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 July 16, 2016 | 10 Comments
I left the prospect of my long-promised analysis of a neo-peasant future dangling at the end of my previous post. But the first lesson they teach you at blogging school is to hold your readership in suspense so they keep coming back for more. The second lesson they teach you is not to hold them in suspense so much that they decide not to come back at all. So I promise you upon my word that I’ll start the neo-peasant analysis in my next post. In this one I’m going to replicate my review of George Monbiot’s new book How …
Continue readingPosted on July 7, 2016 | 20 Comments
I promised a Brexit two-parter with a second post on agriculture, so that’s what I aim to deliver. It’s clear that the Brexit issue is going to reverberate for a long time to come, but I think I’d better start pressing the fade button on it for a while after this. Funny how quickly it’s flipped from a slow-burning issue of the disgruntled fringe in both main parties to a fast-burning issue of the disgruntled mainstream. Looking back at my pre-referendum predictions, I thought a Brexit result would cause strife in the Tory party, which it has. What I didn’t …
Continue readingPosted on June 29, 2016 | 51 Comments
I suppose I have no option but to write about Brexit, adding my own small voice to the torrent of verbiage that’s already been devoted to the current extraordinary events. There are endless possible questions and implications to be traced. How they’ll play out is anybody’s guess. What does already seem clear is that the Vote Leave campaign was based on a series of lies that have already unravelled, and its soundbite-politician architects have absolutely no clue how to deal with the political, economic and social mess they so carelessly engineered. Maybe some of the present sky-is-falling rhetoric of my …
Continue readingPosted on June 23, 2016 | 27 Comments
In the early 19th century London was such an unhealthy place that it couldn’t sustain its population through indigenous births and had to rely upon net in-migration. Its death rate has long since declined to a more acceptable level, but today the capital relies as much as ever on in-migration. About 40% of its current population was born abroad. And foreign-born workers in London constitute more than a third of all foreign-born workers in the UK. Those facts aren’t much, I realise, to build an entire hypothesis on, but I’m going to give it a go. Hell, there are people …
Continue readingPosted on June 19, 2016 | 10 Comments
I mentioned in my previous post that I’m slowly working my way towards an analysis of a neo-peasant future. Well, the operative word there is ‘slowly’ and here’s one of the slow bits. It comes in the form of the report I promised on my recent spirit quest, and also by way of a breather before I shoulder the onerous burden of the neo-peasant analysis. But I’ve also got to say that I’m reeling in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder. Various people are cautioning not to make political capital out of her death, which is probably wise. So let …
Continue readingPosted on June 9, 2016 | 48 Comments
Over the coming posts I’m going to start slowly moving towards my next big theme: the practice and politics of a neo-peasant agriculture. But first I need to prepare the way with a bit of context, and one context is permaculture. The word is a contraction of ‘permanent agriculture’, so in that sense seems close to the kind of sustainable farming and society I seek. But it’s also a movement with a distinctive literature and community associated with it, a movement in which my own route ‘back to the land’ was originally forged. Yet now I’m not so sure how …
Continue readingPosted on May 31, 2016 | 37 Comments
I had to recite the Lord’s Prayer at school every day for ten years, and have never spoken it since. But for my sermon today I’d like to elaborate a theme from one of its lines – “lead us not into temptation”. The temptation to which I refer is voting for populist political candidates. Perhaps that will surprise long-term readers of this blog, who will be familiar with my enthusiasm for agrarian populism. So let me qualify the statement by paraphrasing that hapless British Rail spokesperson from many years ago who justified the company’s inability to deal with inclement weather …
Continue readingPosted on May 25, 2016 | 8 Comments
I’ve now returned from my spirit quest feeling suitably spirited (report to follow). I also feel pretty rushed off my feet, with a deal of farm work and desk work to catch up on, including a review of George Monbiot’s new book to write. So normal service on this site will resume as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I offer you below a mere snippet of Small Farm Futurology in the form of a letter of mine recently published in Permaculture Magazine (No.88), which discourses on two themes aficionados of this site will perhaps be (wearily) familiar with, viz. my friendly scepticism …
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