Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
Posted on September 28, 2025 | 46 Comments
It’s time for me to break my silence here – thanks for keeping the discussion going in my absence.
Among other reasons for the pause was a long trip away, at least by my standards – mostly recreational, and mostly in Scotland. To get back into the swing of this blog I’m going to say a few things about the trip, relating them to some of the wider issues generally discussed here. Then, with publication of my new book imminent (tickets for the launch in Frome on 14 October available here – it’s free), I’ll start turning to some posts about that.
So – one part of my trip involved cycling the Hebridean Way, a 180+ mile cycle ride across the island chain of the Outer Hebrides, from Barra in the south to Lewis in the north. I was accompanied most of the way by my son, before his work as a river ecologist called him away. Part of his job involves rescuing wild salmon from the depredations of a road widening project in the Highlands, and the salmon’s call upon his time were more important than mine. At this juncture in world history, widening roads and destroying salmon habitat doesn’t seem to me a great use of precious resources, but I’ve (almost) given up on trying to make sense of modern priorities.
Anyway, one of the pleasures of the time I was able to spend with my son is his well-honed ability to spot and identify wildlife. Hence, my trip involved an impressive rollcall of accompanying characters such as sea eagles, golden eagles, short-eared owls, lapwings, snipe, ptarmigan, godwits, seals, dolphins and pine marten. Many of these creatures used to be more widely spread across the country but have now retreated to its wilder edges – not least due to farming practices geared to higher productivity, and lower price. People talk about a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ of wildlife loss, where the relatively slow decline across human generations blinds us to the richness that’s been lost. I’d argue there’s also a shifting baseline syndrome of human economic action, which is directly causative of the former. We cannot imagine the less monetised, less energised and more localised worlds of the past involving more people and more wildlife on farms, or imagine that it’s feasible or acceptable to project such ways of being into the future.
I completed the last part of the ride to the northern tip of Lewis alone. Here’s a picture of an old shieling I came across there, which has now become a small museum. My trusty steed is visible to the right. Less than two centuries ago one branch of my family headed south from a farming life in the Scottish Highlands with similarities to this, joining the modern economy as industrial wage workers. And now here I am returning as a leisured, Lycra-clad English tourist. Again, our culture over-celebrates this shifting baseline as if it’s unambiguously good. So I was pleased that the display didn’t overdo the ‘hard and miserable life of the agrarian past’ shtick, making mention of the celebration and sense of social freedom around the shielings and common pasturage in Gaelic culture. Winters cooped up with family in lowland housing, summers spent carousing in the high pastures. Or else, in other transhumant cultures, winters spent cooped up in large communal dwellings, summers spent in smaller kin groups. Family and freedom, an essential tension.
As readers of this blog will know, I’m a cautious enthusiast for shared agrarian property rights – two cheers for the commons. I chart the contours of this enthusiasm, and this caution, in my new book. Sometimes, I fear I overdo the caution. For all my strictures against modernist politics, have I become a petty bourgeois Little Englander, obsessing over landownership and property boundaries? Well, I don’t think so. When I look at the wider global historical literature on how people organise access to productive land, I find endless iterations on the difficulties of reconciling kin and community, individual and collective, in ways that can never definitively be resolved on one side or the other. This isn’t just about modernist ultra-individualism.
I hope I’ve conveyed some of that difficulty in the new book – but perhaps it merits some further discussion here. Meanwhile, for more thoughts on the petty bourgeoisie and the future, I’ve recently put this essay out in a new publishing venture, Romanticon. There’s a lot to be learned from the Romantic movement, in its broadest sense. Good luck, then, to Romanticon.
On my way back south, I stopped off in Glencoe and spent a nice day hiking the steep ridges of Stob Coire nan Lochan and Bidean nam Bian before dropping back down through the Lost Valley – now magical, once the desperate sanctuary of the MacDonalds fleeing the Glencoe massacre. That’s a story where the villains, as is so often the case in Scottish history, were ostensibly the English, but on closer inspection, not only the English – a warning, perhaps, against overly dualistic hero and villain narratives.
Back down in the Glencoe carpark, a coach pulled up and the door opened. A man dressed to the nines in kilt and sporran jumped out and proceeded to play the bagpipes. The passengers filed out, took photos of the mountains on their phones, then filed in again, followed by the piper. The door closed and they were gone, the whole affair lasting two minutes max. Glencoe done.
But who am I to feel superior? Loving the views from the top of a mountain involves more physical exertion than loving them from the bottom but is maybe not so different otherwise. Loving the views at all is at least entry-level Romanticism of the kind that’s needed if we’re to have any hope of navigating toward a better world.
During the trip, I bought a book I’ve long been meaning to read, Soil and Soul, by Hebridean writer and land activist Alastair McIntosh, first published in 2001. I discovered that its foreword was written by a certain George Monbiot. In it, Monbiot says McIntosh’s book proves that poetry can save the world (p.xiii). There’s a different sensibility in Monbiot’s 2022 tome, Regenesis, where he writes: “one of the greatest threats to life on Earth is poetry” (p.212).
Maybe someone should write a book about the implications of this volte face. On which note, while sheltering from a storm in a youth hostel my son and I met a young woman who enquired about the work we did. When I told her that I wrote about farming and eco-politics she asked if I’d read Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. Quite the ego boost for an obscure writer – though, as my son cruelly pointed out, my books are more likely to find a readership in the Outer Hebrides (population circa 26,000) than in, say, London (population circa 9 million), where efforts to dismiss agrarian localism as mere ‘romanticism’ and to seek industrial alternatives to farming are a surer way to find an appreciative audience. Regardless of my own modest literary efforts, I think this speaks to a wider problem of our times. Still, our new acquaintance had recently completed a master’s degree in environmental history and was searching the local landscape for evidence of old field systems. I drew comfort from her activist remembrance.
So – hard agrarian lives, old field systems, wild weather. Cycling the Hebridean Way in inclement conditions doesn’t rank too highly in the annals of human adventuring, but it was interesting all the same how the circle of my daily concerns suddenly narrowed during the trip: where will I be able to pitch my tent, do I have enough food, how will I keep dry and warm? It doesn’t surprise me at all that our ancestors in the deep past took many millennia to figure out how to survive in northern Europe. If we’re going to live up to our H. sapiens moniker, it’d be worth applying our minds to rethinking how we’ll do so in such places again with less reliance on imported energy and materials. Maybe these half-buried Hebridean field systems sing a song of the future.
I had limited access to electrical energy during my cycle ride, meaning I failed to keep as abreast of the news headlines as I usually do. But I discovered toward the end of my trip that someone I’d barely heard of had been shot dead in Utah and all hell had broken loose. For reasons logistical, personal and meteorological, when I got back to the mainland I had to spend a few days without much to do in a pretty little raincoast town, and ended up gorging myself dangerously on the social media firestorm about the killing and the wider politics that it implicated. The shooter, you see, had been consumed by far-left ideology. No wait, he’d been consumed by far-right ideology. Hang on, the shooter wasn’t actually the shooter.
I think it’s probably best if I avoid adding my redundant opinions to this pile-on. Two things I will say that it dramatized and that relate to the concerns of this blog are, first, that in politics as in farming there now seems to be a missing middle – everybody these days seems to be either ‘far left’ or ‘far right’. And this is accompanied by the conviction that the other lot’s position is twisted ‘ideology’, while one’s own is plain good sense. I plan to write more about this in a forthcoming post. Relatedly, it seems to be an open question now whether the US republic can survive given the rent in the fabric of any common political narrative. I find the writings of Christopher Armitage about blue states pulling away from the federal structure interesting in this respect. This could prove harder than he thinks, but nevertheless he traverses some similar ground to the nature of political collapse that I charted in A Small Farm Future with the concept of the ‘supersedure state’, and that I further examine in Finding Lights… with the concept of the sun polity. With Trump sending troops into ‘war-ravaged’ … er … Portland, the days of national collapse and the supersedure state seem more imminent.
Ah, collapse. While the US was convulsed with its far-left/far-right imbroglio, Britain was rehearsing its own version, with a well-attended ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in London, and the road system festooned with national flags.
As argued by John Harris in this interesting article, part of the ‘far-right’ narrative involves playing constantly on overwrought ideas of impending social collapse and civil disorder. Though historically ‘far-left’ narratives have also done exactly this. Anyway, Harris’s article gave me brief pause to wonder whether my own collapsenik tendencies are part of the same problematic political ecosystem. To be honest, I don’t think so. I’m not massively interested in emphasizing the impending-ness of civil disorder to found some political project of restoring a sense of the status quo ante or else some brave new world. It’s just that I can’t see how our colonial and fossil-fuel dependent world system built on economic growth will ultimately survive the social and biophysical shocks it’s bringing upon itself. But perhaps this is an issue worth discussing further.
Renegade Labour MP Clive Lewis wrote this interesting little comment about a friend of his who went to the Unite the Kingdom rally, not because he was persuaded by the ‘far-right’ messaging but because he felt the government doesn’t listen to people and because he wanted to feel proud of his country again. I hope to write more about this in a forthcoming post too – not least because I shared a stage with Clive at the Green Gathering recently and I want to dig into some of the things he said there, alongside these remarks about the rally.
Anyway, the long drive I took to Scotland (ah yes … I have my own sins to expiate), gave me the opportunity to do a bit of entirely unsystematic social science research by observing the distribution of national flags across the motorway system. It seemed to me that as I progressed northward across England the density of flags generally dwindled. Once I crossed into Scotland, I saw precisely one union flag and one Scottish Saltire. Hence, a geographic gradient of political allegiance – cast-iron proof at last that my theories of the supersedure state are well grounded.
