris Smaje says:

        November 22, 2024 at 18:10

        Understood. No need to apologise!

        Reply
    • Simon H says:

      November 23, 2024 at 13:04

      Glad the Zen aphorism appealed, Chris. On reflection it strikes me as a 13th century sage’s version of the jester’s bumper sticker gag: “I found Jesus! He was down the back of the sofa all along!”
      As you only provide the (working?) title, for whatever reason I thought first of Cohen’s ‘You Want it Darker?’ LP title, then of some lines from Cohen’s ‘Tower of Song’ (maybe you’re familiar?):
      I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it get?
      Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet
      But I hear him coughing all night long

      The loneliness of the scribe, perhaps?
      Then later in the same song (total tuppence flip from me here, I know):

      Now, you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure
      The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
      And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong

      Incidentally, in Nick Cave’s cover of the same, of the mighty judgement he adds: it won’t take long… But I could be wrong.

      I guess you’ll focus more on the light, squinting ahead. I also expect a work that’s largely politics focused, shot through with echoes of Distributism and religion/Christianity. But, like Leonard and Nick, I could be wrong! Godspeed unto Autumn. (PS I’m not too concerned about the quality of the work to come, but I do wonder, with that title, how an illustrator could come up with an appealing cover… Probably only my concern. And maybe I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover anyway).

      Reply
19. Kim A. says:

    November 22, 2024 at 21:57

    First off, congrats on both the anniversary and the new book deal. Very happy to be getting another book from the SFF pen.

    1a) When it comes to the term “dark age”, I know it’s fallen out of favor in academic terms, but I guess I’m just so used to it in a John Michael Greer/Spengler sense I don’t mind too much. And I do think “Lights in a Dark Age” is a lovely title. It’s probably fair to say the upcoming age will be experienced as pretty dark by many as industrial civilization unravels, so I think it’s fitting enough. If you were writing about the historical Iron Age, not so much.

    Anyway, many good suggestions here about the content of the book already. I think I’d expect more detail about how to preserve the political rights and freedoms we take for granted, even as the huge, petroleum-fueled growth states that underwrote them totter and fall. IMO that’s one of the more interesting and unique aspects of your political thought, and one that deserves more space. I sometimes get the feeling there’s a lot of tough-guy “apocalypse machismo” (to borrow a term from JMG) types out there who seem to relish the thought of a might-makes-right age, but I’m with you in that I’d much rather keep freedom of speech, religion, conscience and assembly if at all possible. How can we do that without cheap, abundant energy? I guess that’s one way of reading the proposed book title.

    The other approach I think of is the good old “travel the country showing off examples of people doing sensible things in the small-farm space” book. This is a veritable sub-genre of its own at Chelsea Green, so I could imagine their editors asking you for a UK-based example. That could be interesting and valuable, but I’m personally more interested in seeing your political thinking expanded. Maybe even with some high-level quantification, ie. your Peasant Republic of Wessex math, which is still one of my favorite projects of yours. I always think of that one when some ecomodernist or BAU type pearl-clutches about how sensible agriculture could never feed us all (without being too flippant about the real difficulties involved, of course). Good thing I really do like potatoes a lot…;)

    1b) Looking back to the previous dark age won’t help much in my case, since this part of the country had maybe a handful of farms until well into the Middle Ages. If I have to guess, I think our prospects could be fairly decent, unless the climate makes Scandinavia too marginal for agriculture (ie. AMOC shutdown). My part of southeastern Norway is close to some of the best agricultural land in the country, and it has decent rail and water transport links to the major cities. Historically most people here lived by forestry and farming, and like I’ve said before, I suspect there might be more demand for local timber both for building and firewood in the future.

    We’re only an hour and change from Oslo and well within the core southeastern capital sphere, so in a situation where the country fragments, I think this area will remain more under central control than many others. Or: no James Scott-style escaping to the hills for to be unintelligible here, I think. Maybe in the more remote forest valleys further north and east. From what I’ve read of local history, they certainly had a lot of hassle and annoyance with state tax collectors and other authorities around here back in the 17- and 1800s. Either way, I think there’s enough of a local culture of independence (from the state) here that people could probably cobble together some sort of workable political arrangement when the state withdraws more and more.

    This region is also fairly compact geographically. I’ve imagined more than once what it’d be like if we had to revert to horse-drawn transport here, and I don’t think the distances would be crippling. Of course, well before that, I could imagine maybe one or a few cars shared between every household in the scattered neighborhoods. Then again, the roads will probably go before the cars go.

    Long comment, I know, but it’s not a question that’s easy to answer in brief. Finally, about Trump…I’d rather not add too much to the piles of verbiage about him already, especially not as a European. I guess my brief take is that I think he’s a buffoon, unfit and unqualified for the role, but that I’d still take him over Harris and the Democrats any day if I had to choose. My vote would have easily been for RFK Jr., though, even if I don’t agree with him on everything (ie. Israel). Still, as a European I hope a Trump presidency could result in a settlement in Ukraine and more of a normalization with Russia, which would make the whole thing worth it by itself IMO.

    “Third, it’s looking like one result of the election might be more political distancing by some states from the federal centre. How might that play out longer term?”

    Again, as a foreigner, I think this is necessary and healthy. The US seems way too big and diverse to be one country anyway. It’s like if, say, Europe was a single federation, with Norway and Turkey supposed to be under the same government. The red and the blue states have such fundamentally different cultures and values that I think they should accept that and embrace separation and dissensus rather than trying to force a single national culture.

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 22, 2024 at 23:22

      It is not going to end well with him. For anyone and anything. As a woman I absolutely loathe him, but that aside it’s my gut feeling that things will get ugly quickly. Particularly for marginalised communities and POC. I really hope that you are right and I am wrong, because this is one instance in which I would prefer to be wrong

      Reply
    • John Adams says:

      November 23, 2024 at 20:45

      @Kim A

      “The US seems way too big and diverse to be one country anyway.”

