Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
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 24, 2017 | 31 Comments
I’d been aiming to publish a bit of good news on this site for a change, just when I learned yesterday the very bad news of the Manchester bombing. I guess I can understand some of the logic of anti-modernist and anti-liberal movements – I’ve even been called a dangerous extremist myself once or twice for that reason. What I struggle to understand or empathise with is the emotional interior of anyone who kills people at random, and what they think it achieves. My thoughts are with those personally affected. Well, maybe the best thing I can do is press …
Continue readingPosted on May 17, 2017 | 13 Comments
The much-delayed Issue 21 of The Land Magazine has just been published – how did we cope with the waiting? If you search diligently through its pages, you’ll find a review in it by me of David Fleming’s fascinating book, Lean Logic1. Below I’m reproducing a longer version of the review than the one that appears in the magazine. It may be worth just sketching the back story of the review. Fleming died in 2010 leaving his manuscript incomplete, and it was left to Shaun Chamberlin to pick up the gauntlet and see the work through to final publication – …
Continue readingPosted on May 8, 2017 | 24 Comments
I’m going to follow up on my previous post and turn this into a Malthusian two-parter. Let me begin by offering you an exclusive behind-the-scenes peek into the intellectual ferment that is the Small Farm Future office. After publishing our post on Malthus last week the SFF team have been reading Chris Wickham’s doorstopper of a book Framing The Early Middle Ages, which makes reference to the late Danish economist Ester Boserup’s influential 1965 book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth, and specifically to Boserup’s ‘anti-Malthusian’ arguments. We’d read Boserup’s book a couple of years back and made a few notes …
Continue readingPosted on April 28, 2017 | 22 Comments
To start, just a quick summary of this site’s comment policy, which I’ve now added to the About page. No personally abusive comments directed towards me or other commenters, please. And no content of a racist, misogynist or otherwise prejudiced character, even if wrapped in a cloak of researcherly authenticity. Comments of this nature will be removed, and individuals with repeat infractions will be permanently barred. Final decision on the rules rests with me, with no discussion entered into. Well, at least there’s somewhere where I have sweeping executive powers. Though I’m hoping for political office along those lines in …
Continue readingPosted on April 18, 2017 | 63 Comments
OK, so I said in my last post that I was done with crunching the numbers for my imaginary future republics of Wessex and Londinium. I lied to you. The discussion with Joe Clarkson under that post has prompted me to look at one last scenario. Suppose we followed his idea for a nationwide ‘transitional agrarian repopulation effort’, how might that look? So I took all the agricultural land in the UK (excepting rough grazing) and modelled an organic peasant-style allotment agriculture with conservative yield assumptions and low meat/dairy production in order to see what kind of population could be …
Continue readingPosted on April 8, 2017 | 22 Comments
I promised a bonfire of the numbers on my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex project in this post. Well, here goes. We shall also be taking a couple of side trips to the city state of Londinium – which, it turns out, is not without its peasant-like aspects – and to the Principality of Wales. So pour yourself a stiff one, pull up a pew, and get yourself some matches to help me light the flame. First, though, a stop press from the Somerset County Council newsroom. What, you didn’t know Somerset County Council had a newsroom? Shame on you – …
Continue readingPosted on March 24, 2017 | 144 Comments
To begin, a reflection on my previous post (feel free to skip to paragraph 3 if you’re in search of this week’s new material…): perhaps ‘Energy in neo-peasant Wessex’ wasn’t among my best, but at least one way or another it underscored the kind of transitions necessary to create a plausible post-fossil fuel future. I guess I’m agnostic on the likely pace and extent of the unravelling of our contemporary industrial ecology, though I very much doubt it’ll stay fully ravelled. And I’m still unsure of quite how to reckon the intermediate economy. But on reflection it was good to …
Continue readingPosted on March 17, 2017 | 93 Comments
I think it’s about time I paid my next visit to the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex. But first, news of another publication from the Small Farm Future stable – a piece entitled ‘Why Britain should protect and cherish its small farms’ published by the insurance arm of everybody’s favourite farming union, the NFU. When asked why the tone of the article was more moderate than that usually to be found here on this website, Small Farm Future CEO Chris Smaje replied, “Because NFU Mutual pay better than the punters on this blog. Though, since you mention it, the donate button …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS