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 July 17, 2023 | 92 Comments
Before I wade into blogging about my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I’d like to take a step back and try to characterize some of the broader political contours that have now put me in a different camp to George Monbiot, the main antagonist in my book, despite our similar starting point on what some people would no doubt characterize as the ‘far left’. One strand of that left-wing starting point emerges out of Marxism and the history of Marxist regimes, with a strong influence on the left beyond those who explicitly identify as Marxist. It emphasizes …
Continue readingPosted on July 10, 2023 | 39 Comments
I’ll be in discussion with Vandana Shiva about ‘The War on Farming’ at an event in London next Tuesday. Come along if you can. Should be an interesting conversation. There’s certainly plenty to talk about, because it does seem to me there’s quite a concerted media effort underway to point the finger at farmers and farming as the culprits for climate change and biodiversity loss. I’ll write something about the biodiversity side of it another time. Regarding climate, the issue of ruminant methane emissions sucks the air out of more important questions, such as transitioning to low-energy agrarian localism. When …
Continue readingPosted on July 6, 2023 | 24 Comments
I’m guessing that few people the world over will have failed to notice the big-ticket news items last week – most importantly, the official launch of my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future at the Groundswell Festival in Hertfordshire, and secondly the release of the 2022 global energy figures by the unironically named Energy Institute. Okay, so I’m joking about the newsworthiness of my book. But last I looked it was riding high in the Amazon charts, at No.1 in its Soil Science category (?), No.2 in nanotechnology (??), and No.5 in distribution management, whatever that is. Vindication. …
Continue readingPosted on June 26, 2023 | 29 Comments
UK publication day is nigh for my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods. I’ll be blogging about it here over the next couple of months and as ever welcome constructive debate. I’m unlikely to be debating it on Twitter, because I find it a terrible platform for meaningful discussion, so if you’re landing here from Twitter this post is where to place your comments about the book. Unless it’s about a specific issue that I’ll deal with in a later post, I’ll do my best to reply …
Continue readingPosted on June 17, 2023 | 14 Comments
Time for a quick update on climate protest from your correspondent somewhere quite a long way behind the frontline, but still closer than you’ll read in the average news report. Then I’m going to bring it all back home before relating it to the present concerns of this blog around my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. So for starters, I’ve got to say that the British government has played a blinder in containing and derailing climate protest in these isles. If only it had displayed the same level of competence in, like, every single other area of …
Continue readingPosted on June 11, 2023 | 60 Comments
Mostly some news items and a bit of housekeeping in this post, rather than any substantive topic, before getting back to business next time. First, in relation to my poll about a possible trip to the USA, the crude data fell out this way – 1st place: Go, with qualifications 2nd place: Just go 3rd place: Just don’t go And the result, after some data smoothing and correction (including my instinctive tendency to favour the underdog) is that I’m not going to go. I won’t bore you with the details of my decision-making process, except to say that one factor …
Continue readingPosted on June 4, 2023 | 132 Comments
The shape of human civilization in the future will depend a lot on how we manage the global energy economy over the next few decades. I think the most likely scenario is that we’ll carry on using a lot of fossil fuels, which will create climate chaos and therefore civilizational chaos. The likeliest path out of that will be agrarian localism or a small farm future, because in most places most other choices will have been foreclosed. Another possible scenario is that globally we’ll find some way to pull back from the present brink of climate chaos politically, and cut …
Continue readingPosted on May 30, 2023 | 23 Comments
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism. If it does, obviously that’s fine. It’s a polemical sort of book, so counterargument is only to be expected. But my hope is for thoughtful, engaged counterargument that’s worth discussing, and not the kind of dumbass dismissals of agrarian localism that are all too common (I’ve already seen a couple online in relation to my book, even though it’s not yet published). Now, I’ve been writing about this topic for quite …
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