On my way back south a couple of weeks later, almost all the flags were gone. Collapse deferred. For now.
Perhaps I’m making too light of the present grave political moment and the creeping – no, bounding – authoritarianism that’s emerging. In wealthy Global North countries, there’s little doubt in my mind that the ‘far-right’ is a greater threat than the ‘far-left’, and I do understand some of the furious backs-to-the-wall rhetoric among left-wing or ‘progressive’ (why are all political terms so deeply problematic that I feel the need to put quotation marks around them?) activists aimed at political moderates for conniving at the right-wing power grab. But this is tempered by the fact that so much left-wing thinking seems to me delusional about the reasons for its eclipse. If I were to frame it in the class terms that’s the staple of left-wing analysis, I’d say that a lot of this bears on an inability to take the petty bourgeoisie seriously or understand how complex and multifaceted petty bourgeois politics is – a theme picked up in my linked article that I hope to expand on in the future.
And so now I’m home again, back to the farm, back to the book publication, back to a million things to do, back to trying to grow some produce and grow some politics that’s not far-left or far-right but equal to the present moment by dispensing with those figments of modernism and doing my bit to articulate more vital political traditions like Romanticism and distributism. Sometimes it feels too thankless and daunting, an enterprise that invites mostly indifference, if not ridicule. How tempting to slip away and embrace a less critically-edged Romanticism. Maybe I’ll just chuck up everything and spend these sunset years swaggering the rock-strewn paths of Highland mountains. Tempting, but I probably won’t. I daresay instead I’ll stay sober and industrious, and thus ironically modernist, despite myself. I have new gardens to plant.
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
I’m glad you’ve had some time off; welcome back!
I am looking at a bit of time off myself, soon: our new parish priest was licensed last week and he is taking a whole load of admin work away from me, to.my considerable relief.
Meanwhile, I have found a stand of holm oaks in a London park (no, I’m not telling the internet which one) which produce acorns so low in tannin that I ate a bite of one raw. It was a bit astringent but less so, I think, than a raw sweet chestnut. I am delighted, and have gathered enough to try some experimental baking in due course, once I catch up on the apple backlog, the pear backlog, the quince backlog, the potato backlog, and the tomato backlog…
Holm oaks can be the cornerstone of subsistence IMO . They have several attributes , they can handle irrigation and can live with lawns and lawnmowers. A mown lawn makes collecting with a rake and a dustpan both easy and productive. 200lbs. in a few hours of work. The acorns usually don’t crack and the meat isn’t exposed to contamination so collecting in public spaces is safe. After drying they keep a couple years without degrading and around here they stay mostly pest free.
I wish I had a handheld gauge to test tannin in the field so I could find a Holm Oak with very low tannin . I would like to start grafting sweet holm oak for an attempt at acorn agriculture. I believe it may be an important crop within the next generation or two as more people are forced , or willingly venture, into foraging staples.
Probably the best portable tannin gauge is your tongue. I collected the acorns with a nut roller, and one of my chores today will be sorting through them — not many cracked, but a fair few have been nibbles by squirrels, so there will.be some triage involved. And there were enough trees close together that I can’t be absolutely certain all the acorns are from the same tree. Still, it’s a promising development.
Outstanding point about using your tongue as a tannin gauge. You can do the same thing estimating pH in soil. I have done this all my life, even as a callow youth on a dairy farm. I know it sounds ridiculous and allegorical but, “Listen to your tongue.”
Yes but my palate goes flat pretty quickly after a very bitter acorn. So I will try to get some ferrous chloride and get into the weeds .
“Two milliliters (2 mL) of the aqueous solution of the extract were added to a few drops of 10% Ferric chloride solution (light yellow). The occurrence of blackish blue color showed the presence of gallic tannins and a green-blackish color indicated presence of catechol tannins.“
I am looking for the very least amount of tannin in the acorns of a holm oak and then using that oak to graft onto rootstock from seed grown acorns.
I just finished planting out 100 Calif live oaks on my farm. Our oaks are very tannic and don’t like irrigation or lawns. I am interested in a cultured oak as a crop.
On the topic of acorns, this document from the University of California says acorns can be source of oil, comparable to olive oil.
“Acorns can also be used to make acorn oil by boiling, crushing, or pressing. Acorn oil has been used as a cooking oil in Algeria and Morocco… It was used by the Indians of the eastern U.S. for cooking and as a salve for burns and injuries… Some varieties contain more than 30 percent oil, equal or greater than the best oil olives… The quality and flavor of the oil is comparable to olive oil…”
Use of Acorns for Food in California: Past, Present, Future
David A. Bainbridge, Dry Lands Research Institute, University of California, Riverside
https://web.archive.org/web/20101122043059/http://ecocomposite.org/native/UseOfAcornsForFoodInCalifornia.doc
[link downloads an archived document file]
This small hand-cranked oil press can be used to produce oil from acorns, walnuts, sunflower seeds, etc.
