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 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 …
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 …
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