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 September 15, 2024 | 89 Comments
There’s one last bit of business outstanding from my previous project critiquing ecomodernism. This concerns the forces that may drive either ruralisation or further urbanisation in the future. In comments on this site, perhaps most relevantly here and here, Cameron Roberts disagreed with my view that future ruralisation is likely – and that if we don’t try to make it happen by design soon, it’ll happen by default later. I said I’d offer a longer analysis of this issue, and here it is. I’m going to structure it around Cameron’s comments, but his points are widely held so I see …
Continue readingPosted on August 26, 2024 | 225 Comments
A couple of news items just in, relating to my recent critiques of manufactured food. Apologies for harping back to this theme, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the unfolding story. At the end, I’ll cast forward to new themes. So, this recent article is another rather starry-eyed piece heralding the bright future for Solein, the protein powder manufactured from bacteria by the Finnish company Solar Foods. What’s interesting about it is that it gives a few facts and figures about the company’s production processes, presumably derived from the company itself, which corroborate figures I provided in …
Continue readingPosted on August 12, 2024 | 87 Comments
I’ve made a case in my writings that, to oversimplify, the future is likely to devolve into low energy-input local societies based around widespread agrarianism in one of two main ways: We persist with the present mostly fossil-fuelled economy until the resulting global heating, along with other drivers, brings the curtain down on our present civilization, leading to a (bad) small farm future for those (un)lucky enough to survive We stop using fossil fuels, resulting in a lower energy civilization, perforce involving more localized and agrarian economies – a different (better) small farm future But critics have objected that I’ve …
Continue readingPosted on August 1, 2024 | 54 Comments
I thought I’d introduce a new element to the blog starting today with this first ‘news’ post. The idea is to intersperse my longer essay-style offerings with shorter postings on matters that seem newsworthy according to my idiosyncratic view of world affairs. ‘News’ in the sense of a mix of facts and opinion, because as The Guardian doesn’t say but ought to: ‘comment is free and so are facts and it’s harder to separate them out than you might think’. Anyway, let me know your thoughts. Four brief items to kick off. 1. Manufactured food and the culture wars …
Continue readingPosted on July 15, 2024 | 96 Comments
This essay continues my anniversary overview of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and the various strands of criticism it’s received that I began in my previous post. Before I do that, I just want to reprise a point in that previous post where I possibly erred a little. In my discussion of Joel Scott-Halkes’s criticisms of me around his view that small-scale farmers have “awful, awful lives” and don’t want to be farmers, I made the point that it’s not the farming itself that’s the problem so much as the political and economic structures that societies often …
Continue readingPosted on July 8, 2024 | 46 Comments
There’ve been two seismic events in British public life in the last couple of weeks. One was the general election. The other, of course, was the publication anniversary of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The latter has received strangely little attention compared to the former, so this post is mostly about redressing that balance. But a few opening remarks about the election seem in order, especially insofar as it illustrates some of the themes of Saying NO… I have to confess I didn’t pay much attention to the election campaign, having concluded long ago that mainstream party …
Continue readingPosted on July 1, 2024 | 29 Comments
This is something of a placeholder post, with four miscellaneous items on the general theme of looking back to the past and forward to the future, and then finishing with some questions for regular commenters at the end. So, looking back (and forward) … well, first, the first anniversary of the publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future passed last week. As previously signalled, I’m shifting my attention from the themes of that book to other projects, but I’ll be posting a retrospective about the book and a couple of follow up posts on specific themes from …
Continue readingPosted on June 24, 2024 | 24 Comments
The present global meta-crisis seems certain to affect not just global politics but also the underlying structure of global politics in the existing system of nation-states. What’s the outlook for modern nation-states as the crisis unfolds? The question is probably too broad, and better addressed on a case by case, or at least a power bloc by power bloc, basis. I’ll aim to do that here with reference to one country and one power bloc, with the help of two recent books bearing on the issues. Another England? First up is Caroline Lucas’s Another England: How to Reclaim Our National …
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