Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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I’ve been blogging about farming, ecology and politics since 2012. I welcome well-tempered discussion. Please note that if you’re a new commenter, or if you include a lot of links, your comment will go into the moderation queue before publication. I sometimes miss comments in the queue so feel free to nudge me via the Contact Form if your comment fails to appear.
Posted on March 11, 2026 | 24 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 …
Continue readingPosted on February 16, 2026 | 26 Comments
It’s about time I wrote some posts about my recently published book Finding Lights in a Dark Age. There are twelve chapters in the book plus a preface, introduction and afterward, so my intention is to write fifteen posts about the book in all, one for each of these segments. And, as a bonus, one about the bibliography too. I also have a few other posts up my sleeve, including one about my ongoing debate with Tom Murphy, so there will doubtless be some interspersing. Apologies however that the blog posts are only trickling out these days – a slow …
Continue readingPosted on January 27, 2026 | 83 Comments
Part of me thinks I should be writing about the US government and its current dramas. Venezuela. Greenland. Minneapolis. But instead I’ll hold off from the hot takes and go to the other end of the spectrum with a post about long-range human history. As previously trailed on this blog, I’ve recently been having some interesting discussions on this topic with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the informative Do the Math blog. Here, I’ll try to give a flavour. So… whereas those of an ecomodernist bent tend to locate the source of human happiness in recent times – all humanity …
Continue readingPosted on January 13, 2026 | 81 Comments
Happy new(ish) year. As hinted by the second part of my title, this post isn’t a two-part retrospective on the Beatles, with a follow-up on John and Ringo. Instead, it’s mostly a sort-of review of Paul Kingsnorth’s recent book Against the Machine (henceforth ATM). But while thinking about Paul Kingsnorth, I find it hard not to think also about George Monbiot – sometime friends and fellow travellers in the broadly left-wing environmentalist movement whose intellectual, political and spiritual journeys have now diverged sharply. Also, arguably the two most prominent contemporary English writers on the conjunction of politics, nature and society. …
Continue readingPosted on December 22, 2025 | 52 Comments
I said my next post would cover my discussions with Tom Murphy, but I’m afraid time has caught up with me and I’m going to sign off for the year with this more general offering involving snippets from here and there. I promise that I’ll get to the Tom Murphy discussion early next year. There have been a few other promised posts I’m yet to deliver on too. I’m feeling the stress of next year’s blogging already. Ah well, I did manage to put out twenty-six posts in 2025 (or a round twenty-five if you exclude Eric F’s guest post). …
Continue readingPosted on December 7, 2025 | 57 Comments
I’ve been having an interesting offline debate recently with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the excellent Do the Math blog. I’ll write about it in my next post. In essence, Tom is more certain than I am that human agricultural civilization is a busted flush. Since I generally get it in the neck for my doominess on this point, it’s nice to be in discussion with someone who’s further down that line – especially when it’s as interesting and friendly as the one I’ve had with Tom. But in this post I’m going to mention a different interlocutor – one …
Continue readingPosted on November 11, 2025 | 60 Comments
To coincide with the US publication today of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I think it’s time to start writing some blog posts about it. I have a bit of unfinished business in relation to other projected posts, but hopefully I can sweep them up somewhere along the way. It’s going to be a slow tick over, though, because I don’t currently have much capacity to turn out blog posts at speed. I’ll begin by linking something I mention at the very start of the book with something I mention at the very end. At the …
Continue readingPosted on October 23, 2025 | 134 Comments
A brief note here on a topic that’s been in the news lately – namely, the news. Or, more specifically, the so-called ‘legacy media’ such as national newspapers and television. And, alongside that, declining literacy and book-reading, which is obviously of great personal concern to me as the author of a recently published book, as well as a watcher of historical change. Also, religion. Let me explain. Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is a touchstone work on, well, nationalism, that religion of modern times. One of his arguments is that literate …
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