Piteba brand, made in Europe, price 74 euros for the unpainted version, plus shipping (worldwide).
https://piteba.com/en/
An updated version of the acorn document from Bainbridge, with recipes:
Acorns as Food
History, use, recipes, and bibliography
David A. Bainbridge
https://www.academia.edu/download/77857420/download.pdf
@Kathryn
Your Holm Oak acorns sound interesting.
Have you tried roasting over hot coals like a chestnut?
(Foraged some chestnuts this weekend. Yum!)
Does anyone know if the tannin fluctuates from year to year or is it the same every year?
Kathryn, would you be up for posting a dozen of your precious treasures to me? Sounds like a fun project to see if I can get them to grow and plant out. My contribution to future generations 🙂
Sure — can you get me your email address to exchange postal details? I think Chris has my email address…
Happy Days!
@Chris. Please can you ping my email over to Kathryn if you have a moment (and if such a thing is even possible) Thanks
Great idea for a holiday. sorry about the typical Scottish weather . You see far more from a bike and enjoyed it !
My male line also comes from Scotland , ( and at least one viking ) but the east side , living on land that was anything but fruit full and became reivers , after unification of the two kingdoms many were hung , some were jailed then deported to Ireland or australia becoming Scotts Irish , some are still there , some came to the USA and live in Appalachia , poverty and political upheaval scattered them across the world .
The guardian piece never mentions the Palestinian protests , or the over 3000 people jailed for their thoughts on social media ( second highest on the planet behind China) ,Amnesty international is becoming upset but I doubt you heard about that ) .
Charlie Kirk was anything but right wing , thirty years a go he would have been called a wet conservative .In the USA It seems anyone to the right of Chairman Mao is a Fachist .
the Charlie Kirk societal spasm- In interviews, the governor of Utah specifically targeted social media as an accelerant and facilitator of polarization and tribalism. He is right, but capitalism and profit seeking will prevent its elimination or correction. There are few politicians that take this moderating and conciliatory tone.
Open primaries and ranked choice voting would help with reducing the push to the extremes, but again, we don’t seem to be able to fix our system. A symptom of late stage empire.
The sixty minutes interview:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-kirk-utah-spencer-cox-civility-unity-plea-60-minutes-transcript/
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold………Damn that poem gets more haunting and apropos by the day.
so it goes.
Hazelnut harvest was down this fall, but our chestnut trees have started producing this year. Took them 13 years, but then, I have not pampered them, so they have had to expend extra energy just surviving before deciding to shift some effort to reproduction. (These are the American/Chinese crosses, attempting to find a middle ground between blight resistance, cold tolerance, and productivity)
holm oaks- dang, wish they could stand the Wisconsin winters, sounds like another great perennial food plant to add to the repertoire in warmer climes. Once my white oaks start producing, I’ll be stuck with leaching the tannins.
Bike trips and the like are necessary. Moderation in all things, including eco-guilt. We are all embedded in the machine, and even with the most fanatical off grid, home spun home grown effort, we are still participants. Anyone who is not won’t be reading this little note.
@Chris
I too have been to that shieling.
Felt bleak and comforting at the same time.
It’s all a matter of perspective. A tiny little one room hovel but a blessing if sheltering from the storm.
Did you visit any of the “Black Houses”? They were an eye opener too. Life up there must have been tough before fossil fuels started to take the strain.
Perhaps why the Church is such a force on the island. Faith was the only thing that kept people going!!!!!
Did you see the ratchet straps holding the oil tanks down due to the howling winds!
The talk in the supermarket in Stornoway was of the amazing summer they were having. Three consecutive days of sunshine and no rain 🙂
And the there is the midgies!!!!
It’s a tough place to live.
(third biggest island in the British Isles after Great Britain and the island of Ireland)
Did you “clock” all the empty houses? That’s what a population decline looks like.
I have a friend who is a Gillie up there on a private fishing estate. Another problem for the salmon population is all the salmon farms. Lice infecting the wild fish.
Fascinating place to visit.
The whole second home thing doesn’t seem to be an issue up there. Too remote and inclement climate I guess. Unlike Cornwall.
Made my way up to Lewis with Julian Cope’s book, on a road trip for my mate’s birthday. We ended up making friends with an old northern lad who was recovering from drug addiction and was looked after/looking after a crofter who had a bothy on the avenue up to the stones. We went out with him to cut peat, and saw down some of the conifer plantations that had failed – we were literally engulfed by the midges and had to make a hasty retreat!
