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 15, 2020 | 17 Comments
With my book launching officially today in the UK, it seems a good time to start the cycle of blog posts about its themes that I’m planning to run over the next few months. Unlike my usual output here, my intention is for these posts to be short and frequent – but we all know where the road of good intentions leads… Ah, the book, the book! When I started writing it, I naively thought it would give me the space to go deeper into all the major themes that I’ve explored on this blog. But, later than I should …
Continue readingPosted on October 4, 2020 | 9 Comments
The publicity wagon for my book is well and truly on the road, so along with having to get outside occasionally to do some actual farming I don’t think I’m going to be able to put any new posts up here for a few weeks. But I’d like to give a special invite to followers of this blog to join me for the launch webinar of the book at 6.30pm UK time on Tue 13 October (1.30pm Eastern Time in the US), where I’ll be in conversation with Peter Macfadyen (ex-mayor of my hometown of Frome, author of Flatpack Democracy, …
Continue readingPosted on September 26, 2020 | 20 Comments
The first talk I’m giving in relation to my new book is at the Northern Real Farming Conference, at 7.30pm on Tuesday (29 Sept). Although I’m not from or in the North, the conference is nevertheless an appropriate launchpad for my book because I suggest in it that in the future people are going to have to furnish their livelihoods more regionally and locally than most do today, and that this is going to involve a lot of rethinking – of agriculture, of industry, of politics and society more generally, and indeed of what we mean when we talk about …
Continue readingPosted on September 21, 2020 | 45 Comments
The time is nearly upon us when the feature-length version of my musings here will be released upon an unsuspecting world – A Small Farm Future (the book) will be available from 15 October in the UK and 21 October in the US. Various launch events are in the offing, and I’ll be gearing the blog for a while to come to riffing on various themes from the book. So watch this space… Meanwhile, I have one final bit of outstanding business to attend to before turning my attention to the book – though in many ways this post serves …
Continue readingPosted on September 13, 2020 | 59 Comments
This post continues with my theses on class, identity, protest, violence and the politics of agrarian localism begun in the previous one. For a definition of terms and acronyms used below, and reference to the people and articles it engages with, see the previous post. Comments welcome! 17. I’ll now turn to the success or otherwise of XR and other climate and social justice campaigns. Ruben suggests the addition of less carbon to the atmosphere is the appropriate criterion to judge climate activism. I think this is very stringent, but not unreasonable. It’s harder to come up with such a …
Continue readingPosted on September 11, 2020 | 16 Comments
In this post and the next one I continue exploring the issue of protest, violence, class and the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement I raised in the last one. I engage with some of the responses to the previous post, including one from Peter Gelderloos on Twitter, but rather than being just another iteration of that post and its responses, I’m thinking of these present two posts more as a kind of position statement on the politics underlying my forthcoming book, A Small Farm Future, and its arguments for renewable agrarianism, using the debate about XR as my foil. And also …
Continue readingPosted on September 5, 2020 | 25 Comments
Another month, another Extinction Rebellion protest, another crop of articles excoriating XR for being too disruptive and anti-capitalist, or not disruptive and anti-capitalist enough, or for not laying the blame on China, or whatever. I don’t particularly feel the need to appoint myself to the defence, but I was interested in this ROAR article by Peter Gelderloos, which raises some points of wider interest to me that I hope to develop further in my next post where I’ll attempt to relate them more directly to my micro-niche of small scale farming. In this one, I’ll restrict myself to a few …
Continue readingPosted on August 29, 2020 | 20 Comments
To begin, just a heads up on a couple of new things on the site. First, I’ve posted on the My Book page advanced comments about my forthcoming book that have come in from a number of interesting thinkers. It’s nice to get such positive notices. Currently, I’m pretty busy gearing up for the book launch on 15 October (21 October in the USA) and I’ll be devoting some blog posts to the book thereafter. Also, an interesting comment has come in concerning my house rules on the About page, to which I replied here. I don’t promise to debate …
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