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 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in my series on health and welfare in a small farm future.This one started life as a draft book chapter, subsequently unpublished, and is herewith being put out to grass unamended as a blog post.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 …
Continue readingPosted on November 12, 2022 | 69 Comments
Just a quick info interlude before I post the final instalment of my present mini-series on health and welfare in a small farm future, probably on Monday. Mostly, I want to alert you to the fact that Steve L – a much valued member of the Small Farm Future community – has consolidated his analyses of the case for manufactured foods into a supremely informative document, which I’ve posted on the Research page – available here. I haven’t fully got my head around it yet and will probably need to read it several times to take it all in. But …
Continue readingPosted on November 7, 2022 | 24 Comments
We debated the pitfalls of diving too deep into the likely politics, including the social policy, of small farm societies of the future under my last post. Maybe this post runs that risk. Or maybe it doesn’t dive deep enough. Anyway, here I’m going to broach under five headings a few aspects of social policy that I think small farm societies of the future will wrestle with – I hope without easy solutionism or false optimism. Then in my next post I’ll publish the draft chapter about social policy issues I cut from my book. And that will conclude this …
Continue readingPosted on October 25, 2022 | 70 Comments
It’s tempting to divert from my present cycle of posts to address the latest melodrama in the ongoing dark comedy of British parliamentary politics. However, it’s a temptation I’m going to resist. There are some things I want to say about it inasmuch as it illuminates the crooked path to a small farm future, but I think they can wait for a month or two while I work my way through my present agenda. It’s possible that by then we’ll be onto our fourth prime minister of the year. But the underlying reasons for the turbulence won’t have changed, and …
Continue readingPosted on October 17, 2022 | 56 Comments
I’ve now blogged my way through Parts I-III of A Small Farm Future in this marathon cycle of posts. Only Part IV remains. But before I get onto that (…this is why it’s been such a marathon), I want to devote a few posts to various other issues – some of them reiterations or clarifications of things in the book I’ve already discussed here, some of them touching on older concerns of this blog or issues that I lacked the space to address in the book, and some of them engaging with the growing list of people who publicly disagree …
Continue readingPosted on October 9, 2022 | 50 Comments
This post is the third and final instalment of my engagement with the Eden story and its contemporary implications for a small farm future, based on the debate I’ve had with Sean Domencic and other commenters here. My thanks to Sean and everyone else for raising so many interesting issues. I can’t pursue everything that everyone’s raised, but below I address a few of the points that came up, and this (with apologies) already amounts to a pretty long post. If you’re not so interested in all this stuff, hopefully you’ll join us next time for a look at welfare …
Continue readingPosted on September 25, 2022 | 82 Comments
Here, I’m going to respond to Sean Domencic’s commentary on my article ‘Genesis and J. Baird Callicott’ published in my last post, and try to pick up on as many of the comments beneath it as I can (albeit too briefly or evasively, I regret). Sean’s commentary is an exemplary exercise in constructive criticism of a kind that’s all too rare, and also a lovely piece of writing in its own right. My thanks to him for taking the trouble to produce it. I’ll engage with Sean’s commentary in a moment, but it’s been quite a while since I published …
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