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 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, …
Continue readingPosted on April 28, 2023 | 46 Comments
A few remarks in this post arising from an episode of Nate Hagen’s always interesting ‘Great Simplification’ podcast, in this instance with chemical engineer and hydrogen expert Paul Martin. A key message I took from Martin’s remarks is that hydrogen has various important uses as an industrial chemical – principally for agricultural fertiliser – but is pretty much a non-starter as the currency of a future green industrial energy economy, for various reasons connected with its energetic, physical and chemical properties. While hydrogen is being talked up as a potential solution for decarbonizing industry, in Martin’s view it’s less a …
Continue readingPosted on April 20, 2023 | 29 Comments
The time has come to announce my new book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods. It’ll be published in the UK on 29 June and the US on 20 July, with ebook and audio versions also available. So there’s no excuse… I’m delighted that Sarah Langford, the author of Rooted, is writing a foreword for it. The folks at Chelsea Green have come up with this attractive but unfancy cover, which matches my feelings about the book. I wrote the book in a two-month blur as a job of …
Continue readingPosted on April 12, 2023 | 6 Comments
The clock is running down on the time available to blog about my book A Small Farm Future, so I’m going to close the, ahem, book on it in this post with some brief remarks about the last two chapters in it, respectively titled ‘Dispossessions’ and ‘Does Goldman Sachs care if you raise chickens?’ Starting with the last first, the answer to that question is: no they don’t but do it anyway. The Goldman Sachs phrasing came from a Marxist author critiquing the political traction of the localist and neo-agrarian movement. And the later part of my book is among …
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