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 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 readingPosted on February 28, 2024 | 38 Comments
The gist of my last two posts is that manufactured microbial food isn’t plausible on energetic grounds as a mass food approach unless there’s a rapid and large expansion of available global energy, and that the more likely future trend is in the opposite direction – towards less energy. Like it or not, I think that means a future of low-energy agrarian localism. The main reason I try to prepare the ground for agrarian localism in my writing is therefore because I don’t think we have much choice. I fear that the transition to agrarian localism might be troubled and …
Continue readingPosted on February 11, 2024 | 184 Comments
When people look back nowadays to medieval philosophy, they often dismiss it with the derisive remark that it was concerned with debating “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. The sense is of an era whose thinkers engaged in sterile intellectual gymnastics founded on flawed premises. It’s an unfair characterization, which reveals more about the modern people who say it than the medieval objects of their contempt. Still, sometimes I wonder if there are aspects of our contemporary intellectual chitchat that might invoke angels-on-a-pin type dismissals from people in the future. One candidate could be the …
Continue readingPosted on January 22, 2024 | 128 Comments
Michael Daw has written a blog post that criticises my arguments concerning the energetic implausibility of manufactured food (or ‘precision fermentation’ to use the biotech industry’s preferred term). I don’t think his arguments stack up, as I’ll explain below, but this seems like a good opportunity to run through the relevant issues, which is the aim of this post. It will be followed by a few more posts on various issues relating to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and some of the criticisms of it, before I turn to other issues. One thing I must do at …
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