      The USA has only been possible because of fossil fuels. (Watts first viable heat engine in 1776)
      The railroad, telegraph opened up the Midwest and linked East and West coasts.

      As those links become less sustainable, as energy decline kicks in, California and New England will become increasingly detached and irrelevant to eachother.

      Reply
20. Kathryn says:

    November 23, 2024 at 07:06

    Just wanted to say — I recently read An Introduction to Twenty-First Century Hoe Farming by Gareth Lewis, and it’s given me some food for thought.

    https://hoe-farming.com/product/an-introduction-to-twenty-first-century-hoe-farming/

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 23, 2024 at 09:00

      That’s my next book! Thank you

      Reply
    • Simon H says:

      November 23, 2024 at 09:14

      Thanks Kathryn, I keep meaning to order that book, and the others on there (my daughter would take to straw hat braiding like a duck to water)… PS Gareth’s other posts on that website you link are well-written, succinct IMO.

      Reply
      • Kathryn says:

        November 23, 2024 at 17:27

        Yes, I’m thinking about the straw hat one too. A decent straw hat isn’t cheap to buy.

        Reply
    • Steve L says:

      November 23, 2024 at 15:41

      The 21st-century hoe farmer Gareth Lewis has a monthly newsletter (which can be read at hoe-farming dot com)…

      “English-language newsletter – ‘The Subsistence Gardener’, featuring cartoons and articles about subsistence gardening month-by month, and how to work a subsistence garden in the 21st century.”

      …and videos on a YouTube channel:
      https://www.youtube.com/@hoefarming9055/videos

      Reply
21. Diogenese10 says:

    November 23, 2024 at 14:54

    https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/11/work-one-day-for-free-french-asked-in-latest-budget-plan/
    Looks like the French are bringing feudalism back , one day so far but ” mission creep ” always creeps …..

    Reply
22. Chris Smaje says:

    November 24, 2024 at 10:30

    A quick note to say thanks for all the further contributions here … Ben, Kim, Hoon & the more regular contributors too. Some things for me to think about.

    Dammit Simon, have you installed spyware on my computer or something? A good call about the content of the book, but hopefully I can still spring a few surprises! Good stuff too on electrical futures … more to say on that in due course I hope.

    Interesting side debate on family & communications. Another thing to come back to. If the world gets larger again in relation to transport & communications, what are the implications for family & residential patterns?

    Hoon, I hear you regarding your grief and the need to find bedrock and not sand. I wonder how much the numerous fierce defences of modernity arise from an implicit sense of its sandiness. Anyway, I hope you’ll continue to share your journey here.

    You mentioned de Oliveira’s book ‘Hospicing Modernity’ – a good one that I’ve been reading recently too. I forgot to put a list of my reading at the foot of the post above. I’ll do that here in case it prompts some good further suggestions. It’ll probably give some further clues about the contents of the book, or at least the part that I’m currently working on. So, at the moment, I’m reading/re-reading/skimming:

    Christopher Lasch ‘The Culture of Narcissism’
    James Scott ‘The Art of Not Being Governed’
    James Scott ‘Two Cheers for Anarchism’
    Mary Abbott ‘Family Ties’
    Sophie Lewis ‘Abolish the Family’
    Gavin Mueller ‘Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job’
    Jane Jacobs ‘Dark Age Ahead’
    Rhyd Wildermuth ‘Here Be Monsters’
    Bina Agarwal ‘A Field of One’s Own: gender & land rights in South Asia’
    Marshall Sahlins ‘Stone Age Economics’
    Marshall Sahlins ‘What Kinship Is … and Is Not’
    Marshall Sahlins ‘The New Science of the Enchanted Universe’
    Jan Rocha ‘Cutting the Wire: the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil’
    Jo Guldi ‘The Long Land War’
    Azby Brown ‘Just Enough’
    Silvia Federici ‘Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body & Primitive Accumulation’

    I’ve also been re-reading the debates on this site from about a year ago on land & tenure, which have been very informative!

    Reply
    • Simon H says:

      November 24, 2024 at 13:56

      In the spirit of future prepping, I’ve sworn off spyware, Chris. Suffice to say, wet ware/soft machines are more my thing, i.e.: I communicated in person with P. last week, but the only info I could get out of him was “C. did say he was writing a book but he didn’t tell me what it was about.” (wink emoticon here)
      On springing a surprise, my money is on something along the lines of ‘create your very own Themkini for the coming climactic’, co-authored with Alice Holloway.
      Right! Off out to prune some wild apple trees, not really knowing if I’m wasting my time, nevertheless looking forward to the reply they’ll give in the coming months and years.

      Reply
    • John Adams says:

      November 24, 2024 at 15:31

      @Chris

      Where do you find the time to read all those books and at the same time!!!!?????
      Respect!!!!

      Reply
23. steve c says:

    November 24, 2024 at 12:26

    I’ve been gone from here for a while, but this looks like an opportune time to catch up and chime in.

    1. Lights in a dark age- What came to mind first is the idea that emergent, decentralized responses will (already are) happen all over the world, with the available resources and cultural inclinations at hand, ( echoes of the supersedure analogy).

    A quite large portion of humanity knows to varying degrees that we are entering a time of crisis, and responses have already begun. Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” pointed out how from the ground up, varied efforts can add up to a considerable effort to repair or redirect. Many will fail, but some will not. Dissensus in this case is a good thing. Too many unknowns and so no way to know what specific path is right. Just do something.

    So maybe the book will be a description of the necessary ingredients for a person or community to begin gathering to be a light in the dark. Or maybe you have begun the cataloguing of those efforts already underway, as encouragement for others to follow suite?

    Anyway, depending on the anticipated audience, a definition of the dark age in question, and its root causes would be helpful for anyone wanting to be a corrective and avoid repeating the same mistakes. In other words, what kind of light for what kind of dark?

    2. Dark age here? First- dark age anywhere means first focussing on the basics- food, water, shelter, full stop. Sure, there are cultural schisms growing, authoritarian responses to the shrinking pie that might be organized against, but physical needs per Maslow will be the first priority.

    Aside from the obvious urban/rural split on means toward self reliance, each specific location will be more or less suited to a low energy, self reliant lifestyle. Those places that have a reasonable mix of rain, soil, trade route proximity will be where the lights dimly glow in a dark age. I suppose that urban “lights” can also be a thing, but altogether harder and more complicated. Not the path I’m on.

    I am partly lucky, partly intentional to be where I am. Reasonable climate and terrain, mixed land use, other positive features. As many have said, do so if you are able. Now.

    Anyway, what will this place look like as a light in the dark? Food trees that were planted years ago and are now bearing. Clusters of neighbors, all having figured out how to cooperate and barter. Skills that had been acquired and mastered over time, from leatherwork to weaving to cheesemaking.

    As we continue the energy descent, I think that lights in the dark might be exemplars to others, but in general, their impact will be short range, and mostly to close by communities. Patterns successful in the changed conditions will slowly replicate, others will fade like so many have in the past.

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 26, 2024 at 13:25

      The two campaigns I am involved in, both involve allowing local communities to maintain ownership of their commons so that they can redirect and rebuild. As it stands, the state and the multinationals have an enormous reach, based on the ability to penetrate deep into hinterlands secondary to the availability of fossil fuel energy. So such campaigns are always under threat. My hope is that with piecemeal collapse of the current global system that abandonment will occur in some geophysical regions, such that communities such as the Penans of http://www.barampeacepark.org, will be freed to re-establish secure futures.

      Reply
      • steve c says:

        November 27, 2024 at 02:50

        I understand that Borneo has terrible rainforest logging rates. I wish you well in your efforts to preserve as much as possible.

        Reply
        • Hoon Seong Teo says:

          November 27, 2024 at 14:29

          Follow us at http://www.barampeacepark.org, http://www.SAVERivers.org, www. NEEC.ngo, The Borneo Project, Bruno Manser FONDS and http://www.cleanupthetropicaltimbertrade.org. And let your social circle know about what we do

          Reply
24. Diogenese10 says:

    November 24, 2024 at 15:24

    https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/ais-insatiable-appetite-energy-threatens-irelands-grid
    Lights in a dark age ?
    It seems to be heading up to a choice between AI and everything else , power cuts for essential industries because AI is more essential , how this works when we are all reading a book by candle light kinda confuses me , and then there is the goop factory problem .
    I have also seen pictures of large marine diesels generators ( monsters )being hooked up to server farms

    Reply
    • Bruce says:

      November 25, 2024 at 07:50

      “It seems to be heading up to a choice between AI and everything else , power cuts for essential industries because AI is more essential , how this works when we are all reading a book by candle light kinda confuses me”

      I think at some point recognition of the absurdity of the idea that tech can save us from energy descent/ecological will become unavoidable. And I’m not sure much of it will survive as luxuries for the super rich either.

      Reply
      • John Adams says:

        November 25, 2024 at 11:31

        It seems that “we” humans are determined to p*** the last remaining fossil fuels up the wall, on AI/bitcoin/SpaceX etc, rather than using them to build future resilience.

        When it’s gone, it’s gone.

        Reply
        • Simon H says:

          November 25, 2024 at 13:34

          I think it goes deeper than that, but – spoiler alert – you do have to slow down for this one:
          Cultivating the human in an age of intelligent machines : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44m7HQxho
          (Give it a couple of hours:)

          Reply
          • John Adams says:

            November 28, 2024 at 18:46

            @Simon H

            I’ve given the video a go but, boy!!!!!! , does he ramble on and sooooo slow!!!

    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 26, 2024 at 13:42

      Can’t eat AI, nor drink it, nor will eat stop you from getting nasty diseases. And how will the physical support structures that support AI be maintained. There’s an enormous amount of actual work by actual people that goes towards this. I think this is one 1️⃣ f the more insane technocratic rabbit holes that people particularly in the high-energy world have fallen down. To paraphrase Elon’s estranged offspring to their father ‘go outside and touch grass’

      Reply
      • Diogenese10 says:

        November 26, 2024 at 19:53

        Yep ” go outside and touch the grass ” I wonder if some of them know what grass is or have ever been outside or live in the real economy , Europe’s economy is toast , the USA is coming closely behind , thysen are laying off 11000 ,Stelantis is closing Dunstable , there will be no economy for their ” amazing ” ai to “mine ” for profit , maybe when they are also sitting in the dark they will take notice that all their efforts are nothing but a dusty page written on vellum with a goose feather and oak Gaul ink .

        Reply
25. Marion says:

    November 26, 2024 at 15:57

    As always such a lot of erudite and thoughtful posts, so just a few thoughts and comments. Dentistry is already unavailable in many parts of the uk for anyone without the means to go private and for myself I’m happy to have gaps and for my seventy plus years old teeth to not be bleached pearly white. I hope dentures might still be available in a post collapse world though I’ve worked with old people who had lost all their teeth and found their hardened gums did a pretty good job instead. A more concerning aspect of the societal breakdown we’re going through for me is the loss of a functioning system for other forms of medical care. I’m guessing that hip and knee replacements will become unlikely for most of us. I don’t remember when they first became available or how people managed before though I do remember almost all the older people in my youth having a stick. I’m guessing we will all have to get more used to doing without life saving treatments and perhaps death will seem more normal and less frightening. Already I find herbal remedies more useful for the problems I have and I imagine that in the future “dark age” medicinal gardens and herbalists will be important part of the community. I like to believe we’re better able to look after ourselves and each other than we think. I hope that in your book, which I eagerly look forward to you will write about the alternative healthcare systems which could still exist in a future “dark age”. I’ve spent most of my adult life growing things, mostly vegetables and culinary herbs, but also grass, fodder crops and trees. Growing and learning more about how to use medically useful herbs seems wise and possible. I don’t think the making of tinctures needs to be an industrial process though I guess you have to have a source of strong alcohol.

