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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on February 13, 2025 | 45 Comments
Apologies for my silence here – the book-writing has been in overdrive, and I’ve also been trying (with limited success) to keep up with the winter’s woodland work. Anyway, some moments of respite today. Time enough for a blog post with brief notes on three things, viz. My forthcoming book Manufactured food newsflash Lifehouses? Finding Lights in a Dark Age So, I now have a final title and subtitle for my new book after much discussion with my publisher – Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft. Not sure of an exact publication date yet but …
Continue readingPosted on January 16, 2025 | 47 Comments
Just a brief post to thank readers here and on Substack for a bunch of great comments and recommendations under my last post. I’m in book-writing overdrive at the moment so apologies for not responding. However, today I finished the first draft of Chapter 6 so I thought a quick peep over the parapet would be in order. The basic structure of my life has been pretty simple of late. Get up. Eat something. Light the (sustainable) woodstove. Check on the (sustainable) sheep. Write. Eat something again. Write some more. Eat some more. Read. Go to bed. Recently we had …
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