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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on June 30, 2015 | 12 Comments
My previous post addressed the ancient agricultural commons of preindustrial England. Here I’m going to look at some issues about contemporary commons, before wrapping up this little odyssey on the commoning theme in my next post. Although many agricultural commons still exist among small-scale farmers globally, the hot commons issues nowadays aren’t about common land resources so much as intellectual property rights, copyright, digital commons and so forth. I can’t say that I’m much of an expert on all that, but since my main occupations are as a small-scale farmer and a small-scale writer I do have a passing interest …
Continue readingPosted on June 22, 2015 | 4 Comments
At the end of my last post I floated some questions about property rights and resource use, which I aim to address here – albeit obliquely – with a look at an old book about an old subject, but one that’s highly relevant to present day issues: historian J.M.Neeson’s Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. I’ll follow it up with another post or two about the concept of the commons and its relevance today. Neeson effectively dispels, if indeed it still needs dispelling, Garrett Hardin’s misleading concept of ‘the tragedy of the commons’. Instead she finds …
Continue readingPosted on June 11, 2015 | 7 Comments
Time to bring it all back home today, with a sneaky behind the scenes virtual tour of Small Farm Future’s corporate headquarters. The picture at left gives an overview of the complex, as seen from the lofty throne of the outdoor compost toilet. Funny that in these days of retro fashion the backyard loo hasn’t made a return to every hipster’s homestead wishlist. Ah well, more evidence that SFF is ahead of the curve. So let me walk you through the various accoutrements visible on the edifice’s southern wing. At left is the satellite broadband dish through which my jeremiads …
Continue readingPosted on June 3, 2015 | 11 Comments
Some thoughts today on the weighty matters of my title, prompted by Tom’s departing broadside against me a couple of posts back. Perhaps I ought to just ignore it, but I’m slightly troubled by the fact that someone who’s been reading my blog for a while should (mis)interpret my thinking as he does. I’m sure the fault is largely mine, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to restate and clarify some of the main themes of this blog, and to lay down a future marker. If I accepted Tom’s stance on where the world is at I should probably …
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