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 26, 2024 at 16:30

      I’ve given this some thought. If you’ve ever read Ivan Illich, beyond a certain level of sophistication advanced medical systems deliver diminishing returns. For instance, I would hope that in whatever age we are entering we will still have access to the basics of a public health care system. That should form part of any future commons. How should it work? It doesn’t have to be as technologically complicated as you think. For instance the ‘barefoot doctors’ delivered an astonishing health care service to rural China during the early days of Chinese communism. In the present day, you can look to Cuba’s bare bones healthcare service. For my own part I don’t believe healthcare services will completely disappear. It’s one of the important work that we need to be working on in the ruins.

      Reply
      • Diogenese10 says:

        November 26, 2024 at 19:58

        One of the major things is that euthanasia must not become the cure of choice as things get more and more strapped for money .

        Reply
        • Hoon Seong Teo says:

          November 27, 2024 at 14:25

          No, the primary aim should be a huge shift of medicine away from tertiary hospital based back towards primary preventative. I was really concerned about SE Asia, during the pandemic, especially about the rainforest folk. As it turned out, the low income countries like Vietnam did far better then the global north, because they already had an extensive primary health care infrastructure set up. Why? Because it’s less expensive, and far more effective

          Reply
      • Marion says:

        November 27, 2024 at 08:05

        I worked in Mozambique in the late 70s shortly after independence when it was, briefly, a Marxist Leninist state. There was generally available basic healthcare but for anything else you flew back home. I developed a painful skin condition which was cured with injections of B vitamins. The barefoot doctors of China and Cuba focussed a lot on preventative medicine which will become increasingly important, I believe. I don’t think the production of drugs and vaccines is technologically simple and much of modern medicine depends on them. So, I don’t imagine we will have back surgery, but we will have yoga and chiropractors and we will have herbalists.

        Reply
        • Simon H says:

          November 27, 2024 at 11:56

          Could be that the end is nigh for the Cyclotron, then.
          https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/cyclotrons-what-are-they-and-where-can-you-find-them

          Reply
        • Hoon Seong Teo says:

          November 27, 2024 at 14:07

          Most of medicine should be preventative. That’s one of the basic tenets. Unfortunately, modernity has itself caused an escalating health crises such that in the OECD countries medical systems have become top heavy , with more and more of the budget going towards crisis management at the tertiary level (the most expensive tier) because of the consequences of NCDs (non-communicable diseases). NCDs are a direct result of modernity. The hope should be that, if we ever get over the rocky journey to a (good) small farm future, that NCDs will become a much smaller section of the disease pie, and then we can utilise energy resources to manufacture preventive strategies such as vaccines, and absolutely vital stuff such as anaesthetics, antibiotics, surgical disinfectant and surgical instruments

          Reply
        • Bruce says:

          November 28, 2024 at 16:24

          The Chinese were experimenting with variolation a thousand years ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variolation and Chinese herbalists were using ground pigs pancreas to treat diabetes for around the 16th century.

          But that tradition developed over several thousand years – no doubt there were upheavals in ancient China over that period, dynasties came and went but the culture within which those dynasties emerged remained remarkably stable – throughout the history of Chinese / Traditional East Asian medicine and right into the 20th century there have been new ways of practicing that have emerged from movements that insisted on returning to the foundational texts of the tradition.

          Whether we’ll have that sort of stable tradition to draw on seems like the million dollar question

          Reply
    • Kathryn says:

      November 26, 2024 at 19:22

      Yes — health care is a major issue, as is social care. I think Hoon is spot on about public health as a commons and also about the medical system in Cuba as an example of what can be achieved.

      In herbalism, I would probably start with teas (technically tisanes if you’re a stickler) rather than tinctures, myself. I know of at least one herbalist who uses glycerine instead of ethanol, to make syrups instead of tinctures; I am not sure if this would also work with honey.

      There is considerable overlap between the herbs I grow for their culinary qualities and those I grow for the alleviation of minor ailments. Most of the culinary herbs have at least some health properties in one tradition or another, and many of them are extremely nutrient-dense. Annoyingly there is the combination online of a lot of bad information from grifters, combined with a lack of careful research.

      Regarding dental care, avoiding processed sugar goes a long way. If that’s not possible (or you just don’t want to) there’s probably something to be said for an unsweetened herbal mouth rinse used after meals (that is, cold herbal tea from the cup you made mid-morning and forgot about).

      Reply
      • Marion says:

        November 27, 2024 at 08:34

        I’m guessing that in the small farm future that I expect to come about, growing medicinal herbs for local herbalists will be common and there will be more focus on the properties of what can be grown locally rather than imported from elsewhere. Distilling alcohol isn’t too complicated either so it should be possible to produce tinctures which for me have been more effective than teas.

        Reply
        • Kathryn says:

          November 29, 2024 at 13:48

          My understanding is that glycerine (and potentially honey) are more like ethanol than water in terms of their ability to absorb various compounds from the herbs with which they are made, as well as keeping basically indefinitely the way tinctures do, which is why I mentioned them; of course, the other thing about tinctures vs teas is that they are usually very much stronger.

          My own reason for starting with tea is that the dry herbs keep for some time and simple teas and decoctions are trivial to make at home. While I theoretically could distill ethanol at home, it requires equipment that I don’t have, and the safety considerations are quite a bit more involved than boiling the kettle. It would also be illegal in this jurisdiction for me to distill alcohol myself, though it should be noted that this hasn’t always stopped people from doing it.

          I also wonder about things like infused wines — some of my homebrew has come out in the 16% ABV range, so if it’s a matter of medicinal compounds being more soluble in alcohol than in water, that might still be of use.