I loved the reed roofs held down with rope hung with stones. I look forward to a ride up there when the lad is old enough.
I think the key in your writing is that it’s based around actions, like this latest piece, as are you books. Because (weirdly obviously) that is where the action is. The times, as you say, are a changing, and all hope is in making (actually making) the lives we want/need to live. This must qualify all talk, writing, story telling. The romantics maybe the high point of literature, of language at its limits, in awe of a world before words; then it is the beginning of the corruption and severing of meaning. Peter Linebaugh does a nice pamphlet rounding up Lud, a poets Queen, and the slave trade, which is a great trip, but it’ll be the Ecological Land Coop that makes it happen.
Holm oaks – I planted a few last year. I wish I’d planted some 20 years ago when we did our main planting. It was under a Forestry Commission grant that required native trees, but if I’d been smarter or more informed back then I’d have snuck a few in.
During the trip my son handed me an acorn and said ‘here have this hazelnut’. The tongue test certainly worked that time! I already said he’s better than me at plant and animal identification, but I maintain it’s my sweet and trusting nature…
Interesting mention of the reivers from Diogenes – now there’s some history that’s worth thinking about!
Re John’s points about housing & decline in the Hebrides, yes indeed. Whereas the endless development in southeast England continues apace. Exemplary I think of growing inequality, the stagnation implicit in current economic models and the incipient emergence of slum-style urbanism and urban concentration in the UK. I’ll touch on that in a forthcoming post, I hope.
Interesting points from Joel – somebody criticised my Romanticon piece on the grounds that Romanticism is first and foremost an aesthetic movement, and my piece lacked an orientation to aesthetics. I think this gets it backwards, exactly along the lines of actions per Joel’s comment. At its worst, Romanticism becomes just elegy or nostalgia – an anaesthetic, not an aesthetic. But it’s powerful when it has a critical political edge. I’ve got that Linebaugh pamphlet somewhere on my shelves – a gift from Aaron Vansintjan as I recall. Must read it again … and Aaron’s book too!
For some reason (*cough* rent-seeking *cough cough*) all the development in the southeast is doing absolutely nothing to lower housing costs.
I’ll look at Aaron’s book, thanks. When Alice was studying ‘the cultural commons ‘ aesthetics came up, and the hilarious concept of ‘disinterestedness’ came up. That only male aristocrats had the ability to gaze disinterestedly upon the world and divine its aesthetic qualities- if it has any! Aside from the ignoble roots of the definition of aesthetics, our understanding is that people are more swayed by how a thing looks and feels (aesthetics) than how it is structured (logic), whereby argument and discussion is useless in the face of feeling. As makers we see how an undeniable aesthetic emerges out of making, a positive feed back through the process structures this aesthetic in a land based logic. Otherwise aesthetic is quickly severed from materials and supply chains.
In this way Romanticism was an attempt to ground an aesthetic in nature but as mostly middle to upper class artist and writers, they’re recourse was to “the sublime’ and not to an embodied process of making from materials in the land to provision the community – something truly sublime! (I think Shelley did attempt something of a community, this maybe gets discussed in Linebaugh’s pamphlet.)
Like Bananarama, in the mix of our own New Romantics, ‘it ain’t watcha do, it’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results!’
So, our dilemma is how to marry aesthetic to these craft processes, make that look/feel accessible/doable/desirable to invite people into positive cycle back to local community provisioning based in the land.
I better read your essay now!
Hi Joel,
I’m a graduate student studying soil organic matter dynamics and radio journalist in Utah. I’ve been following the blog here since coming across A Small Farm Future some months ago. Despite the very relevant discussion of Charlie Kirk to my work and community, it’s really your words on aesthetic that compel me to chime in with my two cents.
I’m struck by the distinction you draw between aesthetics and logic. Different iterations of the same comparison have been on my mind for the past decade or so, since I was involved with environmental activism as an undergrad.
In the American West where I’ve lived for most of my life, I’ve been struck by two poles of environmental thought, which I think map on nicely to the labels you provided. They are also explored in Betsy Gaines Quammen’s book American Zion. In Utah, those of the aesthetic persuasion are obsessed with scenery. Utah’s dramatic landscapes evoke the poetry of Terry Tempest Williams, the prose of Edward Abbey, and the fanaticism of zealots like Everett Ruess. In Utah, we implement a myriad of ways to pass over the landscape (hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, canyoneering, rafting, paragliding, ATVing, etc.) so that we can admire it without really engaging in relationship with it. I would absolutely identify this trend as consistent with what you write about middle to upperclass unembodied romanticism.
On the other pole are what I would describe as utilitarians… those only interested in the structure (logic?) and contents of the land and are, by contrast, entirely unmoved by feeling. These are the ranchers, miners, developers, and drillers that Quammen writes about in her book as heirs to the various facets of yesteryear’s cowboy archetype. They are the villains in Abbey’s novels.
