The Small Farm Future Blog

An arc of future Earth

Posted on March 11, 2026 | No Comments

Continuing my stately progress through my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, we come next to the Introduction, entitled ‘An Arc of Future Earth’. But first a couple of quick housekeeping notices. Apologies to a couple of commenters whose comments sat for a long while in the moderation queue without me noticing, now approved. I seem to have become increasingly bad at noticing queued comments, replying to emails etc which certainly isn’t through any intention to ignore people. Please accept my past and future apologies for this. I won’t take offence at gentle reminders.

A heads up that I spoke with Adam Greenfield, author of the interesting book Lifehouse that I’ve previously discussed here and in my new book, on his Lifepod podcast. You can keep up to date with podcasts and articles outside of my usual blog on my publications page here.

Talking of my usual blog, I’m a bit up against it in finding the time to write it for various reasons, not least my growing tendency to go AWOL whenever I can. As the world gets increasingly crazy for reasons long charted here, and as I approach semi-retirement, I find myself slowly less inclined toward online commentary. One of the few ways I still find peace is in the mountains, which is where I was last week – seeing several eagles over fells in Torridon and Assynt, to link to the Seeress’s Prophecy that I mentioned in my previous post. As with the seeress, a portent for the future perhaps – but what kind?

Anyway, let’s get into an arc of future Earth, as promised. A version of the book that I had in mind at the planning stage was a deeper description of a future England of the kind that makes an appearance in the Introduction and Chapter 12. But publishing nowadays generally pivots more internationally, and in any case the book became a hybrid with several strands or themes. Hence, I came up with the idea of present and future satellite flights, an arc over the earth from the western USA to western Europe (which encompasses the locations of most of my readers) in order to anticipate the key themes of the book.

To list those themes briefly here, the first was water. Contemporary progress narratives trumpet our human ability to find superior and less ecocidal substitutes for older technologies and resources. These claims are often exaggerated, but people haven’t come up with many suggestions for alternatives to water – except possibly via the sleight of hand in using a lot of energy to move it from where it is to where people want it to be. Ultimately I think the human population will rearrange its current distribution to conform more closely to where the water is in the first place, as implied in this section of the book. I get more pushback against my view that current population distributions in urban (and arid) areas will have to change in the future than almost anything else I say, but I consider this less an argument with me than an argument with the sun, the climate and the Earth’s hydrology that the people making it are ultimately going to lose. So it seems to me unlikely that the population of, say, Los Angeles will continue at its present circa 4 million long into the future. My arc of future Earth was intended to prompt thinking about such things.

More briefly, other themes I broached in the introduction were export agriculture and its uncertain future, the nature of human economic connections and frontiers, and the extreme political centralisation of modern times in the form of national governments which we hardly notice because we so take them for granted. How is this centralisation maintained? What is its future, and what are the alternatives? All things I discuss in the book.

The arc of future Earth section also pointed to human land use choices and necessities: woodland, grassland, cropland and gardens. How are these distributed and why like this? What are the alternatives? What happens if/when they collapse? Ah yes, collapse. Another important theme in the book.

Climate change and energy constraint also feature in the introduction. I address the point that some people don’t think climate change is happening, seeing it as a ruse by centralised governments to buttress their power. We can be confident that centralised governments can and do use any eventuality to buttress their power, and climate change is no different in this respect. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

It does mean, though, that it’s wise to be sceptical about most of the highfaluting techno-fixes for climate change that we’re promised will keep the business as usual show on the road. In the concluding section of the chapter (‘The Hero Is You’) I argue against the hero-worship we direct toward scientists, engineers, great thinkers and doers, visionary politicians and thought leaders who propound our modern myths of progress and solutionism. The corollary of this are neo-Malthusian views that without contemporary scientific and corporate agriculture people would starve. A lot of people certainly would starve if these kinds of agriculture rapidly disintegrated, which could easily happen – but they’d starve because these kinds of agriculture have razed other kinds to the ground and made themselves the only game in town. I argue in the book that we have to start trying to be the heroes of our own stories – individually, in families and households, in local communities – by rebuilding alternative bases of livelihood and wellbeing.

I don’t think anything is more important than challenging the notion that ‘they’ will solve the current poly-crisis and keep people safe and fed via existing and new technologies, economic policies and political negotiation. They won’t. It’s time for ordinary people to try to do it for themselves.