          Reply
26. Steve L says:

    November 27, 2024 at 03:23

    To me, one of the brightest lights is the capacity of humans to live meaningful, happy, and loving lives, even in the absence of advanced technologies such as integrated circuits, nuclear reactors, genetic engineering, jet aircraft….

    Regarding communications, I’m reminded of wired telephones being relatively simple 19th-century technology, sometimes linked together using the existing wire fences along fields in the countryside, as I mentioned in an earlier comment:

    https://chrissmaje.com/2023/03/the-supersedure-state-revisited/#comment-256204

    I’m also reminded of the externalized costs of smart phones (along with some other technologies), such as the environmental devastation from mine tailings, and child miners getting lung disease.

    Reply
    • Hoon Seong Teo says:

      November 27, 2024 at 14:40

      Absolutely right. Human beings need far less material goods for happy meaningful lives then most people have been made to believe. I have followed work like the Grameen Foundation, the Isle of Eigg foundation trust, and such like for a long time, and it’s my belief that consumerism is one of the biggest cons of the late twentieth century.

      Reply
27. John Adams says:

    November 27, 2024 at 19:57

    You might find this interesting Chris, as you contemplate a Trump presidency.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/11/political-perfection/

    Reply
    • Steve L says:

      November 28, 2024 at 02:46

      This statement from Tom Murphy, in the comments below that post, has some parallels with A Small Farm Future:

      “I see modernity as a sickness that must end one way or another, and would prefer it to be by a gentle path. It feels different than actively trying to tear it down.”

      https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/11/political-perfection/#comment-14171

      Reply
      • Hoon Seong Teo says:

        November 28, 2024 at 14:21

        I agree. That’s why I hate the fact he’s in power. Not only is he in cognitive decline, he’s a morally bankrupt narcissist who, in tearing things down, ensure that the road to a benevolent small farm future is far more difficult than needs be. I can’t be sanguine about this, as someone who grew up in a country that has lost 50% of it’s forests to this sort of politician and their cronies.

        Reply
        • Diogenese10 says:

          November 29, 2024 at 17:29

          https://x.com/benaverbook/status/1861511171951542552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1861511171951542552%7Ctwgr%5Ec45667a3d1d7f78e26e687f44c0da7c172d57858%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theautomaticearth.com%2F2024%2F11%2Fdebt-rattle-november-29-2024%2F
          For those that drank the cool aid about trump being fachist I suggest you watch this .

          Reply
          • Greg Reynolds says:

            November 30, 2024 at 14:15

            how about giving us a summary ?

          • Simon H says:

            November 30, 2024 at 15:26

            Greg:
            https://san.com/cc/what-is-operation-choke-point-2-0-trump-promises-to-end-it/

28. Chris Smaje says:

    November 29, 2024 at 11:26

    Thanks to everyone for keeping the discussion going in interesting directions, and sorry I can’t contribute much just now. The medical discussion is very interesting, though I fear I won’t be able to say much about it in the new book.

    I’m interested in this from Matt Colborn:

    “I think the problem of human destructiveness needs to be addressed more honestly and comprehensively by anyone trying to imagine a benign human future. This for me is less from a moralistic standpoint, and more in terms of prevention. How can we create social structures in a post-collapse world that encourage the best in human beings and contain the worst?”

    If I can carve out the time, I might say more about that in another post soon, but meanwhile I’d be interested in any thoughts.

    Reply
    • Kathryn says:

      November 29, 2024 at 13:39

      Short answer: religions have been trying to do this for centuries.

      Longer answer: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

      Even longer answer: Are humans actually innately destructive, as that question seems to assume? Religion has a thing or two to say about this too (we bear the image of God, and we marr that image regularly, but this does not make us unredeemable), and anyway I’m one of those weirdos who finds the doctrine of the Fall weirdly comforting, insofar as it means I don’t have to strive for perfection. Apparently Reinhold Niebuhr thought the same so I’m in good company, though I haven’t read his work (yet).

      Or are we only destructive in a context where we have access to more energy than we know what to do with? Or are we only destructive in a context where we don’t properly value all life? Or are we only destructive in a context where we cannot see the interconnectedness of all things and so tell ourselves lies about the actual consequences of our actions?

      I lean toward “some humans are so alienated from their place in this world that they become destructive, and the pattern of their destruction is such that we are all caught up in it to some degree, and the predicament we face is how to resist or subvert the forces which so entangle us” but I’m open to other stances.

      Also interested in the difference between destruction and disturbance. When does disturbance within a system become destructive? Clearly some disturbance can contribute toward good biodiversity, and increases the overall resilience of a system; clearly too much disturbance can be destructive. Avoiding disturbance entirely in the short term will often lead to much bigger disturbance in the long term; limiting the Turtle Island cultural practices of burning woodland and grassland has not led to an absence of fire but to uncontrollable wildfires. If I go for a walk every day my general fitness improves, if I try to walk forty miles in a day without training appropriately for it I will probably not be walking anywhere for a while afterward. So maybe this is “the dose makes the poison” to some extent, but to determine the dose we need to know the context.

      How do we create contexts in which humans can not only thrive but contribute to the thriving of the entire planet? I worry that if we start by trying only to limit destructiveness — if we cast humans as innately destructive rather than fully part of creation and inherently holding at least the potential for good — the obvious conclusion is that humans simply should stop existing. That quickly gets turned into “some humans should stop existing” and that in turn goes to some very dark places politically.

      I am not trying to deny here that humans in modernity have been extremely destructive. We have. But the leap from that, to a framing of humans as innately destructive, of our human needs as directly incompatible with a flourishing world… oof.

