Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
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 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 …
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 reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS