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 August 4, 2025 | 19 Comments
I was invited to give a couple of talks at the Speaker’s Forum in the Glastonbury Festival in June, which I’ve just reprised at the Green Gathering this weekend. In this post, I’m going to tell some stories loosely about my trip to Glastonbury, focusing less on the talks and more on the trip. There’s a chapter in my forthcoming book in which a narrator living in a crisis-ridden fictional future walks from London to Glastonbury, so when it came to speaking at the festival I felt I had no option but to stick with that storyline and walk there. …
Continue readingPosted on July 28, 2025 | 57 Comments
I mentioned in my previous post the recent kerfuffle about animal agriculture and climate change associated with the work of Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop (see this podcast and this paper). I also mentioned that I’m kinda done with getting into the details of all these ‘here’s my one weird trick to save the world’ approaches. But various people have asked me to explain further why I find Wedderburn-Bisshop’s position problematic. So … oh well, here goes. See, this is exactly my problem. You’re not helping. (For those on the other hand who’ve already had their fill of this issue, do just skip …
Continue readingPosted on July 21, 2025 | 26 Comments
The end of June is usually an exciting time for me. Summer holidays approaching? No, it’s when the Energy Institute publishes its annual Statistical Review of World Energy. Who doesn’t love a big fat spreadsheet landing in their downloads folder to analyse to their heart’s content? The answer to that, of course, is a good many. And, in the case of the EI energy data, I have to confess I’m on a path to joining them, because I’ve found my excitement diminishing. The main reason is because the figures tell the same darned story year after year. Despite endless talk …
Continue readingPosted on July 12, 2025 | 13 Comments
Happy news if you’re bored of me trailing my new book – I’m shortly going to hand over to a much valued long-term commenter here at Small Farm Future, Eric Farnsworth, so that he can trail his instead. But, lest you fear my powers of self-promotion are waning, let me also draw your attention in passing to this TBLI podcast I recently did with Robert Rubinstein. Also, before we get to Eric’s book, I just want to thank commenters for the multiple discussions under my clown and two romances post. Apologies I didn’t have the time to respond much. Just …
Continue readingPosted on July 8, 2025 | 6 Comments
I’ve been putting the finishing touches to my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age with the help of the wonderful folks at Chelsea Green (sorry for the consequent silence here), and it’s now going into production. The book is available to preorder from Barnes and Noble here. Rewards members (it’s free to sign up online) get 25% discount and premium members get a further 10% off. Post-civilizational projections at a civilized price! Use PREORDER25 at checkout. Now all that’s out of the way, I’m hoping to find the time to get back to writing some new posts here soon. …
Continue readingPosted on June 23, 2025 | 58 Comments
A commenter under my last post wrote ‘all eyes on Gaza from now on’. I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but recent world events suggest that all eyes also need to be on Washington, DC as well as Tehran and Jerusalem. Probably Moscow, Kyiv, Beijing and the Straits of Hormuz as well. It’s hard to keep your eyes on all these places all at the same time. And, even if you do, there’s very little impact you can have on the decisions that are made in and about them. In fact, I’d argue that giving our attention to the …
Continue readingPosted on June 5, 2025 | 46 Comments
I mentioned the new Root and Branch Collective – described here and here – in my last post and said I planned to write something about it. So here goes. Why write about it? Well, partly because the group (henceforth I’ll call it RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism, which is kinda my bag. Also because RBC invokes influence from various Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks (in their words ‘critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory’). These frameworks have also influenced me, and still do, particularly in trying to get to grips …
Continue readingPosted on May 25, 2025 | 30 Comments
A little bit more about my forthcoming book Finding Lights in a Dark Age and related things. So, the book has a UK publication date of 14 October and a US publication date of November 11. Preorder links are here. If you’re planning to buy it, please also consider supporting your local bookshop/bookstore (I’m working on the copyedit at the moment – I’m shocked at how confusedly mid-Atlantic my English has become). Talking of working on the copyedit, my summer seems to be evaporating before it’s even started in a welter of editing and writing work, speaking events and farm …
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