I have often wondered if there is a middle path that respects the beauty of Utah, protects the ecosystems and watersheds we reside in, and gets our hands dirty (I think the works of Wendell Berry and A Small Farm Future are the best visions of this middle path that I have so far encountered). I am struck by what your line, about an “embodied process of making from materials in the land to provision the community – something truly sublime!” In my feeble attempts at gardening, crafting, and otherwise engaging with the land to provision myself and my community, I have felt perhaps not the same majesty as I experience in Utah’s canyon country, but certainly a more expansive-yet-intimate belonging.
A few individuals and organizations are taking on the mantle of pioneers (a loaded term around these parts) down the middle path towards the alternative aesthetic grounded in ‘land based logic’ as you describe above. Some small farmers, some stewards of indigenous food systems. But most agricultural production is hay, and though Utah supplies a reasonable amount of its own meat and dairy products, produce and staple foods are almost all imported.
At the moment, Utah is growing very quickly. It’s urban centers in particular are surging and it’s currently a cause for great concern (if you ask anybody involved in allocating Utah’s scarce water resources). I wonder if/when we will see the trend towards rural relocation that Chris writes about. In a desert-ish climate, much of Utah’s land is considered marginal and limited as far as productive capacity for agriculture. It’s daunting to think about how difficult it will be to convince people that the ‘craft processes’ you mention are doable, let alone accessible and desirable.
Consider the main similarity between Sumer and Utah or even ancient civilizations and the American West: centralization of water. A small farm future is decentralized.
Texas has many of the same problems as Utah , to many people chasing too few resources water being the big one , fierce summers and vicious winters (-10c to + 40 c ) that happen often enough to stop semi tropical perennial crops , summers that kill temperate plantings , ( Apples will not grow here , or olives , , native pecans do well most years but ‘ improved ‘ trees die in the hotter summers , the same with plum, peach kiwi fruit , it is disheartening to spend years getting a orchard growing then watch frosts kill all you have planted .
It does grow grass , USDA says one calf cow per 20_acres , further west one cow calf per 250 acres .
Permaculturing anything is near impossible .
Huggle culture just feeds termites .
Thank you Thys, it is validating to hear that you have experienced the sublime feeling of community in land based craft. Thank you, also for a evocative description of Utah and the land relations there, it is an interesting insight. I think you have identified the nascent forms of resistance- small farms and indigenous land stewards – against the forces of extraction that you identify. I agree with your definitions of the relationship of land leisure and entertainment as a modern form of aristocratic relations to land.
I’m a especially interested in how the small farms and indeginous practices perceive these resource realities and how they are thinking about your own study area of soil biology.
Good to hear your thoughts here.
Have you thought about having Chris on your radio channel?!
Excellent snippet, even-handed excerpt from the forthcoming book, Chris. October already! Looking forward to the 14th…
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-10-02/finding-lights-in-a-dark-age-excerpt/
A nice “taster”.
Think I’m going to have to order a copy.
You doing any book signings in Frome (or beyond) Chris? 🙂
Free event with book signing at Frome, 14 October.
“Entry to the talk, Q&A and signing is free, with other speakers to be announced. Free wine and soft drinks will be served, thanks to the support of Chelsea Green Publishing UK.”
Tue 14 Oct 2025 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM BST
Frome Town Hall, Christchurch Street West, Frome, BA11 1EB
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/frometowncouncil/1861346
Thank you Simon. The book as a whole is possibly a little less even-handed, but I do my best not to get drawn into old feuds or pick unnecessary fights.
Steve beat me to the details of the book launch. Do keep an eye on the Events & Publications pages of this website, where you can find things I’m doing that I don’t necessarily advertise in blog posts: https://chrissmaje.com/events/
There will probably be an event or signing in Oxford in January at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. There are also a couple of podcasts I’ve done that are already out, and a few more in the offing: https://chrissmaje.com/research/
I did a bookshop signing & Q&A in Stroud last week (sorry, should have advertised it more). For info, I’m open to doing local bookshop events in the southwest (or northern Scotland!) if people are up for organising one.
More from me next week…
Ah. OK. Great.
I haven’t ventured around the site other than the posts.
re: holm oak acorns, isn’t the main problem that they’re small and fiddly to shell? I’ve found a few that were just about palatable raw, but still a bit too tannic to want to eat lots of them. Roasting helped a bit.
Generally I prefer to use common pedunculate or sessile acorns which get to a much larger size and are a lot easier to shell. The trick is to let them dry so the nutmeat shrinks from the shell and the inner skin gets dry and brittle so can be peeled or rubbed off. Bashing them over the head with a hammer or stone then opens up a lengthways crack that you can get your thumbnails into and extract the acorn whole. Then you have to grind and leach them for about a week to get rid of the tannins. I chop them up roughly in a food processor and put the ‘grits’ into a pillowcase and leach in a bucket of cold water, changing the water out twice a day. Hot water works faster but leaches out more of the fats & probably other nutrients too. Then dry in an oven or dehydrator and you have a course, mildly nutty flour that can be fine ground when you need it and will keep for several years (no lie!) if kept dry and away from the usual creatures.
