The Small Farm Future Blog

Finding Lights in a Dark Age – published today

Posted on October 14, 2025 | No Comments

My book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, is officially published today in the UK (US publication is 11 November). It’s available in paperback, e-book and audiobook versions. There’s a launch this evening at the town hall in Frome, my hometown. It’s fully booked, which is nice.

I wrote a little bit about the book here. I’ll start a short-to-medium length cycle of blog posts about it soon, but I think not immediately. At least that will give those who read my online posts and are planning to read the book a chance to get stuck in before I offer my meta-commentary. And I have a few more posts on other matters in the pipeline.

I’m thinking of Finding Lights… as the third and final book in a trilogy that I’ve published with Chelsea Green. Maybe it helps to introduce it in relation to those books. In A Small Farm Future I explained the crises or driving forces that I believe are impelling us away from globalised state welfare capitalism, and further explained why these forces will impel us toward small-scale farming and agrarian localism. To quote the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, I believe we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Though actually, I don’t think the easy way is any longer an option. We can do it in hard ways or harder ways, but a small farm future seems like a given. I’m just trying to highlight the hard ways we might achieve it, to help avoid the even harder ones.

In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I tried to warn against the siren song of ecomodernism, specifically in the farming and energy sectors. Ecomodernism has been aptly defined as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change” and indeed there is a narrative style in the book and policy worlds which involves scaring the hell out of us with terrible future scenarios before pulling a rabbit out of a hat with some high-tech, high-energy new gizmology which supposedly will preserve high-energy urban civilization with little fundamental political and economic change. The touted gizmologies rarely stand up to scrutiny (the fanfares for the manufactured bacterial food that I critiqued in that book have already pretty much faded to black just two years later), but alas people keep falling for new versions of the same marketing patter.

In Finding Lights… I pretty much take it as given that humanity’s destination is a small farm future and that there are no techno-fix or ecomodernist get out of jail free cards. I try not to underestimate how ‘dark’ and jail-like this future might be, while at the same time upending that narrative. The present high-energy urban modernist world involves many jails of its own, while ‘dark ages’ aren’t always as dark as they’re made out to be. I’m glad that some writers and thinkers who I respect very much and who have written endorsements for the book have identified its positivity, the lights it seeks, despite the overall sombreness.

The book is a mix of history, autobiography, social science and creative fiction. It addresses some criticisms of my previous two books and tries to push the analyses from them forward and flesh out the future visioning a bit. It’s probably the easiest read of the trilogy, although it still has its social science-y parts. What it doesn’t do is predict or explain how people are going to ‘solve’ present problems. This is a criticism that sometimes comes my way, but I believe it’s one that misunderstands the role of the writer or critic. As I wrote in an earlier post “The best a writer can do, if they feel called to write, is to use words to draw attention to things that command responses beyond words, models or ‘solutions’.” I stand by that. Writers tend to overestimate their powers.

I was nervous about the reaction when my previous two books came out. I’m not feeling quite so nervous this time around. Maybe it’s because I’m more of an old dog now, or – same thing, really – because I’m no longer so bothered by angry fusillades. If people find things they like in the book or things they’d like to debate constructively, that’s great. For others, I wish them a pleasant route of their own into the new dark age that’s upon us. I only hope my book contributes to the appreciation that a new dark age, in the many meanings of the term, is upon us, and this needs to be the baseline for plotting the most congenial routes into the future.