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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 September 20, 2015 | 41 Comments
In his interesting historical study of small farmers in Namiquipa, Mexico, Daniel Nugent mentions a 1926 meeting between local farmers and state bureaucrats seeking their assent to form an ejido (communal landholding)1. For reasons I won’t go into here, the farmers were generally opposed to the idea. They were also inured to the prejudices of local elites and officials who tended to see them as ignorant, lazy peasants. When the time came for signing the papers to form the ejido most of them refused, some of them claiming that they’d forgotten how to sign their names. They had their reasons, …
Continue readingPosted on September 7, 2015 | 20 Comments
George Monbiot, bless him, has recently been tweeting his enthusiasm for my critique of the Ecomodernist Manifesto (‘Dark thoughts on Ecomodernism’). This gained me quite a lot of positive responses, but also inevitably some negative ones – starting with a mild shot across the bows from one Fahad and thence a veritable blizzard of critical tweets from Mike Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute and a cast of fellow travellers. Some of the issues raised by these critics and the questions they’ve posed of me seem worth following through in greater detail so that’s what I shall essay here. Apologies for …
Continue readingPosted on September 1, 2015 | 17 Comments
“Thinking like a mountain” is such a resonant phrase that many people doubtless harbour their own notions about what it means without feeling the need to return to its source in Aldo Leopold’s eponymous essay1, or perhaps even knowing that Leopold is the source. But if you do go back to the essay what you get, in burnished literary prose, is mostly a rather persuasive argument not to mess around with ecosystems that you don’t fully understand. And in particular not to kill wolves if you don’t want to have problems with deer. You also get an argument that there’s …
Continue readingPosted on August 24, 2015 | 4 Comments
My last two posts have pretty much brought me to the end of two themes that have loomed large in my recent writing: a political critique of ‘eco-modernism’ and an ecological critique of perennial grain breeding programmes. Time perhaps for a few brief reflections on where that work has taken me, and where to go next. One thing to notice is that both themes involve critique rather than construction. Perhaps it’s easier to knock down someone else’s narrative than to build a convincing one of your own. So now I want to spend more time building an alternative narrative, which …
Continue readingPosted on August 12, 2015 | 6 Comments
Last week it was perennial grain breeders, this week it’s ecomodernists: yes, your humble blog editor has another paper out taking aim at a favoured target. Gosh, am I really that disputatious? Well, there’s some as would say so. But more of that in a future post. For now, let me merely offer a brief introduction to my paper ‘Dark thoughts on ecomodernism’, which is published today on the Dark Mountain website: a slightly lengthier version is reproduced below. Long-term readers of this blog will know that for some time I’ve been conducting a low-level guerrilla war (albeit only of …
Continue readingPosted on August 7, 2015 | 28 Comments
Time for a quick update on the issue of perennial grain crops, a recent focus of my writing, occasioned by a couple of spinoff articles I’ve recently published in The Land and Permaculture magazines, and also an interesting correspondence with Phil Grime, the plant ecologist whose work I drew on to inform my approach to the issue. Just to provide the briefest of summaries, it would be unquestionably beneficial from an environmental point of view if our staple grain crops were perennial rather than annual in their growth habit, but yields of perennial grains currently are very much less than annual ones. That’s …
Continue readingPosted on July 31, 2015 | 13 Comments
So, no comments on my previous post – obviously my contention that medieval agriculture was more efficient than its modern counterpart was wholly uncontroversial. Let me up the ante in this post, then, and shout out for the pre-Neolithic diet as a healthier way of eating than most of what’s come after. This, by the way, is also my attempt to address Clem’s question about why I’ve claimed that a grain/legume diet is not especially healthy. You can barely move these days for people following the Palaeo diet it’s so faddish, but I think the issues it raises are interesting. …
Continue readingPosted on July 11, 2015 | 11 Comments
Well, I lied to you. I said I was going to write a concluding post on the theme of the commons. But then I realised that this topic is kind of connected to a larger set of issues I’ve been wanting to explore about efficiency, scale, agrarian structures and the like. ‘Kind of connected’ is a useful phrase I picked up from an undergraduate lecture by one of my professors, Paul Richards (author of the brilliant Indigenous Agricultural Revolution…I wish I’d realised then how lucky I was to be taught by him). Paul said that on bad days it felt …
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