Some old blog posts I did fyi, including research into uses by native people around the world:
https://ondisturbedground.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/balanophagy-for-beginners/
https://ondisturbedground.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/acorns-good-times-bread/
This website is a treasure trove of info related to European ‘balanoculture’:
https://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/p/acorns.html
cheers,
I
@Ian M
Thanks for the links.
No probs!
Ian, I use this nutcracker to crack dried acorns. It works very well if you are trying to crack several pounds of acorns . You still have to sort out the shells from the nutmeat.
https://sites.google.com/view/davebilt43nutcracker/home
Interesting to see, Bruce, thanks. Always in favour of hand-crank options, though the cost + shipping is for me prohibitive for the small scale I do it on. There’s a lady on a Greek island who makes acorn flour and other products who managed to source a beast of a machine to do the dehulling. I seem to remember it came from Croatia and was purpose built for acorns but with the desired product being the caps – used in high end leather tanning – not the nuts. A brief vid on her youtube channel fyi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LMqtJvdS20 Probably chestnut dehullers could be repurposed for the task. Ones I’ve seen spiral the nuts in a drum past a gas flame that scorches the outer surface, then into another high speed drum with indentations that scrape it off. Well mostly, we still had to hand peel the last bits. Commercial operations always turn you into a servant of machines… I’ll stick to the hammer for now!
cheers,
I
I like the machine but alas, I can’t find a supplier in the UK:(
I’ve got a Davebuilt #43 as well, use it to crack my hazelnut shells.
The holm oak acorns from a couple of trees ten minutes walk from my house are tiny; the ones from the park on my way to/from church are quite a bit larger. I think that, like the tannin content, there must be some genetic variation from tree to tree, or possibly it’s just that the ones closer to home are competing a lot more with nearby trees for water and light.
Pleased to get a notification that my copy of “Finding Lights” is on the way and should.be with me Monday! and we might even get a rainy day next week when I can hole up with a book and some squash soup, instead of working outside.
An article in a rural sociology journal says “Back-to-the-land migration is back! In Sweden… since 2013, there are more people moving into sparsely populated municipalities than moving out…”
Sandström, E. (2023) Resurgent back-to-the-land and the cultivation of a renewed countryside. Sociologia Ruralis, 63, 544–563.
https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12406
“For example, the number of small holdings (0—2 hectares) has increased in recent years according to official statistics (Swedish Board of Agriculture, 2017, 2020) and the demand for abandoned farms and houses in the countryside has increased during the past decade according to statistics from Sweden’s largest property portal (Hemnet, 2014). Furthermore, since 2013, there are more people moving into sparsely populated municipalities than moving out according to Swedish official statistics (SCB, 2014, 2021). Paralleling these demographic trends, courses in self-sufficiency and smallholding have proliferated at Swedish folk high schools…”
Chris said that he’s “back to trying to grow some produce and grow some politics that’s not far-left or far-right but equal to the present moment by dispensing with those figments of modernism and doing my bit to articulate more vital political traditions like Romanticism and distributism.”
Hear, hear, but as with the term “conservative”, Romanticism seems to have some aspects which do apply to the envisioned agrarian localism of a small farm future, and some aspects which don’t. In his Romanticon essay, Chris wrote:
“The reason for farming in open country in ways that look somewhat like peasant or artisanal methods of the past isn’t that the past was better but that these methods will better suit the conditions of the future, and are therefore more promising… Given that a mass turn to local practical work in the face of the biophysical, political and economic crises upon us seems almost inevitable, making this a ‘petty bourgeois’ turn by design through emphasizing distributism and semi-autonomous personal agency seems better than other outcomes likely to arise by default.”
This reasoning seems much more rational than Romanticism. Although, to be fair to Chris, he mentioned his interest in “more humane and capacious versions of Romanticism”.
https://romanticon.substack.com/p/open-country
Keep in mind that romanticism was a response to the Enlightenment. So was existentialism. Existentialism focused on a PROCESS to create meaning out of mere existence (do something rather than just be in a state of being). Romanticism focused on emotion rather than reason and the return to nature was one way to do it. There were other ways to BE romantic of course.
In the 1960s, a popular position was to “throw yourselves on the gears of the Machine to stop it.” Thus the refusal to let yourself be drafted and the actions of demonstrating and getting clubbed and teargassed. This was certainly romantic and we felt righteous and fulfilled as we sat in jail and licked our wounds. But the focus on “doing something” naturally led to existentialism. Once a person reads even a little Wittgenstein and considers his claim that, “I am the end of philosophy,” it naturally follows that philosophy is a dead end that only props up the System. So what then? Simply put, you have to get off your dead ass and do something. Nature is a good place to do it.
