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Posted on May 25, 2025 | 30 Comments
A little bit more about my forthcoming book Finding Lights in a Dark Age and related things.
So, the book has a UK publication date of 14 October and a US publication date of November 11. Preorder links are here. If you’re planning to buy it, please also consider supporting your local bookshop/bookstore (I’m working on the copyedit at the moment – I’m shocked at how confusedly mid-Atlantic my English has become).
Talking of working on the copyedit, my summer seems to be evaporating before it’s even started in a welter of editing and writing work, speaking events and farm projects so I’m afraid new web content from me here may be a bit sparse over the next few months. Please bear with me. I’m keen to keep writing online and I always like to see the discussions under my posts.
I’ve got a few things I’m hoping to write about, and then in the autumn I’ll start a brief-ish blog cycle about the new book. Perhaps I’ll list here the things I want to write about in my next few posts to act as a teaser, and to help focus my mind on getting them written –
If anybody would like to suggest topics for an open comment thread of mostly reader-generated discussion, I’d also be open to that to tide things over while I attend to other things.
Incidentally, news is recently in of the death of Alasdair MacIntyre, a major influence on me in general and on my new book in particular. This obituary in The Guardian probably gives some clues as to why he matters to someone like me, even if it does scold him for influencing “the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment”. It’s good to be reminded why I’ve stopped reading The Guardian regularly. I learned from the obituary that Bernard Williams called MacIntyre’s seminal book After Virtue a “brilliant nostalgic fantasy”. As a fellow sufferer from that jibe (usually minus the ‘brilliant’ bit), I’m liking him even more. There are a lot of differences between MacIntyre’s writing and mine, but one thing we seem to have in common is eminent critics who don’t get it.
Anyway, I hope I’ll see you here soon. But for now, back to the copyedit.
Tyson Yunkaporta Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking
Nick Bano Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
Priya Parker The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
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A little musical inspiration you’ll recognise, for the home straight (whole CD is worth a listen):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtAYk4bhFXE
A fun question for some commenters here might be:
You have access to a tenth of an acre and cannot purchase any tools other than those you already own; you may only sell produce from 10% of your land, and you are continuing in your current day jobs if you have them.
What do you grow to feed your household this year, what would you plant now to feed your household in twenty years’ time, and how do you manage the transition between the two? Why is this appropriate for your ecological and social context? What cash crops might you consider, for the roughly 40 square metres that comprise 10% of your land? Why? How do you access local markets in which to sell them?
This wouldn’t be with a view to meeting all nutritional needs, but I know from my own experience that a tenth of an acre can make a substantial dent in calories for three adults and pose serious storage challenges. And while three acres and a cow (or five acres or whatever) sounds like a much more successful venture (if rather a lot of work without power tools), I suspect for many people the more immediate future may involve rather a lot less access to land; perhaps a tenth of an acre is too generous. But it’s also, coincidentally, the combined area of my own allotments and back garden.
Well, Kathryn, allow me to answer your question, since this has been my program full-time since 2004 and part-time since 1971.
1) Sell produce: Don’t bother. It takes a lot of time to sell at a market or even to put up a farm stand. Your labor is best spent growing the food and improving your soil. For another angle, consider gifting your excess produce. This provides more social capital than the pittance in money you can get selling at commodity prices.
2) Grow for this year: I am retired now and only put 600 hours into my garden each year and produce about 3000 pounds of food on a garden of 70% of an acre and an orchard of 20% of an acre. This 5 lb/hr can be done by anyone who is paying attention. I was up around 8 lb/hr when I was a market gardener. I keep track of my top 20 crops for kcal/acre and I will give you some results for just the last six years since I have been growing in France. The four crops that are consistently in the top 10 are: sunchokes (aka Jerusalem artichokes), winter squash, potatoes and leeks. The sunchokes are the clear winners in kilocalorie value at around 13-15 million kcal/acre. They also are easy care. If you are worried about stomach distress, eat them in soup. The future will likely see a return to pottage as the main meal anyways. The rest of my top ten for 2024 were: summer squash, beets, favas, artichokes, celeriac and apples. Now keep in mind that kcal/acre is a normalized metric. I don’t have multiple acres of potatoes or sunchokes or anything else. Kcal/sq meter would be the real number, but kcal/acre allows me to compare myself to so-called “conventional” agriculture. These are just the crops that are kilocalorie dense. Of course one has to have tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, etc.
