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 March 7, 2022 | 51 Comments
With Russia invading Ukraine and the IPCC bringing out its direst warning yet about the existential threat of climate change, the past week has showcased what’s always struck me as the two most likely ways for the complacent ease of life in the wealthy west to end – geopolitical and strategic conflict, or climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, here at Small Farm Future HQ we’ve been worrying about … taxation. You might think this is something of a first world problem in the present situation. But that, as I hope to show, is precisely the point – how can the disastrous consequences …
Continue readingPosted on February 28, 2022 | 28 Comments
My last post concerning rural gentrification led into the wider issue of future migration patterns, which I’ll address briefly here. I haven’t got much to say about it that I haven’t already said either here or in my book but maybe a little repetition is warranted. As I see it, human movement within and between countries is likely to be a massive reality in the years to come, and the ‘rural gentrification’ trend among contemporary neo-agrarian homesteaders discussed in my previous post is merely a straw in the wind presaging it. Globally, estimates from international agencies suggest that anywhere between …
Continue readingPosted on February 21, 2022 | 39 Comments
In this post, I discuss some issues about gentrification, localism and homesteading or neo-agrarianism, following on from my last post and the wider debate I referred to there. Let’s begin with a word on gentrification, which is usually applied to urban situations where richer people avail themselves of cheaper property prices by moving into poorer neighbourhoods, resulting in rising real estate values over time that price the original inhabitants or their descendants out of the area, and changing its social character in ways more suited to the incomers than the original inhabitants. As I see it, these trends are significant …
Continue readingPosted on February 16, 2022 | 31 Comments
I’ve long been meaning to write a post about rural gentrification and associated issues – localism, globalism, nationalism, migration and so forth. Some recent interactions online have prompted me to do it now. It’s a bit out of sequence in my present blog cycle concerning my book A Small Farm Future, since it’s closer to the material I discuss towards the end of the book in Part IV. But anyway… The spur to writing this originated from two fascinating pieces by Neal Clark and Anarcho-Contrarian in the Doomer Optimism mini-manifesto series. I found much to agree with in them, but …
Continue readingPosted on January 25, 2022 | 68 Comments
This is the last in a somewhat interrupted series of posts about property rights in small farm futures and small farm pasts, which started here, looked at the idea of work and self-ownership here, considered private property here and common property here. The missing piece in terms of standard definitions of property ownership is public or state ownership. So here I’m going to address public ownership to complete this part of the blog cycle. But I’m not going to say much about the forms of state ownership emanating from national, federal or local government familiar from everyday modern politics. For …
Continue readingPosted on January 13, 2022 | 65 Comments
I’ve only recently come across Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World but I thought I’d take a breather from my present blog cycle by taking a brief look at it. Actually, it’s not really a breather, as many of its themes run close to those I examine in my own book. Yunkaporta offers far more food for thought than I can cover in a blog post, so here I’m just going to pick out a few themes that interest me by way of ten discussion points. Then, in the next two or three posts …
Continue readingPosted on January 1, 2022 | 42 Comments
I wouldn’t normally be straining myself to get a post out on New Year’s Day, but (checks archive) blow me if today isn’t the tenth anniversary of this blog’s inception. Three hundred and fifty blog posts. Ten thousand comments. It’s quite some wordage. Has it all been worth it? I couldn’t possibly say, but I hope the landmark is enough for me to be forgiven the self-indulgence of a short trip down memory lane. When I started the blog I was four years into my tenure as the main grower for Vallis Veg, the small local veg box scheme that …
Continue readingPosted on December 13, 2021 | 138 Comments
The late David Graeber and David Wengrow’s (henceforth GW) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Allen Lane, 2021) is the newest big book of revisionist global history on the block. I’ve been fighting the urge to write a review of it, but since it illuminates several themes of interest to this blog, what follows is a white flag of surrender to that fine ambition. When I say The Dawn of Everything is a big book, I mean really big. Several reviewers of my own tome commented with palpable tiredness about how exhaustively argued (272 pages), endnoted (12 …
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