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 June 14, 2026 | 9 Comments
There are a few anniversaries in the air at the moment. The one that looms in British politics is the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, which was held on 23 June 2016. I daresay the media will soon be full of opinion pieces about it, so I thought I’d get mine in early and move on. It would be possible to write at great length about the numerous ins and outs of the Brexit process over this last decade. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog – a weekly compendium of heavyweight political …
Continue readingPosted on June 8, 2026 | 24 Comments
In this post I reflect on the main things I think will be necessary for ‘surviving the future’, to channel David Fleming. The post was prompted by comments under my last one, especially ones by Kathryn, Steve C and Walter. I was going to write my own comment underneath in reply, but I thought it warranted a somewhat lengthier treatment. At a high level of generality, I’d suggest on the back of those comments that fundamentally people need to attend to four things in navigating the collapse of our present high-energy, stable-climate, urban-industrial edifice: Skills of practical livelihood-making Physical capital …
Continue readingPosted on May 27, 2026 | 30 Comments
Sorry I’ve been so silent here of late. I’ve got a lot of work on various fronts, some of which I may mention here soon, which is keeping me from blogging. But if there’s a Small Farm Future/Dark Age Light hole in your life, do listen in to this Crazy Town podcast I did with Jason Bradford, which was quite a fun conversation. Despite my busy-ness I must confess that I did take a brief holiday in the Scottish Highlands – partly to visit my son who lives there and partly to hike in the mountains, which is something I …
Continue readingPosted on April 22, 2026 | 67 Comments
Apologies that I’m not finding much time at the moment to write new blog posts, a situation that will probably continue for a while. Well, here’s one anyway, chiselled out from a couple of hours of idling on the internet recently and trying to catch up on world news by triangulating rather unoriginally between the BBC, Al Jazeera, the London Review of Books and The Guardian. And if triangulating between four sources sounds odd, believe me it’s not as odd as some of the things in the news they’re reporting on. Here, I’m going to make reference to one particular …
Continue readingPosted on March 21, 2026 | 127 Comments
Diverting briefly from my blog cycle about my recent book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, here I’m going to continue my polite discussion with Tom Murphy about the human condition past, present and future – and, more specifically, about the place of foraging (gathering and hunting) vis-à-vis farming in it. My thanks to Tom for the discussion, which has helped clarify my thinking. I’m still wrestling with the issues, though, and I think Tom makes a lot of good points. For info, I’m going to be offline during the coming week, but I’ll aim to reply to any comments here …
Continue readingPosted on March 11, 2026 | 25 Comments
Continuing my stately progress through my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, we come next to the Introduction, entitled ‘An Arc of Future Earth’. But first a couple of quick housekeeping notices. Apologies to a couple of commenters whose comments sat for a long while in the moderation queue without me noticing, now approved. I seem to have become increasingly bad at noticing queued comments, replying to emails etc which certainly isn’t through any intention to ignore people. Please accept my past and future apologies for this. I won’t take offence at gentle reminders. A heads up that I …
Continue readingPosted on February 16, 2026 | 28 Comments
It’s about time I wrote some posts about my recently published book Finding Lights in a Dark Age. There are twelve chapters in the book plus a preface, introduction and afterward, so my intention is to write fifteen posts about the book in all, one for each of these segments. And, as a bonus, one about the bibliography too. I also have a few other posts up my sleeve, including one about my ongoing debate with Tom Murphy, so there will doubtless be some interspersing. Apologies however that the blog posts are only trickling out these days – a slow …
Continue readingPosted on January 27, 2026 | 93 Comments
Part of me thinks I should be writing about the US government and its current dramas. Venezuela. Greenland. Minneapolis. But instead I’ll hold off from the hot takes and go to the other end of the spectrum with a post about long-range human history. As previously trailed on this blog, I’ve recently been having some interesting discussions on this topic with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the informative Do the Math blog. Here, I’ll try to give a flavour. So… whereas those of an ecomodernist bent tend to locate the source of human happiness in recent times – all humanity …
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