3) Grow for the future: In addition to space for annuals, I recommend apples, pears, plums, quince, raspberries, sunchokes. I increased my sunchokes this year, even though they mostly go into the compost after giving as much as I can away. They are an even better survival crop than potatoes. Depending on your climate, add in cherries, peaches, nectarines, figs, grapes, etc. You cannot go wrong planting fruit trees.
4) Transitioning for the future: All of your plans should be viable in multiple contexts; short-term, mid-term and long-term. All of these crops cover the three timelines. The 4-5 years it takes to get a young apple tree producing fruit is NOT time lost. Waiting is good for you.
5) Social and ecological context: It helps if you are in a French village where everyone with a little patch of ground is growing something. But even if you are in suburbia, people will notice. That’s where the social capital of giving food away comes in. Also, get used to the idea of “renard à deux pattes” or two-legged foxes. You will have theft once times get hard, so make your peace with it now. In southern France, many properties have detached gardens at a distance from the house, so it can be a problem. But after collapse, the community norms of respect for the grower may kick in again. (Even in Amerika!)
6) Local markets: I started two farmers markets in Whatcom County, Washington, and provided infrastructure and seed capital for a third, so I have some experience here. Two of them are still going, even though they just hang on every year. The key is to start a farmers market NOW so that it will be easy to scale up once the shit hits the fan (SHTF). Tailgate markets are the way to go. There are tailgate markets in the US that have been going for years without scaling up to a full-fledged market. I go into starting markets in depth in my second book, Hints for Managing Collapse (2014). Even though the idea of “markets” is linked to capitalism and all its evils, the small-scale market is a necessary gathering place, as well as a market. Within fifty kilometers of our village in southern France, there is a market every day of the week. This will become the norm again.
7) Nutritional needs: In 2004, I produced 3084.23 pounds of food with an energy value of 879,159 kilocalories. This is an average of 285 kcal/lb and was enough to feed .96 persons or 1.91/acre, which includes the orchard of mostly young trees. As a general rule, you can feed four people on an acre of intensively managed ground. Keep in mind that a person does not need bread, so you don’t have to devote land to wheat or other cereals if you don’t want to. Also, once you start keeping data on your harvest and calculating the nutritional value of various crops in your spreadsheets, some surprising vegetables will pop up. For instance, in 2024 my watermelons yielded the equivalent of 2.1 million kcal/acre, which would be comparable to 22 bushels/acre wheat. This is better than the medieval European average of 7-15 bushels/acre. These melons are my own landrace and also store well. I had my last one a couple of months ago.
8) Tools: You can do everything with hand tools. It just takes more time. I have a Grillo 65 cm tiller and a small electric tiller, but I have more land to work. I have done plenty of experiments with just hand tools and for your small allotment and garden, hand tools are enough. Pull weeds after a rain, put a beer halfway down the row as a reward when you are weeding, etc.
9) Bottom line: You get a better return on investment if you concentrate on reducing your expenses instead of selling food. I learned this the hard way growing up dirt poor on a farm in the 1950-60s. We ate our own beef, pork and milk, as well as our own vegetables and fruit. The cash from milking cows went to pay bills and the mortgage, but we still had to leave the farm in 1965. From 1956, when my dad died, until 1965, we were just marking time on an increasingly elevated treadmill. But we still had enough to eat.
At 7), that should be 2024. My bad
@walter Haugen
Wow. Total respect.
What are the titles of your books?
Thanks.
The Laws of Physics Are On My Side (2013)
Hints for Managing Collapse (2014)
Paradigms for Adaptation (2024)
Great post, I found your most recent book, looking forward to diving in.
Mike B – Thanks. Hope you find it helpful and a good read.
Thanks for this, Walter.
How would you change your strategy if you had access to only a tenth of an acre in growing space, and if you were starting from scratch?
I do already have apples, pears, plums, Jerusalem artichokes, grapes, figs and raspberries, among other perennials.
My garden yield from a tenth of an acre last year was something around 400kg; total yield of that and foraging was over 500kg (I forage from more fruit trees than I grow at home, and plums, apples and pears are pretty heavy). I did not track calories, but winter squash and potatoes certainly feature. Allium leaf miner makes leeks rather a pain here. I would like to eat more Jerusalem artichokes than my housemate will tolerate. Beets are glorious and I love them. Celeriac have been hit or miss for me, some years they do really well and some years they fail to thrive and I haven’t quite worked out why yet but I will keep trying.
