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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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on June 21, 2024 | 40 Comments
The Energy Institute published its annual Statistical Review of World Energy yesterday, releasing the energy figures for 2023. So I thought I’d bring you a brief newsflash with a few headline items from it. I’m still having internet connectivity problems (one reason why my comments have become sparser here of late), but I wasn’t going to let that stop me getting at the data. So while England were eking out an underwhelming draw with Denmark in the Euros, I cycled to the edge of town, set up a mobile hotspot and downloaded the energy data onto my laptop. I am …
Continue readingPosted on June 17, 2024 | 32 Comments
The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it. It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on. In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding …
Continue readingPosted on June 11, 2024 | 41 Comments
The way that humans have messed with the Earth’s carbon cycle rightly figures as planetary eco-problem No.1 in public debate, but the way we’ve messed with its nitrogen cycle probably ought to get more attention than it does. In the former case, farming often gets a bit too much of the blame in my view, whereas in the latter case there’s no doubt that it’s the key culprit. The consequences for nature loss, human health and climate change are serious. If humans somehow manage to get over their fatal attraction to the fossil fuels that drive our messing with the …
Continue readingPosted on June 2, 2024 | 58 Comments
The end of my last post left a few threads hanging, not least a promise to say something about Carwyn Graves’s wonderful book, Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape (2024, Calon). But let me approach obliquely from a more personal angle. Sometimes I make the mistake of reading negative online comments about my writing. A comment I read under a YouTube interview I did a while ago went something along the lines of “what Smaje didn’t mention is that he keeps sheep, which have a brutal ecological impact”. Now, it’s true that for about six of the twenty years …
Continue readingPosted on May 26, 2024 | 39 Comments
To say there are now a series of interlocking and difficult worldwide crises that we must somehow navigate our way out of is hardly news. To say that we might fail to navigate our way out of them and therefore face societal collapses of some kind is a little more unorthodox, but isn’t exactly a bombshell. Even the British Government has just launched its own prepping website. In this and the next couple of posts, I’m going to draw on some interesting recent writings that try to discern the navigational direction, and test the waters for the price of failure, …
Continue readingPosted on May 2, 2024 | 122 Comments
Given my conviction that humanity’s long-term future is likely to revolve around low-energy local agrarianism, I’ve long pondered whether the example of people who’ve pursued that way of life in the past – namely peasantries – is relevant to this future scenario. The answer, I believe, is the same as the answer to many tricky social-political questions: yes and no. But I’m always interested in sources that can put a bit more nuance to it. One such source is a recent book by the eminent historian, Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Allen Lane, 2024). …
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