      Also, I am not sure we can get back to a point of having an ecosystem with enough resilience to support human life without human intervention, at this stage. I have ample opportunity to observe what happens to a forest that used to be managed by coppicing and pollarding and mostly isn’t any more, and that’s just nowhere near the kind of growth that happens on trees that are pollarded regularly. Enough tipping points have been passed, I think, that if we stopped all fossil fuel use tomorrow and did nothing else, things would continue getting worse for some time, so I think some intervention (aka disturbance, aka destruction if you frame it a certain way) is probably called for. Ideally that would be partnership rather than domination (which so often leads to extraction); taking actions that improve the overall health of, say, the forest or the grassland, while dipping into the nutritional, energetic and hydralogical flows in such a way that we can co-exist seems like a good bet, though of course it will look different if you are trying to green the desert than it will if you are trying to restore a forest that has been clear cut, or repair the ecosystem where mountaintop removal mining has happened, or replenish fish populations.

      Speaking of fish populations, I found out last weekend that there are otters on one of my local rivers (the nearest one to the Near Allotment), and I am delighted, and planning a little outing to go and see if I can spot them. Otters within walking distance in East London! I hope they flourish and there are enough fish for them to stay.

      Reply
      • Hoon Seong Teo says:

        November 29, 2024 at 13:48

        Did you use to have a blog, Kathryn?

        Reply
        • Kathryn says:

          November 29, 2024 at 13:50

          I’ve had a few over the years, yes; why?

          Reply
          • Hoon Seong Teo says:

            November 29, 2024 at 14:42

            I followed you on one of them, I think, a few years back. Would like to again, if you’re still at it

          • Kathryn says:

            November 29, 2024 at 14:50

            If it was Dreamwidth/Livejournal then if you contact me via the artsyhonker username on dreamwidth we can disambiguate further.

            Beyond that, I’m currently writing at locavore.substack.com and I keep intending to resurrect http://www.artsyhonker.net but have been somewhat stuck for a few years now, trying to figure out how composing sacred choral music fits into my current life.

            I have had other, more pseudonymous blogs in the past, but I am not currently updating any of them.

    • Matt Colborn says:

      December 1, 2024 at 19:07

      Hi Chris —

      Wil have some thoughts myself, and looking forward to your piece on this!

      Matt.

      Reply
29. Joel says:

    November 30, 2024 at 14:49

    Regards communication, I’ve been getting interested in cb radio, and crystal sets- as a stone carver I can really geek out on the fact stones can communicate to one another!
    The discussion on health care is very interesting and is central to our project (Care Home Farm), in realising that the state is receding from any social duty, so if we want a public health care system outside the commercial, we will have to build and maintain it. I heartily agree with the prevention rather than cure which comes on the back of a local agrarian life.
    I have been listening to a Bookchin lecture:
    https://youtu.be/TO26ZiXdI-w?si=-NRC22D_EAIzYvWi
    Urbanisation against Cities, which outlines the destruction of both city and rural communities by urbanisation. Its a novel view (to me) which allows for the restoration of the city as a civic space for
    local democratic processes through a democratic local agrarianism. He also covers some of the need for a city, as a technology for dismantling the tribe – the metropolitan/cosmopolitan aspect of the city that we do not want relinquish in a local agrarian future. There is a good case for suggesting modernity is the destructive urbanising force in the city and country, that the city precedes it.
    As you know, regards your last quote, our theory of change involves people learning the skills of community provisioning, for health, mental and physical, and resilience and humility. Whilst we have a multiple classes of people (symbolic capitalists), without the experience of making/growing anything, there is an unbridgable cognitive gap. Logically people may be able to understand but the ‘encouragement of the best, and containment of the worst’ is an embodied position which is experienced and empathic. The way to achieve this is through generational work of establishing communities of practical skills of community provisioning.
    This week we start ‘The Brixton Chair’ which is a project to make hyper local furniture using green wood felled in Lambeth, to become a skills workshop for the local community. I’ll let you know.

    Reply
30. Diogenese10 says:

    November 30, 2024 at 16:16

    Greg ,

    “how about giving us a summary ?”
    Ok early this year Biden’s team met with financiers of silicon valley , the gist is that there will be up to three ai companies under full federal control , no more start ups will be allowed . Anyone in the tech world falling foul of the government will be debanked .

    Reply
31. Nick says:

    December 2, 2024 at 09:37

    My feelings to a T ref your number four and the reappearance of Trump. But I fell foul of being bit less than tight tipped whilst joshing with an American about how it wouldn’t make that much difference….. It turned out that her family were closely associated with the Democrats and one close contact committed suicide the day the results came out.

    As you suggest, the front line in the collapse of the mainstream is not pretty.

    Reply
32. Alex Jensen says:

    December 8, 2024 at 22:36

    Hi Chris, sorry I am very late to the commenting party, again, but wanted to throw a few thoughts into the mix that I didn’t see raised amongst the previous comments, for what it’s worth:

    – This is probably unhelpful since you didn’t ask for thoughts on your provisional title, but having read books like The Darkness Manifesto (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Darkness-Manifesto/Johan-Eklof/9781668000892) and Waking Up to the Dark, my first thought went rather literal – namely, that the issue of electrical light pollution scrambles and to an extent inverts the ordinary associations of these words – dark and light. The books convincingly argue – and I suspect most of us here could corroborate – that we live in an era of excessive light, where darkness is an endangered condition, hence we could do with electrical light degrowth, i.e. Darkness in a Light Age, or Lights Off in a Glaring Age. But I guess you’re not writing a book about light pollution (not that it’s not ultimately unrelated to high-modernist techno-urbanism that you *do* write about!), and don’t mean to suggest you change your title because of this!

    – This brought another interesting book back to mind, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, showing among other things how modernity tries to launder its own image and excuse its consequences by erecting and then knocking down ‘straw pasts’. As one review put it, “The medieval period, Perry and Gabriele argue, has good news for us. The world can be beautiful without centralized and brutal imperial power.’ (I wonder wonder why the reviewer didn’t write, “By definition, the world cannot be beautiful with centralized and brutal imperial power”). In another sense however, the literal sense referred to above, it really was a dark age, and that was a good dark! In the metaphorical sense of dark and light, however, if centralized and brutal imperial power are hallmarks of a “dark” age, then obviously we live in a dark age, and your title is apt.