I currently think if I were starting from scratch and I had permission to plant more trees I’d be quite tempted to put in some rows of hazel and/or chestnut to coppice, with the annual vegetables following the coppicing so that they get enough light. I don’t know if this would actually work or what spacing I would use. (Maybe not having my tenth of an acre spread over three growing sites might also be good… though the very different microclimates do provide some affordances.)
Kathryn – It sounds like you are already on a good track. Getting fruit and other foraged food from outside your garden and allotment is a big plus. For the time and space intersection, perhaps some dry beans. Kidneys, pintos and black beans are favorites for us. 400 kilos on a tenth of an acre is a good number. If you have enough potatoes and other staple foods, maybe just grow more of what you like.
As for changing my strategy for less garden space, I wouldn’t do anything different. I am downsizing this year and still planting what I usually do – just less of each item. Good luck.
Dry beans and soup peas are also very much part of my usual planting plans — though I don’t generally grow enough to get us through the whole year, we do manage a bean stew meal or pea soup about once a week through the winter months. But in general I suspect a tenth of an acre isn’t really enough to support three adults, even with my wide and diverse foraging base, so I do grow a lot that is higher in interest than calories: asparagus, herbs, leafy greens of various descriptions, and of course tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and so on.
I suppose if I were seriously trying to maximise calories I might reduce some of those “hungry gap” perennials and overwintering leaves in favour of more calorie crops, but as it is, rat-free storage space for potatoes etc is already a challenge (we are three adults living in a 720 square foot terraced house). I do like black salsify and oca, and find them about as trouble-free as Jerusalem artichokes, if perhaps lower-yielding (though I haven’t measured), so expanding my patches of those might be a good shout if I needed to change the calorie balance. I am looking forward to trying hopniss for the first time this autumn, and I have some mashua now too, though I was thinking of eating the leaves rather than the roots.
It’s also possibly a little misleading to say that I’m growing so much on a tenth of an acre, considering that I do use various inputs from off-site. The largest of these are woodchips from local tree surgeons, spent coffee grounds from a local chain, and fallen leaves, though I also use horse manure if there’s a lot of it available. In late winter I build pallet bay sized compost heaps, turn them once or twice each, and then in early May I direct sow my cucurbits into them — the residual heat from the heaps means they don’t suffer from the frosts we can get at that time of year (one of my growing sites is in a frost pocket), the height of the heaps means they have space to ramble, and at the end of the growing season I have plenty of part-composted stuff to top up my other veg beds with, as well as more winter squash than I have storage space for. This is a fair amount of labour, but it mostly happens in winter when there’s not so much else going on. If more people were attempting growing on this scale then these inputs from local waste streams would be much harder to come by.
One other thing I am trying to do more is landrace-style seed selection, though only with crops where this is easy at my scale.
Mike B – Thanks. Hope you find it helpful and a good read.
A lot of my time as “serious” grower is in the market garden context so your area would be about 12 100ft beds in my frame of reference with 1 bed for sale.
Based on my data 1/10 of an acre should be able to grow 1700lb of produce, or 300,000kcal, worth about $4080 in 2019 prices for 263 labor hours or about 6.5lb/hr. This is with only hand tools, though would include a poly tunnel on 4 of those beds. This is also with mostly lightweight lower calorie “high value” crops so it sounds like you’re already beating these yields. My rough metric is that 325kcal/hour needs to reach the kitchen or the farmers will starve.
As for selling on only 1/100 of an acre I would also not bother, though a good bed of garlic, strawberry or raspberry would bring in $300-$500 IF you could sell it. And those crops can be preserved, or stored for awhile if needed, and people will tend to pay for fruit. Now in theory you could do multiple rotations of greens and get up $2,000 in this one bed we’re selling from, but you would need refrigeration and ready customers to combat spoilage, etc.
If I had irrigation or steady rainfall, I would grow mostly sweet potato, garlic, and leek with tart cherry, mulberry and pawpaw on the edges.
Dryland I would look at switching to corn, melon perhaps, sorghum, and sesame instead, with mulberry, pear and fig edges.
Walter inspired me to run some numbers and with my current systems/skill it looks like my sweet potatoes and sesame are right around 3.1million kcal/acre which disappointed me on the sweet potatoes but that might because I let them run over multiple beds as a form of weed control to hold space for fall crops so in my data it looks like they’re using more space then they probably need. Worryingly my sorghum (including both syrup and grain) only came in around 1.3million kcal/acre. But that might because I tend to not water or weed it. I also think carrots were driving up the yields from the market garden, the density in terms of pound and calories per sq ft are pretty good, and you can triple crop them here if you get it all right.
