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 June 23, 2025 | 58 Comments
A commenter under my last post wrote ‘all eyes on Gaza from now on’. I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but recent world events suggest that all eyes also need to be on Washington, DC as well as Tehran and Jerusalem. Probably Moscow, Kyiv, Beijing and the Straits of Hormuz as well. It’s hard to keep your eyes on all these places all at the same time. And, even if you do, there’s very little impact you can have on the decisions that are made in and about them. In fact, I’d argue that giving our attention to the …
Continue readingPosted on June 5, 2025 | 46 Comments
I mentioned the new Root and Branch Collective – described here and here – in my last post and said I planned to write something about it. So here goes. Why write about it? Well, partly because the group (henceforth I’ll call it RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism, which is kinda my bag. Also because RBC invokes influence from various Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks (in their words ‘critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory’). These frameworks have also influenced me, and still do, particularly in trying to get to grips …
Continue readingPosted on May 25, 2025 | 30 Comments
A little bit more about my forthcoming book Finding Lights in a Dark Age and related things. So, the book has a UK publication date of 14 October and a US publication date of November 11. Preorder links are here. If you’re planning to buy it, please also consider supporting your local bookshop/bookstore (I’m working on the copyedit at the moment – I’m shocked at how confusedly mid-Atlantic my English has become). Talking of working on the copyedit, my summer seems to be evaporating before it’s even started in a welter of editing and writing work, speaking events and farm …
Continue readingPosted on May 12, 2025 | 43 Comments
I’ve all but finished my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, which will be out in the autumn. A few words here about its context, and some other bits and bobs of news. I got quite a lot of input from readers of this blog about suggested content as I was preparing to write the book. Thank you – it was much appreciated. Some people were interested in more of the staple fare of this blog: agrarianism, climate change, energy futures, politics and suchlike from a quasi-academic perspective. Others pushed me to explore …
Continue readingPosted on April 15, 2025 | 78 Comments
I recently read N.S. Lyons’ interesting essay ‘American Strong Gods: Trump and the end of the Long Twentieth Century’. Yeah, apologies – another Trump piece … though Lyons casts the net wider. Anyway, his essay is kind of apropos to stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately, so I’m going to air it here. I’ll refer also to this recent essay from Perry Anderson. To deal in old political money, Lyons is a writer of the new right, while Anderson is the doyen of a ‘new left’ that’s no longer all that new – but a testament at least …
Continue readingPosted on February 18, 2025 | 88 Comments
I thought I’d write a follow up to my previous post by way of replying to the various interesting comments it received. But I won’t mention any commenters by name in case they’d prefer not to be so publicly identified. So, first – I was possibly a bit negative about Adam Greenfield’s book Lifehouse in my previous post. It has many strengths. I like it that he’s not overly wowed by techno-fixes or the idea of a renewables transition’. On the latter point, there’ve been two interesting reviews of books I need to read recently in The London Review of …
Continue readingPosted on January 16, 2025 | 47 Comments
Just a brief post to thank readers here and on Substack for a bunch of great comments and recommendations under my last post. I’m in book-writing overdrive at the moment so apologies for not responding. However, today I finished the first draft of Chapter 6 so I thought a quick peep over the parapet would be in order. The basic structure of my life has been pretty simple of late. Get up. Eat something. Light the (sustainable) woodstove. Check on the (sustainable) sheep. Write. Eat something again. Write some more. Eat some more. Read. Go to bed. Recently we had …
Continue readingPosted on January 6, 2025 | 107 Comments
Happy new year. I’m pretty deep in book-writing mode at the moment, and therefore unlikely to have much to offer here for another couple of months. But I thought I’d put out an open comment post inviting readers to debate a few points and questions, which I will then shamelessly plunder as material for my book. So … I’ve been a regular visitor at my wonderful local bookshop Hunting Raven recently, buying various forbidding non-fiction titles by way of background research for my own book. One of the staff asked jokingly if I ever just settled down with a good …
Continue readingPosted on December 21, 2024 | 44 Comments
And so we come to the end of another year’s blogging. Twenty-six posts authored by the editor-in-chief here, with two guest posts from Alice and Jake – my thanks to them. All told, there were 1,886 comments (including my responses) to my own authored posts. And, when aggregated, my posts amounted to 68,704 words. Sheesh, I got so exhausted from all that blog writing that I decided to take a break and do something different – so now I’m writing a book. Sincerest thanks to all commenters for keeping things alive here. My least commented post was Another England, or …
Continue readingPosted on November 17, 2024 | 122 Comments
A few news items curated for you from the Small Farm Future office: 1. Lights in a Dark Age First, the aforementioned office is pretty much where I’m going to be living for the next few months, having just signed a contract with Chelsea Green to write a new book provisionally entitled Lights in a Dark Age with a view to publication in Autumn 2025. I’ll say a bit more about the book in future posts but since most of it isn’t written yet I spy an opportunity for some reader input. So, two questions: Taking the title as your …
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