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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on July 19, 2022 | 147 Comments
A step sideways from my last two posts about urbanism and ruralism with a review of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis (Allen Lane, 2022) – though it’s kind of a propos, since his book showcases the pro-urbanism and anti-ruralism I’ve been critiquing. When you read a book with which you profoundly disagree, I guess it’s usually best just to shrug, put it back on the shelf and get on with your work. The hatchet job review is a popular but ignoble genre. Having been the object of one myself I can attest the outcomes are rarely positive, apart perhaps from a …
Continue readingPosted on July 5, 2022 | 86 Comments
I’ve written quite a bit on this blog over the years about urbanism, ruralism and the case for deurbanization – the theme of Chapter 15 of A Small Farm Future where this blog cycle has currently lighted. To be honest, I get a bit exasperated about urbanism. It’s not because I’m against city living as such. In an ideal world, I’d like it if everyone could live wherever they damn well pleased and do whatever they wanted. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and it seems to me that climate, energy, water and waste realities are going to …
Continue readingPosted on June 28, 2022 | 19 Comments
Time to move onto the next chapter of my book A Small Farm Future in this blog cycle about it, which is Chapter 15 – ‘The country and the city’. I’m probably going to write two or three shortish posts on this topic. In this one, I’ll approach it obliquely with an account of a walk I took last week. To blow off a few cobwebs, I decided to spend a couple of days hiking a part of the Ridgeway, which has been in use for around 5,000 years and is supposedly Britain’s oldest road. It’s now a national hiking …
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