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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on March 16, 2023 | 106 Comments
Here, I’m going to continue the discussion of the supersedure state from my last post, focusing on the Welsh perspective developed by Carwyn Graves in his excellent review of my book, A Small Farm Future. I should have done this a long time ago, but it’s taken me this long to blog my way to the part of the book that’s most relevant to his review, particularly the critical aspects of it. To over-generalize about those critical aspects, Carwyn’s main objection is my tendency towards over-generalization. Small farm futures, he rightly says, are going to be locally specific, will look …
Continue readingPosted on March 8, 2023 | 59 Comments
It’s time to get stuck into the final few posts of this blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future. At long last, we’ve now reached the fourth and final part of the book, ‘Towards a small farm future’. Probably the most important idea that I try to develop in this part of the book is what I call ‘the supersedure state’. I don’t plan to go over the same ground here as in the book, but here’s a quick overview. Most mainstream positions across the political spectrum are invested in getting control of the modern, centralized, bureaucratic nation-state …
Continue readingPosted on February 27, 2023 | 24 Comments
Time to fire up my blogging machine again – but let me know if you think the small farm future bot that Clem’s being trialling does a better job than me. If so, I’ll be able to save myself some time, close this site down and devote myself to another worthy enterprise that no doubt will also soon be obliterated by the march of the robots. At least until they run out of gas. But for the time being I’ll press on with a few news items and a roadmap for this blog’s short-term future. So, all being well my …
Continue readingPosted on February 9, 2023 | 32 Comments
I’m in the final manic editing phase of my little book, and if I don’t get a post out now it won’t happen for a while. So coming right up is my review of Peter Zeihan’s recent book, as per the title of this post. I wrote it a while back and had planned to edit it a bit, but I don’t have the luxury of time for that just now. However, I hope to see readers of thsi blog soon on the other side of my book project. In the meantime, feel free to listen to me talking small …
Continue readingPosted on January 31, 2023 | 16 Comments
I’m still a little too deep in book-writing mode to resume normal service on this blog, but hopefully things will start to open up soon. On the subject of my book writing, I’ve just taken delivery of the Czech translation of A Small Farm Future – a handsome looking volume, as you can see. My sincere thanks to Alena Souskova and Hynek Hruska for undertaking the hard work of making it happen. Small Farm Future goes multilingual! In relation to the interesting discussion under my previous post, it’s probably not too much of a bombshell to reveal that my new …
Continue readingPosted on January 13, 2023 | 15 Comments
Just thought I’d make a brief appearance here to wish Small Farm Future readers a happy new year, and to thank those of you who kindly contributed to the Small Farm Future Christmas appeal. Also, my thanks to Simon for publicizing that I was speaking on a panel at the Oxford Real Farming Conference with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Manish Jain and Mika Tsutsumi. Apologies I didn’t do a better job of publicizing it here myself. In the event my contribution was a bit underwhelming. I was acting as a discussant for the fine new Planet Local film – we’d just got …
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