Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted 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 13, 2026 | 81 Comments
Happy new(ish) year. As hinted by the second part of my title, this post isn’t a two-part retrospective on the Beatles, with a follow-up on John and Ringo. Instead, it’s mostly a sort-of review of Paul Kingsnorth’s recent book Against the Machine (henceforth ATM). But while thinking about Paul Kingsnorth, I find it hard not to think also about George Monbiot – sometime friends and fellow travellers in the broadly left-wing environmentalist movement whose intellectual, political and spiritual journeys have now diverged sharply. Also, arguably the two most prominent contemporary English writers on the conjunction of politics, nature and society. …
Continue readingPosted on December 22, 2025 | 52 Comments
I said my next post would cover my discussions with Tom Murphy, but I’m afraid time has caught up with me and I’m going to sign off for the year with this more general offering involving snippets from here and there. I promise that I’ll get to the Tom Murphy discussion early next year. There have been a few other promised posts I’m yet to deliver on too. I’m feeling the stress of next year’s blogging already. Ah well, I did manage to put out twenty-six posts in 2025 (or a round twenty-five if you exclude Eric F’s guest post). …
Continue readingPosted on November 11, 2025 | 60 Comments
To coincide with the US publication today of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I think it’s time to start writing some blog posts about it. I have a bit of unfinished business in relation to other projected posts, but hopefully I can sweep them up somewhere along the way. It’s going to be a slow tick over, though, because I don’t currently have much capacity to turn out blog posts at speed. I’ll begin by linking something I mention at the very start of the book with something I mention at the very end. At the …
Continue readingPosted on October 23, 2025 | 134 Comments
A brief note here on a topic that’s been in the news lately – namely, the news. Or, more specifically, the so-called ‘legacy media’ such as national newspapers and television. And, alongside that, declining literacy and book-reading, which is obviously of great personal concern to me as the author of a recently published book, as well as a watcher of historical change. Also, religion. Let me explain. Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is a touchstone work on, well, nationalism, that religion of modern times. One of his arguments is that literate …
Continue readingPosted on October 14, 2025 | 41 Comments
My book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, is officially published today in the UK (US publication is 11 November). It’s available in paperback, e-book and audiobook versions. There’s a launch this evening at the town hall in Frome, my hometown. It’s fully booked, which is nice. I wrote a little bit about the book here. I’ll start a short-to-medium length cycle of blog posts about it soon, but I think not immediately. At least that will give those who read my online posts and are planning to read the book a chance to …
Continue readingPosted on October 8, 2025 | 46 Comments
I’ve shared platforms with Westminster parliamentarians twice in the last few months, and more than that in the last few years, who’ve been dismissive in one way or another of my case for agrarian localism. Given that that case is itself quite dismissive of the ability of parliaments and centralized politics to deal with the problems of our times, perhaps it’s not surprising that I tend to find myself at loggerheads with such folks. Generally on these occasions, I’ve been on the receiving end of a mini-lecture along the lines that (1) the present world is one of mass urbanism, …
Continue readingPosted on September 28, 2025 | 46 Comments
It’s time for me to break my silence here – thanks for keeping the discussion going in my absence. Among other reasons for the pause was a long trip away, at least by my standards – mostly recreational, and mostly in Scotland. To get back into the swing of this blog I’m going to say a few things about the trip, relating them to some of the wider issues generally discussed here. Then, with publication of my new book imminent (tickets for the launch in Frome on 14 October available here – it’s free), I’ll start turning to some posts …
Continue readingPosted on September 2, 2025 | 52 Comments
With the publication of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age fast approaching but not yet arrived, I’m at that awkward stage in an author’s journey with a book where it’s too late to change anything in it, but it’s not yet left the nest and made its own way in the world. Already, I’m visited too often by an internal monologue along the lines of “should have included that, shouldn’t have said that, should have said that better”. Something I like about writing books rather than, say, blog posts is their fixed and tangible material presence in …
Continue readingPosted on August 4, 2025 | 19 Comments
I was invited to give a couple of talks at the Speaker’s Forum in the Glastonbury Festival in June, which I’ve just reprised at the Green Gathering this weekend. In this post, I’m going to tell some stories loosely about my trip to Glastonbury, focusing less on the talks and more on the trip. There’s a chapter in my forthcoming book in which a narrator living in a crisis-ridden fictional future walks from London to Glastonbury, so when it came to speaking at the festival I felt I had no option but to stick with that storyline and walk there. …
Continue readingPosted on July 21, 2025 | 26 Comments
The end of June is usually an exciting time for me. Summer holidays approaching? No, it’s when the Energy Institute publishes its annual Statistical Review of World Energy. Who doesn’t love a big fat spreadsheet landing in their downloads folder to analyse to their heart’s content? The answer to that, of course, is a good many. And, in the case of the EI energy data, I have to confess I’m on a path to joining them, because I’ve found my excitement diminishing. The main reason is because the figures tell the same darned story year after year. Despite endless talk …
Continue readingPosted on July 8, 2025 | 6 Comments
I’ve been putting the finishing touches to my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age with the help of the wonderful folks at Chelsea Green (sorry for the consequent silence here), and it’s now going into production. The book is available to preorder from Barnes and Noble here. Rewards members (it’s free to sign up online) get 25% discount and premium members get a further 10% off. Post-civilizational projections at a civilized price! Use PREORDER25 at checkout. Now all that’s out of the way, I’m hoping to find the time to get back to writing some new posts here soon. …
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