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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on December 24, 2022 | 5 Comments
Time for a final, brief, seasonal blog post of the year. Well, the Small Farm Future year began with our 10th anniversary blog post, before getting down to business with more blogging our way through Small Farm Future: the book. There were a couple of interruptions. Our editor-at-large Chris Smaje made an appearance at City of London Magistrates Court for protesting government climate inaction. The unwavering brilliance of his self-defence was matched only by the unwavering indifference of the magistrates. But he remains at large, and editing. With the government’s new police bill now on the statute book, giving the …
Continue readingPosted on November 28, 2022 | 41 Comments
Here’s the final instalment in my series on health and welfare in a small farm future.This one started life as a draft book chapter, subsequently unpublished, and is herewith being put out to grass unamended as a blog post. Let me know if you’d like a full citation for any of the references at the end. As previously related, I’m currently hard at work on a small writing project, so please forgive me if my activity on this blog takes a downturn over the next couple of months. As proverbially social animals, humans look to each other for support through …
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