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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on September 13, 2022 | 28 Comments
Today, small farm future brings you a rare guest post, authored by Sean Domencic who regular readers here will know well. But before handing over to him, I probably need to sketch a bit of background. When I started thinking and reading seriously about food, farming and ecology in the late 1990s (and then doing it), it felt like a large gap in my education that I needed to fill with self-study, both in terms of practical skills and wider intellectual contexts. On the latter front, I came across eco-philosopher J. Baird Callicott’s Beyond the Land Ethic in a Seattle …
Continue readingPosted on September 5, 2022 | 52 Comments
Time to move on in this blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future,with a post about the last chapter in Part III – Chapter 16, ‘From religion to science (and back)’. If, however, you’re bored of reading what I have to say about a small farm future, you can listen to what I have to say about it instead. A couple of interviews have recently landed here and here, although one of them was recorded quite some time ago. A change is as good as a rest, they say. Anyway, back to Chapter 16 for those inclined to …
Continue readingPosted on August 26, 2022 | 76 Comments
My title sounds like one of those “…walk into a bar” jokes, and if anyone would care to provide a punchline I’d be delighted. But actually this post is more in the way of a placeholder, reflecting back on some previous themes and anticipating some ones to come in relation to my three titular characters. Most importantly, the novelist in question is G.K. Chesterton – less a novelist, really, than a multimodal writer and one-man torrent of words and ideas. I invoke him as one of the founders of distributism, and I’ve just published an article in the latest issue …
Continue readingPosted on August 15, 2022 | 92 Comments
I’d been planning to move on from my present focus on ruralism and urbanism, but since George Monbiot briefly broke cover to launch some fusillades at me on Twitter last week I’m going to ruminate a bit more on the issue in the light of his intervention. I mostly want to focus on the bigger issues that our little war of words raises, rather than the war itself. But a brief personal backstory seems relevant1. I’ve long argued that the likeliest long-term future for humanity in the face of climate, energy, water, soil and political-economic realities will involve a turn …
Continue readingPosted on August 8, 2022 | 44 Comments
In this post, I aim to pick up where I left off last time with my review of George Monbiot’s Regenesis, mostly in reference to its theme of urbanism (there’s also a bit of housekeeping and an apology at the end). But first, since it’s kind of a propos, some brief remarks on the trip I took last week, which involved me bicycling from Frome to Chepstow and back, among other things for an enjoyable in-conversation session with eco-philosopher and activist Rupert Read at the Green Gathering (a recording of most of it is here). Much of the southern part …
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