Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on July 31, 2026 | No Comments
Apologies for my slow turnover of blog posts here, which is likely to be ongoing.
I’d planned to do a blog cycle about my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, published by Chelsea Green last year, but somehow I’ve run out of steam for it and the moment seems to have passed. Instead, I’ve provided below one-sentence summaries of each chapter in the book (bear in mind that I incline to writing very long sentences, as those who edit my writing will ruefully attest). I hope my summaries won’t be taken too seriously – books defy summary, and I could have written entirely different ones. The main point of them is to act as a kind of invitation into conversation. If those who’ve read the book want to raise anything about what I say in it, or the wider implications, this is the place – feel free to use the comments section below, and I’ll do my best to respond.
Obviously, the summaries below are no substitute for reading the actual book, which you should absolutely buy.
In the old days there was a lot of predatory violence, especially after shocks to existing social/political systems, and that’s true of the present too (we’ve just got good at concealing it) – more shocks are coming and we won’t be able to dodge them, but we might find some ways to respond that are better than others, and some moments of reprieve.
It’s best not to expect the present human terraforming of the earth to continue long into the future – population concentrated in cities which have poor local resources to support such densities, sparsely-populated major agricultural zones with fossil-intensive agricultures acting as global breadbaskets, waterscapes involving drawdown of aquifers and major geoengineering of flow, powerful political centres etc.
All major currents of contemporary politics are oriented toward that existing terraforming and are ill-suited to the challenge of reconstructing human society in resilient and renewable ways – so a dark age is coming and this is terrible news that shouldn’t be downplayed or avoided, but nevertheless it could conceivably lead to slightly less terrible outcomes than may seem likely on the face of it.
…or it may not – a lot depends on what political structures arise as the present geopolitical order breaks down: at one extreme, ‘supernovas’ (aggressively expansionary authoritarian war states), at another, ‘solar systems’ (weakening state centres permitting local autonomies in their peripheries) … let’s hope for and work toward the latter.
Historically, ordinary people tend to vote with their feet, seeking out places that give them the best hope of living peaceful and prosperous lives, including the availability of land or employment to create livelihood, and the availability of less repressive or discriminatory political regimes – in the future, this ‘open country’ is unlikely to correspond to existing settlement patterns … its exact shape is impossible to predict, but it’s likely to involve more dispersed and rural settlement patterns than is typical today, especially in the rich countries of the Global North.
It’s likely that the basic unit of production in a low-energy, more rural future will be the small, co-residential household, producing substantially for its own needs, albeit set within wider cooperative structures, such as commons.
…and it’s likely that the basic unit of social connection within these households will be kinship, or family – a world primarily, though not exclusively, of mothers, fathers and their children – albeit the way this kin relatedness is organised can and will take many forms.
The main form of land tenure in such societies is distributed private household ownership – an entirely different beast to concentrated corporate or governmental ownership; contrary to popular belief, this kind of private ownership is ubiquitous in historical farm societies … the main challenge is how to keep it distributed and prevent it falling into ever fewer hands over time.
…this challenge, however, won’t present itself mainly in the form of different interest groups trying to press their claims on the levers of state power, as at present – in the dark age future, it will often manifest in terms of direct conflict and/or negotiation between people and social groups/classes where state power is weak … much will depend on the complicated and sometimes conflicting loyalties and motivations of the various people and groups in play locally, in ways that contemporary political theory barely addresses.
There’s an imbalance in the present workforce (and its remuneration) between people who produce tangible human value (for example, farmers, builders, manufacturers, teachers, health and human service providers) and those who produce abstract human value (for example, bankers, corporate lawyers) – this needs to be corrected, and in the future it probably will be, although unfortunately not in a careful way that minimises damage and maximises general benefit, but out of system shocks and general social crisis.
More markets and less of ‘the market’; more guilds and fewer trade unions; more local trade, and less global trade; more carnival and less disciplined, automaton-like work – this is the best we can hope for in a new dark age, so we better try to shape it now.
I mentioned in Chapter 1 that contemporary political thinking is ill-suited to the challenges of the present moment – we could do worse than reconstructing for present times older political traditions that are better able to meet those challenges, such as civic republicanism, natural law and agrarian populism.
Stop trying to solve problems by political edicts from the ‘top’ or ‘centre’, which isn’t going to work anymore – understand that democratic politics has now become comic (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer, Vote Leave, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Count Binface, Nigel Farage, Volodymyr Zelensky), although comedy can often be a serious matter … also, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.
Around 2100AD, my alter ego escapes from London and seeks salvation here in Somerset – you wouldn’t believe some of the things he sees!
There’s a kind of fury in the modern world to improve, perfect, solve, revolutionize and transcend – ultimately this stems from a fear of death and suffering, but ironically it only amplifies those outcomes … it’s better to be humble, to produce tangible human values while we live, to honour true gods instead of false human ones, and then to die joyously. Amen.
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