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 | 18 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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Regarding supernovas Vs solar systems…
One thing that gives me some hope here is that present-day authoritarian war states appear to be operating under the assumption that efficiency and centralisation of power is the way forward. This has been roughly the case for a while because of so-called economies of scale — but where those economies of scale are actually economies of extraction, particularly extraction of fossil energy, they are pretty fragile.
The same way a village of small diverse farms with a decent amount of horticulture is more resilient than one huge financialised industrial cereal monoculture, a network of smaller groups for governance is more resilient than an authoritarian war state. Distributed microgeneration of electricity using small solar and wind is more resilient to extreme weather events (or warfare, for that matter) than massive hydroelectric projects, nuclear power plants, or even huge offshore wind farms. Localised manufacturing processes might mean people don’t have access to the bewildering plenty of global material culture but also that they know who to go to to get their boots mended… I am not quite saying that if we tend to the local and the small, the big picture will take care of itself, because that’s not always the case. But I think to get anywhere from here we need to tend to the local and small a lot more than we do at present.
The knack, I think, is to tend your small local garden (or artisanal workshop or whatever) and engage in mutually beneficial relationships of trade and solidarity with a network of like-minded others, while not allowing that garden to be captured by brittle authoritarian entities (I am at least as concerned about the corporation as the state, here). And not everyone in every place will succeed at that — enclosure and extraction are in the historical record from long before fossil fuels came along — but the more of us give it a try, the more chance of multiple refugia existing, from which the landscape can be renewed after whatever kind of apocalypse happens.
a network of smaller groups for governance is more resilient than an authoritarian war state.
Yes it is, but an authoritarian war state is far more capable of projecting power (at least as long as energy is available), despite its lack of resilience. This is why smaller groups must either remain invisible to the state or be seen as totally irrelevant and harmless.
This power dynamic is consistent regardless of scale, so it is very unlikely that there will ever be a transformational mass movement to dismantle industrial nation-states and implement a small farm future. Add to this the problem of what to do with city populations and the status quo has indisputable status.
Small farmers just have to keep their heads down, avoid any confrontation with power, and wait until industrial modernity collapses. As you nicely put it, “tend your small local garden”. And wait.
Industrial nation-states are pretty new; cities are older but not at the population concentrations we see now.
Extraction and oppression both pre-date industrial modernity, of course, but it seems to me that the surveillance state in particular (or maybe just the data-collection heavy state, or surveillance corporatism, or something…) makes it much harder to get away and try your luck elsewhere if things are really bad.
However, my point was mostly that current authoritarian war states are based on energy abundance derived from fossil fuels, as well as partially incorrect understanding of how economies of scale work, and this has implications for how long we might spend in supernova vs solar system patterns as Chris describes them.
From my point of view the dichotomy of supernovas vs solar system states is not sufficient and does not capture the array of future state forms.
The state is not bound to capitalism and growth, even it adapted to it easily in last 70 years in north west and 35 years in post socialistic countries. The state can and I believe will pivot to some other form when it will hit limits of this and it may not mean less control of its land and people. We got used to the idea that states do not demand anything from citizens except of taxes, but that is also historically pretty new, and it can change fast as can be seen in Ukraine or China.
Even when there will be not enough resources for growth, the state power needs much less of them to exercise control and distribute the scarce resources for the loyal ones.
When some absolute scarcity of resources will come, there will be big and fast shift to another form of distribution, as capitalism and markets are not prepared for that, they operate on the assumption all is solved by price.
So I envision a state working on internal control and preservation of itself rather through more control of its territory and resources then weakening state and it does not need to mean any external expansion.
It really depends so much what the energy availability will there be in future in specific places as I fully believe it is the real physical world that drives a lot of the social and human above it.
Also the state will have much easier work controlling the citizens as historically it was those who can live without dependence, ie. those producing their own food, who were most resilient against state pressure.
I don’t think of supernovas Vs solar systems as a strict binary where something must be one or the other, and depending where you live it might not always be possible to tell the difference.
Many of our modern nation states only emerged in modernity, though. What we now think of as Italy or Poland or Canada or India did not have the same governance structure in pre-modern times.
This doesn’t mean states will disappear, of course. But it is worth thinking about how they might change with the changing conditions.
Hi Kathryn,
yes, it is not strict binary and it is not even some opposite sides of some scale, and from that reason we need to bring out the other possibilities also. Mainly if they are qualitativelly different from those two.
WIth Poland and Italy you need to go quite far to history not to call them some form of state, we may have some argument if this state can be called national state, but it does not matter for the ordinary citizens. Because I believe in those places we have something like 1000-1500 years of state control which is pretty enough to get settled.
Also some things are harder to undo then to get established, so the fact that in some places there were no national states in pre-modern times is from my point of view no argument that in such places it would be easier to undo the national states now.
I just want to challenge something I see as mainly US and UK idea that the state is raising from the will of the citizens and it is there to serve them. And that the citizens has some inherent say to the fact how the state will work and how it will be governed.
I believe there can be oppresive state controlling the citizens without providing anything.
Thanks Hynek,
Yes, that’s very much how I see governments, generally.
There is ample evidence that ordinary people can and do organize their affairs amongst themselves as they see fit when there is no government forcing them. Up to a certain size of society, that is.
