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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on April 6, 2023 | 22 Comments
Time to move on to a brief discussion of Chapter 19 of my book A Small Farm Future in this blog cycle. The chapter is called ‘Reconstituted peasantries’, which derives from a chapter in another book, Caribbean Transformations, by the late Sidney Mintz, an anthropologist who was one of my teachers during my brief and ill-fated sojourn at graduate school in the US. I wrote an obituary of Sid a few years back, and what I said in it in some ways formed the basis of Chapter 19, so I’m kind of retracing old ground here. But I think it …
Continue readingPosted on March 26, 2023 | 81 Comments
Continuing the final descent of this blog cycle to finishing its discussion of A Small Farm Future, Chapter 18 of my bookis called ‘From nations to republics’. I hope to say more on this theme in the future, but for now just a few words here on this chapter. Nationalism has been much the most successful of political projects worldwide over the last couple of centuries, and a major employer of politicians, writers, historians, cartographers, soldiers, bureaucrats, priests, academics, architects, policy wonks and others whose work has helped build the story that the modern political power emanating territorially to the …
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