There are a lot of differences between MacIntyre’s writing and mine,
The main one being that your prose is simply better – really, MacIntyre’s prose is quite uneccessarily stodgy – crosses every t and dots every i in a way that detracts from meaning rather than clarifies it.
Chris – Since you are planning on a deeper dive into Catton’s Overshoot, I hope you will also address Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse (2009). He had to self-publish this book on Xlibris because it was too radical for even independent publishing houses. Here is a quote from Google Books that illustrates my point. ” . . . humans having become so numerous, so ravenous, and so short-sighted this has made the nature of today’s human prospect far more dire than most policymakers dare admit. It tempts even the wisest and most civic-minded to seek or promote “remedial” policies that will worsen the real predicament.” This idea – that there is a huge opportunity cost in trying to reform the system – is not something socialists or progressives are willing to even contemplate, much less buy into. Nevertheless, it is very real and very dangerous. The demographics and the “flow” have already shifted. Those who cannot shift their paradigm will continue to drift in a sea of ennui.
On another topic, I would like to get some feedback from you and/or your audience on any experiments you/they may be doing in using variance. My focus on variance started in grad school when I did my master’s thesis on analysis of variance of Neandertal vs. modern human limb bones. I had already started landrace experiments in my garden by this time and sort of bumped into the variance angle in plant breeding. When I got into market gardening, I expanded it and now have a whole bunch of different varieties that do well in an increasingly volatile climate. Using variance in plant genomes to mitigate variance in climate, as it were.
Before we left the US, I used to go to Las Vegas and gamble 3-4 times a winter and I noticed how variance is not just volatility in the sample space, but moves upwards and downwards on a curve. Like a sine wave on an incline either up or down. (This incline is a sine wave in itself. I have sat at blackjack tables for hours and watched it change.) Back in 1992-93, I worked in a casino in Lake Tahoe for a year and so got an insider’s look at gambling and casino operations. I was winning at poker on the side but I was also playing a lot of blackjack, so I learned to count cards. That’s where I learned first hand about how the variance can kill you. It is not just the variance; the size of the bet amplifies the variance. (As a general rule, you increase the size of your bet based on the plus count in the cards remaining in the deck.) If the variance goes against you on one of your big bets, it can undo the profit you have just spent the last half hour grinding out. So we have an external input on an internal variance. In landrace development, this is the climate and soil conditions either amplifying or suppressing the natural variance in the landrace genome. There are other implications for studying variance in the coming decline and collapse, but right now I am observing and working with it. Another example. My social security checks are in dollars and I am now converting the dollars into Japanese yen and Swiss francs on a transfer app before converting them into euros as I need them. The idea here is to mitigate the variance of the USD/EUR conversion by using the variance in JPY/EUR and CHF/EUR. So if anyone is doing experiments with variance I would be interested to hear about them.
Regarding plant adaptability and variance, this article from 2022 (found via Google Scholar) also looks at “specificity”, which is proposed as a better measure of adaptability than variance (for commercial plant breeding, at least):
Adaptability and variety adoption: Implications for plant breeding policy in a changing climate
by Mohammad Torshizi and Richard Gray, 2022
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8489.12491
“Although variance captures overall variability in performance, it can be a misleading measure of adaptability… Our proposed measure of adaptability, variety specificity… is defined as follows: the rate at which the yield of a variety decreases as its area under cultivation expands from the best-yielding location to the second-best location to the third-best location and so on. A variety is considered very specific if its yield drops rapidly when its area expands beyond its top-yielding location. A variety is not considered very specific if it provides consistent yield levels across various locations. In other words, specificity is the mathematical inverse of adaptability; a higher degree of variety specificity implies a lower degree of adaptability.”
“Graphically, variety specificity is the slope of the curve that is formed when yield levels of a variety in various locations are ranked in descending order. For variety B in Figure 1, for example, variety specificity is equal to the slope of its yield curve (0.5). Similarly, for variety A, variety specificity is characterised by the slope of a line that best fits its yield curve (0.96). With the higher degree of variety specificity (i.e. higher average rate of drop in yield as the area expands), variety A is more specific and, thus, less adaptable than variety B.”
This is great! Thanks for the link. I will check it out.
I second Walter’s recommendation of a consideration of the lessons in Catton’s “Bottleneck”.
