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 September 4, 2026 | 10 Comments
Following my obituary for The Land magazine in my previous post I’d intended to publish in this next one my article on landlordism that appeared in the final issue. Instead, it turns out that another obituary takes precedence – in this case for Wendell Berry, who died last Sunday. There are others better placed than me to give a proper account of his life and work. Here, I’ll just make a few personal remarks which I hope might serve, however inadequately, as an act of remembrance. I became an adult in the 1980s, at least in the quantitative sense of …
Continue readingPosted on August 24, 2026 | 6 Comments
Just a short post to mark the passing of the great Land magazine, which has shut up shop with its 37th issue this summer. What can I say about it? For almost as many years as I’ve been following a more land-based way of life, The Land has been a guiding light for so many of the issues that matter to me – low-impact living and farming, access to land, poverty and inequality, climate change, nature and biodiversity, and the machinations of the anti-human and anti-nature juggernaut of the present global political economy. On all these issues, I often feel …
Continue readingPosted on August 16, 2026 | 39 Comments
A few further thoughts in this post on the matter of the state – what it is, what its past and future involves, and what does it mean to live within the jurisdiction of a singular state (‘the state I’m in’)? – arising out of discussions under my last post. But first, to go with the wordplay of my title, something a bit more autobiographical about my personal state. Which is, for one thing, quite busy with some other writing and life projects, so posts here are likely to be sporadic at best in the near future, although I hope …
Continue readingPosted 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 – …
Continue readingPosted on July 9, 2026 | 79 Comments
Every year I take a look at the annual energy data published toward the end of June by the Energy Institute in order to ask the big question: Has the energy transition that everyone keeps talking about actually started yet? So far, the answer has always been no. Every year since 1983, total global fossil fuel supply has increased, apart from in 2009 (financial crisis) and 2020 (Covid), when the entire energy system nosedived in relation to those crises before rebooting to the status quo ante. And so we come to the recently published 2025 figures, where the answer is …
Continue readingPosted on June 30, 2026 | 26 Comments
This week sees a more personal anniversary for me than the Brexit celebrations/recriminations last time: it’s three years since I published my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. In it, I criticised the idea that factory-produced bacterial food could be a realistic and significant ‘farm free’ alternative to food from agricultural land, as touted by George Monbiot in his book about the food system, Regenesis. I also criticised various other aspects of George’s takes on the food system, and briefly set out an agrarian localist alternative – not, for the most part, a vision I especially want to see, …
Continue readingPosted on June 14, 2026 | 14 Comments
There are a few anniversaries in the air at the moment. The one that looms in British politics is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, which was held on 23 June 2016. I daresay the media will soon be full of opinion pieces about it, so I thought I’d get mine in early and move on. It would be possible to write at great length about the numerous ins and outs of the Brexit process over this last decade. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog – a weekly compendium of heavyweight political …
Continue readingPosted on June 8, 2026 | 25 Comments
In this post I reflect on the main things I think will be necessary for ‘surviving the future’, to channel David Fleming. The post was prompted by comments under my last one, especially ones by Kathryn, Steve C and Walter. I was going to write my own comment underneath in reply, but I thought it warranted a somewhat lengthier treatment. At a high level of generality, I’d suggest on the back of those comments that fundamentally people need to attend to four things in navigating the collapse of our present high-energy, stable-climate, urban-industrial edifice: Skills of practical livelihood-making Physical capital …
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