Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
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 July 31, 2026 | 5 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 …
Continue readingPosted on May 27, 2026 | 30 Comments
Sorry I’ve been so silent here of late. I’ve got a lot of work on various fronts, some of which I may mention here soon, which is keeping me from blogging. But if there’s a Small Farm Future/Dark Age Light hole in your life, do listen in to this Crazy Town podcast I did with Jason Bradford, which was quite a fun conversation. Despite my busy-ness I must confess that I did take a brief holiday in the Scottish Highlands – partly to visit my son who lives there and partly to hike in the mountains, which is something I …
Continue readingPosted on April 22, 2026 | 68 Comments
Apologies that I’m not finding much time at the moment to write new blog posts, a situation that will probably continue for a while. Well, here’s one anyway, chiselled out from a couple of hours of idling on the internet recently and trying to catch up on world news by triangulating rather unoriginally between the BBC, Al Jazeera, the London Review of Books and The Guardian. And if triangulating between four sources sounds odd, believe me it’s not as odd as some of the things in the news they’re reporting on. Here, I’m going to make reference to one particular …
Continue readingPosted on March 21, 2026 | 127 Comments
Diverting briefly from my blog cycle about my recent book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, here I’m going to continue my polite discussion with Tom Murphy about the human condition past, present and future – and, more specifically, about the place of foraging (gathering and hunting) vis-à-vis farming in it. My thanks to Tom for the discussion, which has helped clarify my thinking. I’m still wrestling with the issues, though, and I think Tom makes a lot of good points. For info, I’m going to be offline during the coming week, but I’ll aim to reply to any comments here …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS