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 June 26, 2023 | 33 Comments
UK publication day is nigh for my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods. I’ll be blogging about it here over the next couple of months and as ever welcome constructive debate. I’m unlikely to be debating it on Twitter, because I find it a terrible platform for meaningful discussion, so if you’re landing here from Twitter this post is where to place your comments about the book. Unless it’s about a specific issue that I’ll deal with in a later post, I’ll do my best to reply …
Continue readingPosted on June 17, 2023 | 14 Comments
Time for a quick update on climate protest from your correspondent somewhere quite a long way behind the frontline, but still closer than you’ll read in the average news report. Then I’m going to bring it all back home before relating it to the present concerns of this blog around my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. So for starters, I’ve got to say that the British government has played a blinder in containing and derailing climate protest in these isles. If only it had displayed the same level of competence in, like, every single other area of …
Continue readingPosted on June 11, 2023 | 60 Comments
Mostly some news items and a bit of housekeeping in this post, rather than any substantive topic, before getting back to business next time. First, in relation to my poll about a possible trip to the USA, the crude data fell out this way – 1st place: Go, with qualifications 2nd place: Just go 3rd place: Just don’t go And the result, after some data smoothing and correction (including my instinctive tendency to favour the underdog) is that I’m not going to go. I won’t bore you with the details of my decision-making process, except to say that one factor …
Continue readingPosted on June 4, 2023 | 132 Comments
The shape of human civilization in the future will depend a lot on how we manage the global energy economy over the next few decades. I think the most likely scenario is that we’ll carry on using a lot of fossil fuels, which will create climate chaos and therefore civilizational chaos. The likeliest path out of that will be agrarian localism or a small farm future, because in most places most other choices will have been foreclosed. Another possible scenario is that globally we’ll find some way to pull back from the present brink of climate chaos politically, and cut …
Continue readingPosted on May 30, 2023 | 23 Comments
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism. If it does, obviously that’s fine. It’s a polemical sort of book, so counterargument is only to be expected. But my hope is for thoughtful, engaged counterargument that’s worth discussing, and not the kind of dumbass dismissals of agrarian localism that are all too common (I’ve already seen a couple online in relation to my book, even though it’s not yet published). Now, I’ve been writing about this topic for quite …
Continue readingPosted on May 26, 2023 | 59 Comments
The UK publication date for my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future is a month away. You’ll have to wait a little longer in the US, but you can get your pre-orders in here (UK) or here (USA). In any case, it’s time I turned my attention on this blog to heralding the forthcoming event. I’m not planning such a huge blogathon around this book as the last one, but I think it’s appropriate to focus this blog around its themes for a little while. Apologies for leaving things hanging in relation to the promised follow ups to my …
Continue readingPosted on May 14, 2023 | 91 Comments
The impending publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, along with … y’know … the need for me to say yes to my non-farm-free present, is beginning to impose itself upon my time, so I may have to hold off on new blog content here for two or three weeks. Rest assured that I’ll be getting back to Bakhtin and his implications for contemporary politics soon. I’m also in the process of upgrading this site – more on that soon too. In other news, there’s a possibility that I might travel to the US of A in …
Continue readingPosted on May 6, 2023 | 36 Comments
I recently reread Mikhail Bakhtin’s mind-blowing book Rabelais and His World. On the face of it, a book about the fantastical literary imaginings of a 16th century writer by a long-dead philosopher from Soviet Russia probably shouldn’t loom too large in the reading list of a contemporary blogger writing about farming, ecology and politics. And yet. Here, I’m going to lay down a few waymarks, and come back to them in future posts. François Rabelais (d.1553) was, in more ways than one, a Renaissance man who along with Cervantes and Shakespeare pioneered modern literary culture. But – a key point, …
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