Here is a great review of the book by George Mobus:
http://theoildrum.com/node/5954
Thanks for comments. Catton is one of those who I’ve never got around to reading. I might take a look, and I’m sure it’d be good and informative, but I’m trying to shift my reading a little away from the big, bold futurism stuff. Judging his books by their covers – that’s okay, right? – it looks to me like ‘Overshoot’ is probably the single best one to read in terms of clarification of concepts?
Thanks to Kathryn and Walter for the cropping meditations. Possibly one for an open comment thread, but I’m also interested if others want to contribute here.
A better prose stylist than Alasdair MacIntyre – thank you, Martin! Along with Joe’s recent description of me as a tragic hero, the enchanting endorsements are stacking up. When it comes to professional philosophers, I’ve read worse to be fair. Though I’ll concede an omnibus MacIntyre edition is unlikely to make it onto the Christmas bestseller list … unlike ‘Finding Lights…’, I hope.
Anyway, time – as Simon reminds me – to get back behind the mule.
Catton’s overshoot. Should you read it? I read it in 2015 and here are some of the notes I made (apologies for a longer-than-usual comment):
“… the ideas in it seemed sort of famillar from elsewhere. But as it’s from 1982 (and that’s the scary thing) it was one of the originals, so having read it, I can now cite it. … it wasn’t an easy read, both in the sense that it was stylistically academic and slightly preachy, but also in the sense that what he was saying was not good …”
“He says that that the principles of ecology apply to humans as much as any other species. In a sense that is all he is saying, but the ramifications of that are alarming.”
“Like any other species in its environment (and of course ‘our’ environment is the whole planet), humans are subject to a ‘carrying capacity’ – how many of us can be supported? Carrying capacity is not fixed (of course) and has been expanded by two methods – Drawdown and conquest (not the word he uses)”
“The key point is that neither of these methods can be infinitely extended. We now cover the whole of the earth – there are no ‘new worlds’ and the drawdown of fossil fuels will come to an end. This brings us to the title: the use of fossil fuels has enabled us to ‘overshoot’ our carrying capacity.”
“We have been – and this is the sticking point, I think, for many people – like ‘yeast in a barrel’, in that we’ve changed the very circumstances which enabled us to expand. Why is this a sticking point? Because it amounts to saying that we are animals, in a habitat, subject to constraints. I think it seems for many people to be wrong or upsetting or dangerous, but it seems fine to me to say this becaused no-one says we are just an animal – I don’t think it at all demeaning to human dignity to say that there safe limits to what we can do. I’d even say that we’re not quite sure what these limits are – but that doesn’t mean there are none and it does look as if we are now approaching some hard limits.”
“This sounds very 1970’s doesn’t it? Which is another reason that overshoot is difficult to read … because nothing since 1982 has shown Catton (and those like him) to be wrong. Nothing has shown it to be wrong and yet ‘everyone’ (government, people, me, you) has behaved as if the whole ‘limits to growth scenario was blown to pieces at the start of the eighties.”
“Behaviour hasn’t changed. Although what has changed is the words. We’re all green nowadays, there are recycling bins, wind turblines, sustainability initiatives, emissions limits (kind of), environment ministers, eco-ratings. All great, all good, all worthwhile. But oh so little. For example it took a lomng time for the significance of rising CO2 levels to be acknowledged. And it seems like at the very point of that achnowledgment an army of oppositonists arose form nowhere. Are we doing anything? No, not really.”
I second Martin’s comments on Overshoot, especially “This sounds very 1970’s doesn’t it?”
As my partner has said more than once over the years, “Back in the 1970s we never thought we’d STILL be dealing with this nonsense so far into the future.”
In the mid-seventies my wife and I were returning to where we lived near Bellingham, Washington from my parent’s home in Portland, Oregon. As we were driving through downtown Seattle on I5, one of thousands of cars choking the freeway, I commented on the unadulterated profligacy of the scene around us. Asked what I meant, I explained that every one of the cars on the freeway had a petroleum burning engine that would have been enough to run an entire line-shaft factory a century earlier. Yet here we were, in the midst of thousands of “factory engines”, an immense amount of power, all to move a few thousand people from one place to another and everyone taking it as perfectly commonplace and normal.
I said that surely this profligacy couldn’t go on much longer. Oil consumption had been increasing exponentially until the recent oil shocks, but eventually it would all run out and the entire edifice of modern transportation and modern life would come crashing down.