    – I recall James Scott being up to something similar in The Art of Not Being Governed. Slurs like ‘barbarians’, the ‘uncooked’, and suchlike by the powerful/imperialist/statist/slavers etc. against the ‘Zomians’ inverted the actual situation, as liberty and egalitarianism were to be found in those steep zomian “asylums of liberty”, and where the civilized were the barbarians (and not just in historical Southeast Asia – we needn’t look far to see the same dynamic at play today, sadly). So, circling from this back to your working title and your first question, I would imagine you showing how the things that are called dark, unthinkable, – such as slowing growth or god forbid degrowth, re-ruralization, local small farm futures, an end to consumerism, and the like that you’ve advocated so eloquently over the years – by mainstream economics and the powerful today are where actual ‘light’ (again, to conform to the standard associations) is to be found, whereas in the glittering garish bling of modernity is blindingly dark.

    Reply
33. Nick says:

    December 31, 2024 at 08:52

    Very much looking forward to the new book and can’t add much to the comments above.

    I very much like your attempts at calculation, eg what percentage of the population would have to work the land, so look forward to your analyses of what everyone else will be doing. How will international trade work? What are the implications for international relations and defence? How would local governance systems emerge, how would they relate to national tax and government. I don’t see too much mention above of human pleasure – Karen Perry has some good input on this.

    I love that your work is at the business end of looking at the future. I’m currently reading Vanessa Andreotti and re-listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger, both of whom, imo, have nailed things, but the SFF sits at the heart of what Nate Hagens calls pro-social prepping. In parallel with your next move it’s interesting to see that Rachel Donald has set of in the direction of recording life in communities that are already living the SFF dream with her new channel – Planet: Coordinate.

    What current models might be the foundation stones for the future? Which co-housing/commune models are scaleable? What about the new model where people buy shares in a farm somehow eg https://mylittlefarm.uk or its rather more hardline offspring https://www.instagram.com/wildmindscommunity/. Is there much hope that more of the landed estates with communise themselves like https://hardwickestate.co.uk? (I think i know the answer to that)

    Unrelated to the content but a comment on writing style. I’m not sure what the breadth of your intended audience is but if you wanted to broaden it you might be interested in this: I’ve been having a prolonged and in-depth debate about the (lack of) impact of population on climate change with a colleague and thought I’d landed a killer blow in a missive that included a pithy quote from SFF. His response was that he’d never trust someone writing in the style of text I sent. He’s grammar school/Oxbridge and I scraped through my english O’level, so it’s interesting how impressions are formed. (Having read every page of Jem Bendell’s tome I thought you were rather readable!)

    Thanks for your unique contribution and congratulations on the anniversary.

    Reply
    • Chris Smaje says:

      January 1, 2025 at 16:59

      Thanks for that Nick, appreciated. I might have to do a bit of expectation management about the book in terms of what I can feasibly cover in the space/time available regarding some of the points you raise, but I’ll keep them in mind. My books can provide an intro/lead-in to these kinds of issues, but it’d be good to have a forum for discussing them in more detail. Obviously, there’s this blog, but if anyone has any other ideas let me know.

      Regarding writing style, that’s interesting – so am I right in thinking that my style wasn’t scholarly enough? Or dispassionate enough? Can’t help feeling those kind of dismissals are a bit ad hominem and self-serving in refusing to engage with the arguments, along the lines of ‘I don’t want to address what this person is saying so I’ll blame it on the way they’re saying it’. I suppose we all do that to some degree. I’d be interested in comments from you or others about my writing style & possible ways of making it more impactful. Bear in mind though that there’s a backroom editorial process too, so I don’t have full control.

      Reply
      • Nick Smith says:

        January 2, 2025 at 19:05

        Ref style. No, too scholarly. I sent that chap a pic of page 14 and he picked up the phrase “So too, is the underlying web of causality” as being something that put him off. I suspect that there is an element of not wanting to engage with the topic, but I think he sees himself as a bit of Hemingway, (he writes for one of my trade journals each month, and does have a good clear style I must say.) So depending upon your audience/objectives, i would think that there could be a case for reduction in the vocab range by a bit and avoiding a bit of the academic phraseology . I think Mike Berners-Lee nails this very well in eg There’s No Planet B, plus in his new book which is out soon.
        But imo SFF is brill! I have just bought a new copy to give to a friend.

        Understood ref the scope of your new book! If you do delve into low impact housing arrangements I think you might find a bit more positivity that you reported in SFF. The diggers and dreamers podcast has some fascinating input, some bods in that network have gathered some comparative quant data on costs which is quite interesting.

        Reply
34. bluejay says:

    February 18, 2025 at 17:17

    This post asked a lot of important questions which I’ve tried my best to answer from my perspective. Since the original post some comments have been overtaken by events but this was my thought at the time.

    I initially started writing a treatise about the technical failures of the democratic party, but I think I can safely sum it up by saying that the neo-liberal Democrats and the hollowed out shell of Labour in the UK seemed to have headed off any attempts at a course correction by more or less ousting Bernie and Corbyn a decade ago. Whether those ‘left-wing’ attempts at change were still too closely tied to modernity to be successful could probably be endless debated on this blog and by any group of people who think about who is made to turn the grain mill at gunpoint to make the flour when the power goes out for good. But in terms of reaching the rest of the population…

    I think that covers your point about “progressives” more broadly as well, in that I don’t know that there is any leftish progressive politics happening at the center? Sure a couple of politicians who say nice things sometimes get elected but that hasn’t lead to anything happening regardless of whether the ideas would work or not. I also fear this heads towards the endless litigation of progressive, left, liberal which, while I can sound off about, I somewhat dread as a discussion. Broadly speaking I currently view the choice in the US as blue things get worse at the rate they currently are but we put a nicer face on it, and red make everything get worse faster but we also punish the people you don’t like (more). UK readers will have to switch the colors I think. (A grim prognosis of how little truly changes?)