My idea is that when a society expands beyond some critical size, the urge to concentrate power becomes large enough that it is very hard to prevent some greedy, forceful faction from taking that power to themselves. Unfortunately, nearly all of our societies have been in this condition for a very long time, so almost everyone thinks this is normal.
So when some revolution or something happens, and the tyrants cede a small bit of power back to the people, they all see it as ‘liberation’.
But if some of us manage to keep alive the idea of small scale self-organization, then maybe there will be more possibilities when the current regime slowly gets crushed by its own excesses.
Some folks here may not be aware of Mother Pelican, one of the best anthologies of writers covering collapse and the human predicament. Link to the latest issue:
https://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv22n08page1.html
Ugo Bardi and Bill Rees articles were especially interesting to me.
Many thanks for this, Joe.
The recent article by Ugo Bardi, which Joe Clarkson mentioned here, is titled “How Many People Can Live on Earth?”.
Bardi concluded that if humans ate nothing but PV-powered manufactured food, the Earth could theoretically support a human population of up to (roughly) 1.5 trillion!
I posted my critique of that claim elsewhere, as a comment related to “Saying NO…” and manufactured food.
https://chrissmaje.com/2024/08/newsflash-no-2-manufactured-food-update/#comment-269739
One of the problems bardi fails to take into account .
http://www.zerohedge.com/energy/diesel-epicenter-supply-squeeze-goldman
I was so surprised by this article from him, because in the other writings from him, he was pretty reasonable.
I am not sure if this was some theoretical exercise.
But he has some pretty scary data there, regarding the electricity needs of this, where you basically find out that you need 30 kWh per person every day of the year.
We have nice big solar panel system on whole big barn roof, 15 kW peek, which is able to support our electricity needs in off grid mode for 9 month a year, including charging of two small electric cars and they consume a lot of electricity. If we restrict ourselves a little we can run our farm (with 4 chest freezers full of our own produced food) off grid for whole year with this.
But we got only 68kWh generated on summer day with full day of sunshine last week.
That means only 2 persons fed for that day and we are family of 6. And it is near the peek day of generation.
So it may give sense on paper, but definitely not in physical world.
And I am not sure if his 30 kWh number includes all the stainless steel needed and also not sure if being fed like this is fine long term.
As calculated in another comment (https://chrissmaje.com/2024/08/newsflash-no-2-manufactured-food-update/#comment-269739),
the 2.8 kWh daily energy (caloric) requirement for one human, multiplied by 365 days in a year, can be met by either of these options (with the assumption that microbial biomass eaten in bulk is as safe and digestible as farmed food, which doesn’t seem to be the case):
(1) Approx. 100 m2 of PV solar farm, dedicated year-round to powering a factory making microbial biomass for human food (not including the additional energy required for manufacturing the stainless steel, concrete, aluminum, etc., for the manufactured food factory and solar panel materials and manufacturing facilities, and their eventual replacement, etc.)
Or…
(2) Approx. 200 m2 of sugar beet crop on a farm (with only the worldwide average yield per hectare).
This is far from the order of magnitude (10x) difference in land usage claimed by Ugo Bardi.
It also depends on what governments decide to do with the manufactured food mass medication becomes easy and Orwellian
https://slaynews.com/uk-government-miscarriage-inducing-drug-food-supply-greater-good/
” The UK Government will begin adding a drug to the nation’s flour that is known to trigger miscarriages in pregnant women, arguing that it’s necessary for the “greater good,” exposing tens of millions of people to the substance through everyday foods, regardless of whether they want it.”
Thanks for the comments, links etc. I possibly sold myself a bit short with the binary in my Chapter 3 description above between ‘supernovas’ and ‘solar systems’. I agree that these certainly don’t exhaust the possibilities for state forms, and in the book itself I go into this in quite a bit more detail at several points. Perhaps I’ll write more about this in another post. I want to avoid the notion cherished by a lot of contemporary people that either we have something like a contemporary bureaucratic fossil-fuelled welfare-capitalist state, or else serfdom or chaotic violence. It’d be great to be having public discussions about the shape of future state forms without making these assumptions – it’s not really happening at the moment, so partly I just want to float some generalised ways of thinking about it that might help.
Most of the regular commenters here seem broadly agreed that existing mainstream political forms are time limited, that a small farm future of some kind beckons, and that there’s no plausible easy route between the two. Hence, the relevance of Joe’s point about small farmers ‘keeping their heads down’. This can manifest in different ways. One of my points of difference with Tom Murphy in our recent debate is that Tom seems to think that once a state centre has crystallised, the only story to be told is the binary between the politically powerful and the weak. I think this is a big mistake.
On the subject of governance today’s disappointment is that 61% of Yale students don’t know about the US constitution or why we have just had the 250’th anniversary of independence , these are supposedly the smart ones , tomorrow’s leaders , I fear for the future , I very much doubt that Tik Tok could run a country .
Just over a century ago our local blacksmith taught junior bible class in Greek and Latin , quite a difference the level of education leaves something to be desired !
I have also been watching the Oxford union debates , seems I have lived in the golden age between war and morons .
Some thoughts and passionate posting here from a Carpathian shepherd in the Ukraine, which might appeal to some SFF readers:
https://michelcarpathian.substack.com/
An exceedingly dehydrated summer here in Hungary, more from lack of rain than superheated summer temps. Throw in a drying breeze here and there. Walnuts looking good, though, and also plums. Something always comes through.
Useful blog to read alongside this one …
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/civilizations-fall-when-this-mechanism/comments