I have been surprised and disheartened by how long we moderns have managed to sustain our extreme overshoot, doubling world population and more than doubling energy consumption since then, but the fact still remains that it can’t go on much longer. When it stops, there will be hell to pay and very few are even slightly prepared for the inferno.
I have the name of someone and his family that are prepared. Gareth Lewis.
He has self published a book on his family’s twenty years of hoe farming a small holding in Brittany, France. Title:- Twenty-First Century Hoe Farming. You can get the book from his website. You can pay in euros via PayPal.
He demonstrates that on a handful of acres you can provide a families, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and importantly cereals, plus all the woodfuel you need from the tree planted banks he recommends surrounding the small fields.
All this production can be done part time and with hand tools only, which means a very low capital cost of entry. He does state caveats, don’t do this as a money making exercise, there are no economies of scale with hand tools, plus staying out of the market avoids licensing costs.
He does not cover meat or dairy, but notes that he has no shortage of deer and rabbits on his land in recent years, and recommends foraging. For a small book he covers a lot, most of which I will agree with, and wish I had known thirty years ago.
I bought a fiver acre small holding in 1996, while in thrall to permaculture. Half was a derelict woodland that I restored to high forest, should have gone for Coppice species, the rest was orchard, mostly walnuts and apples but with a lot of obscure fruit and nut trees. I later added a veg garden using raised beds, which did not work well for me. I have been hoe gardening for several years now (before I found the book, I found the book while looking up hoe prices for a neighbour who liked what I was doing) at a local allotment. Unfortunately my small holding has been designated in the local plan for housing, and so I have not been working it for a couple of years, except for harvesting the apples and nuts. I have had severe health problems the past few years, so would probably have had to given it up any way. But if I had my youth again Mr Lewis’s way is a good way. I would just add a broad fork to his tool bag to help with de-compacting conventionally tilled soils.
Yes Samuel Lewis is impressive. Here is another very complete small farm , no tractor. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XyPcesRqBks
” We need to be like mycelium ”
That’s A quote from a blog I read and sounds about right to me .
https://countrysquire.co.uk/2025/05/28/why-we-should-all-respect-farmers/
Big farmer or little one this applies !
While I am an agnostic, I am open to all sources of knowledge and efforts to understand the human puzzle. I think that there well may be aspects of creation that likely cannot be answered by science, and in fact, those aspects are the most interesting and worth struggling with.
Here is an article that you might find interesting. Seems to lie right at the intersection of distributism and religion, both of which has been discussed here.
There are hints ( too soon to know for sure) that Pope Leo IVX might have chosen his name as a signal of support to the notions expressed in Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.
Chesterton has been on my radar for a while, but have not read anything yet. Suggestions on the best place to start?
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/06/what-is-distributism.html
Margaret Canovan’s biog: GK Chesterton, Radical Populist.
(A recommendation that I myself picked up from the comments on this very blog!)
I read it at the start of 2018, here are a few of the notes which I made at the time:
“..This was remarkably easy to read – and interesting. It was about GK’s political thought – so no mention of the man who was thursday, for example, which Martin Gardner talks so interestingly about in a spiritual context.”
“The big point for me was how good many of the points GKC was making were: they fall into the loose category that one might call ‘small is beautiful thinking’ and are aligned with the modern small-g-green agenda of localism”
Quote from the book ” it would be rash .. to attempt any rigid definition of populism, [but] it is certainly a recognizable political standpoint. At its heart lies always a faith in the common sense of ordinary, hard-working people, especially country people, and an intense suspicion of metropolitan society, plutocrats, bureaucrats and intellectural. ”
.
A snippet of village farming news caught my ear this weekend, which may be of interest to others.
The story I heard runs thus: the local herd (approx. a few dozen cows) had started to baffle the farmer by simply not getting pregnant, either through natural breeding or via artificial insemination – no joy, and seemingly all of a sudden. After some time the farmer brings up this problem with a vet, who asks, ‘are the cows anywhere near a mobile phone mast?’. As they had been grazing a few hundred metres from a mast, the vet (counter intuitive it seemed to me at the time, but apparently it gets them out of the tower’s main beam) suggested bringing them closer to the base of the tower and trying insemination again, which evidently yielded in an 80 per cent success rate, just like in the good old days.
Doing a bit of my own research along these lines brought up a 14 year old news story from The Guardian suggesting that women living near mobile phone masts seemed to be getting pregnant more often than those living elsewhere. So now I’m baffled. Anyway, I just thought I’d chip in here in case this relates to anyone else’s experience, with either cows or women, I guess.