    I don’t fault you for your reaction or lack thereof to the orange man. You couldn’t have voted on it, and couldn’t have done anything to stop it unless I’m missing something about the reach of SFF. It will probably affect you indirectly in some unforeseen way since the US is still the empire but I would guess other factors are higher on that list. And I don’t know what the right reaction is either. Acceptance, resignation? A disappointment in my fellow Americans that they wanted this? I was initially worked up about it, (more than last time because we know what we’re getting this time around) but after some in person conversations with non-white friends I realized that my fear about ending up on the wrong side of that invisible line of who the government works for and protects is how most oppressed people have felt the whole time, so there’s at least good company for the worst if it comes to that.

    Regardless, it seems our current governing coalition is a combination of the religious right and the emerging tech elite. The problem will be the tech elite want modernity (industrial commerce, communication, the lot) but not liberalism (the individuals rights, assembly, speech that’s critical of them, workers who aren’t tied to them by contract, markets even they’re monopolists after all) while the religious right wants neither. To the title of this post, the goal of the Evangelical Christians in the US is to either: force another theocratic dark age upon humanity or trigger the apocalypse so Christ will return. Perhaps they shall have both, though probably not as they imagine. (I would say Christ is unlikely to appear but there’s some who already believe Trump is the second coming of Christ and I’m not joking!). I appreciate this blog in part because it seems to be one of the rare places where the discussion is around the difficult problem of how we keep some idea of liberalism without modernity. (If you think that’s fair, that’s what I see when you write about agrarian populism and republicanism though I think I might be a bit sloppy with my definition of liberalism here and the concepts of rights might be a better fit) or more reductively this blogs ask what if liberalism but not modernity? A whole quadrant of this mental landscape that seems woefully unexplored.

    I wrote another substantial section trying to guess which of my neighbors is most likely to turn into a feudal lord. It was a grim exercise, but made me realize that being a feudal lord isn’t maybe that great? Your relatives including your children want to kill you, other lords want to kill you, and if you want a war you actually have to show up in person for it, sure you don’t have to do any manual work but you better spend most of your time on allocating your resources right or the whole enterprise is likely to come undone or at least you are. Of course you could hire some bureaucrats and make some rules…

    This did lead to something I’ve been considering a lot lately which is that what matters for the shape of politics is what the elite in power think. Why do elected leaders leave office (when they do)? There’s not a direct physical threat unless it goes wrong, they do because they believe they have too. In regards to a SFF politics the through-line is that whatever new politics do emerge is partly going to come down to chance on who with power survives, and what they think about how things should be organized.

    In terms of small farming, the biggest direct changes would be if RFK Jr. is actually able to ban pesticides or CAFOs. I’m so used to business interests prevailing though I can’t see that actually happening.

    In regards to some of your questions:

    The abortion messaging was fine? Almost everywhere abortion was on the ballot abortion rights got a majority (Florida fell short of the 60% to pass but still got a majority),(Edit not sure about SD, and NE) even in deep red states(KS & MO). Some combination of either only checking the top of the ballot for president, or just the fact people really don’t like being told they can’t do things. Or if you want to really read into it, maybe some actual democracy is a good fucking idea.

    Gaza was infuriating to watch. It should have been a slam dunk for Harris. You can easily see the compromise approach of “I will end the arms shipment until Israel conducts its operation in accord with rule of law” or such like. Plenty of room to posture on that one and couldn’t even be bothered to do that much! And people were protesting it for months even out here in red country. Plus it matters how you lose, and better to go down saying you’re opposed to genocide and at least show you believe in something.

    States rights you say? It might not play out so well but we can hope this time… it tends to be a cover for slavery and regressive policies against a federal government defending its citizens. Though the federal government is much more implicated in the native genocide. If the future is not the center, it may not be a choice and the states might become more powerful in the relative if not the absolute as the center retreats.

    Tariffs I don’t know what to tell you, or how to explain why Americans think they will work. I’m with you that I’m not opposed to them in principle, unlike economists I don’t think the earth is a perfect frictionless sphere for optimizing value creation, but they do seem unlikely to lower prices in the short term if at all and they’re definitely not a revenue source. (The best tariff is the one you don’t collect since it’s about industry creation.)

    Taking the title as your cue, what do you think such a book might be about, and what do you think should be in it?

    It sounds like it would be about hope or wisdom or otherwise good things in a time where they are lacking.

    Imagine a future dark age in the place where you live. How might it emerge out of present circumstances, and what might it look like – how might people get by?

    I think this is what I’ve been doing since I started reading this blog and growing food, by now almost a decade. All else aside, people will get by (if they do) much as they always have, making things, telling stories, falling in love, and occasionally killing each other.

    But if I can, I want to resist the framing of the question and speak for the dark. One of the deep joys of the end of modernity, once the bullets and the gas are gone will be the dark and the quiet. No more cars, no more engines, the loudest sound you’ll ever hear will be the roll of thunder before the storm. Nothing will outshine the stars and the moon at night. As someone who is sensitive to bright light, the true beauty is in the muted light, the sunrise, the sunset, in the twilight when the shadows lengthen and the boundaries between the worlds grow thin. It never gets truly dark, unless the new moon is completely veiled by clouds. You can follow a trail through the woods just by moonlight if you already know the way. Often the light is held as the truth, the good, the civilized and the darkness is castigated as evil, depraved, and chaos. But what if the dark is also the wild, the free, and the possible?

    Reply
35. Nick Smith says:

    February 25, 2025 at 18:47

    This new org might be of interest for the book

    https://www.theregenescape.com
    https://lu.ma/4ypcr06u?tk=YgDIPr

    good to see youth diving in the mix at any rate

    Reply