Once you put down your copy of Wordsworth and actually look at your connection to those flowers and clouds, it is relatively easy to take your past experiences of “doing something against the machine” to build alternatives.
Yeah, I used to read Wordsworth and the Shelly’s and sacrificed myself to stopping the machine. Now I do crop research and grow food.
A word on existential risk. This is a nonsense term like degrowth. So-called “existential risk” was coined by Nick Bostrom about 15 years ago and magnified by Barack Obama and his generals. It should be rebranded as “extreme risk” or “x-risk.” The word existential does NOT mean “real” or “deadly.” This misuse of an important term is a vehicle for control of language by our corporate and governmental overlords
An existential dilemma is when you have to choose between chicken and and steak for dinner. A real risk is when you don’t have something to eat for dinner.
Yes, all political and intellectual -isms are houses with many rooms, not all of which appeal. But in response to Walter’s comment “Now I do crop research and grow food”, while indeed that’s vital for surviving the future, unfortunately the fact is this is practiced and understood by far too few people, while being actively resisted by too many – largely because utilitarianism, progress ideologies and certain versions of rationalism rule contemporary political and intellectual visions. That’s why, in my opinion, there’s a need for more Romanticism and certain versions of irrationalism, along with other political/intellectual currents, in our political and intellectual visions if we’re to save our asses via local food growing.
Chris wrote “…utilitarianism, progress ideologies and certain versions of rationalism rule contemporary political and intellectual visions. That’s why, in my opinion, there’s a need for more Romanticism and certain versions of irrationalism…”
Yes, depending on what versions and uses of irrationalism you’re talking about, although “irrational” is typically a disparaging term which might not get much traction politically. (Similar to how I think technocratic adherents of scientism wouldn’t get much popular support for an “unfeeling” or “compassionless” politics.)
I agree with Chris that “certain versions of rationalism rule contemporary political and intellectual visions”, but perhaps agrarian localism would be the outcome of a different version of rationalism? Such as a rationalism that’s focused on the well-being of the 90% instead of the top 10%?
As I commented earlier, Chris sounds pretty rational (for the well-being of the commoners) when advocating for agrarian localism, such as when he says it can “better suit the conditions of the future” and “seems better than other outcomes likely to arise by default.”
On the subject of degrowth .
” Germany’s pension and social security system on the verge of collapse
Germany has proposed raising the retirement age to 73 to prevent the collapse of the pension system, per Reuters
Chancellor Merz said that Germany can’t afford the current social security system and that people will need to pay more from their income.”
I am in my 70’s the chances of me holding a full time job are ZERO !
An author from the inter war years stated things well I think.
” I learn more about the countryside , farming , and the land from sitting for a day on the top of Breedon hill than a year sitting in London drinking gin and discussing our books with other authors .”
John Moore 1938 .
On the topic of acorns.
Does anyone know…………are tannins bad to injest or is it just that the tannins are unpallitable?
I’ve started taking a bit more notice of acorns and have found a tree with biggn’s growing on it. I’ve tried a few raw and they don’t seem to bitter to me?
These quotes from Bainbridge’s “Acorns as Food” address your questions.
Eating Acorns
“The acorns from many species of oaks are edible raw, just as they are harvested. I have found sweet acorns from Quercus gambelii, Q. mongolica., Q. emoryii, Q. dumosa, Q. virginiana, and Q. macrocarpa. Other species reported to be sweet include: Q. vaccinifolia, Q. stellata, Q. garryana, Q. lobata, Q. pumila, Q. muehlenbergii, Q. alba, Q. michauxii, Q. brandeegei, Q. gramuntia, Q. E’sculus, Q. aegilops, and Q. ilex var ballota. Undoubtedly, other species and varieties are equally sweet and more flavorful. A careful worldwide search for good cultivars is long overdue because there is hope of finding sweet acorns even in those species normally considered bitter. Some of these include the best tasting acorns, with cashew and chocolate overtones. The more tropical oaks with fist sized acorns that are reportedly sweet and flavorful are of special interest.”
Using bitter acorns — Acorn Leaching
“It is also practical to harvest and use bitter acorns, but the bitterness must be removed. Some cases of acorn poisoning have occurred when people have eaten too many untreated bitter acorns during periods of mass starvation. But the tannin which causes the bitterness can easily be leached from acorns with water.”
Acorns as Food
History, use, recipes, and bibliography
David A. Bainbridge
https://www.academia.edu/download/77857420/download.pdf
@Steve L.
Thanks for that.
Perhaps I should not be chomping into too many raw acorns.
Just being lazy and trying to skip the leaching phase.