Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
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 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). …
Continue readingPosted on April 21, 2024 | 43 Comments
I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me – one reason why I’ve been a bit less active on this blog of late. But now that she’s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother’s life as my starting point. My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in …
Continue readingPosted on March 26, 2024 | 81 Comments
It’s time to move on to pastures new from my Saying NO… book, as I mentioned in my last post. Seems like an opportune moment to try an ‘open comment’ post to signal the change of direction, an idea I trailed at the start of the year. What I think emerged from that discussion was for me to suggest a broad topic and perhaps a few talking points from it and then to see where things went in the discussion. Kind of like a normal post! Back then, Ruben wrote “I would love to hear your thoughts on AMOC shutdown, …
Continue readingPosted on March 16, 2024 | 46 Comments
I published this article at Front Porch Republic to sign off from engaging directly with ecomodernists and ecomodernism around food, energy and ecological futures, the theme of my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The article draws on Naomi Klein’s fascinating book Doppelganger to try to make sense of some of the debates around my book and the weird emergent political world we seem to be entering. It also defines ecomodernism and explains why I find it problematic. The responses I’ve had to Saying NO… have been mostly positive and appreciative (thanks!), but with some negatives too – …
Continue readingPosted on March 5, 2024 | 51 Comments
I’m aiming to wrap up my present blog cycle around my recent book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future shortly. My book critiques George Monbiot’s writing on the food system, specifically his book Regenesis, and I have two essays in which I’m going to further engage critically with aspects of George’s arguments, of which this is one. The other will shortly be published by Front Porch Republic. Apologies if you’re getting bored with this topic, but I’ll be done soon and in my view the issues are important. George’s highly charged response to Saying NO…, entitled ‘The Cruel Fantasies of …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS