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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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on May 12, 2025 | 43 Comments
I’ve all but finished my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, which will be out in the autumn. A few words here about its context, and some other bits and bobs of news. I got quite a lot of input from readers of this blog about suggested content as I was preparing to write the book. Thank you – it was much appreciated. Some people were interested in more of the staple fare of this blog: agrarianism, climate change, energy futures, politics and suchlike from a quasi-academic perspective. Others pushed me to explore …
Continue readingPosted on April 26, 2025 | 66 Comments
Pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the idea that there’s going to be a smooth transition out of fossil fuels and into renewables that can rescue the existing high-energy global economy in anything like its present form comes courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and his 2024 book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. I wrote about the idea of a supposed energy ‘transition’ quite a bit last year (for example, here) and I don’t plan to go over that ground again. But Fressoz’s book is such an informative read that a post about it …
Continue readingPosted on April 15, 2025 | 78 Comments
I recently read N.S. Lyons’ interesting essay ‘American Strong Gods: Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century’. Yeah, apologies – another Trump piece … though Lyons casts the net wider. Anyway, his essay is kind of apropos to stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately, so I’m going to air it here. I’ll refer also to this recent essay from Perry Anderson. To deal in old political money, Lyons is a writer of the new right, while Anderson is the doyen of a ‘new left’ that’s no longer all that new – but a testament at least …
Continue readingPosted on March 28, 2025 | 41 Comments
To start with two news snippets. First, more developments in the world of manufactured food, as detailed here and in following comments by the attentive Steve L. I aim to write an update on this topic later in the year covering what’s emerged since my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – some interesting points of detail, but in general pretty much the story arc you’d expect from a technology over-hyped by journalists committed to easy techno-fixes rather than hard social change. Second, the small farm future blog has just gone multilingual, with a Portuguese translation of this …
Continue readingPosted on March 18, 2025 | 60 Comments
I’m just emerging from intensive book-writing mode. Finding Light in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft is slated for UK publication in mid-October and US publication in mid-November. As the days grow darker at that time of year, it’ll be a perfect opportunity to get the book, put your feet up and journey with me toward the light from these dark times. I’m not quite out of the woods yet with the writing, so normal service on this blog may continue to be patchy for a while. Lots of interesting themes raised under my last post, so I …
Continue readingPosted on February 18, 2025 | 88 Comments
I thought I’d write a follow up to my previous post by way of replying to the various interesting comments it received. But I won’t mention any commenters by name in case they’d prefer not to be so publicly identified. So, first – I was possibly a bit negative about Adam Greenfield’s book Lifehouse in my previous post. It has many strengths. I like it that he’s not overly wowed by techno-fixes or the idea of a renewables transition’. On the latter point, there’ve been two interesting reviews of books I need to read recently in The London Review of …
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