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 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 7, 2025 | 57 Comments
I’ve been having an interesting offline debate recently with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the excellent Do the Math blog. I’ll write about it in my next post. In essence, Tom is more certain than I am that human agricultural civilization is a busted flush. Since I generally get it in the neck for my doominess on this point, it’s nice to be in discussion with someone who’s further down that line – especially when it’s as interesting and friendly as the one I’ve had with Tom. But in this post I’m going to mention a different interlocutor – one …
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 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 15, 2025 | 49 Comments
The year moves through its seasons, and so does the farm over longer cycles. In recent days, I’ve been stepping off the veranda and plucking greengages, figs and apples from the surrounding trees for my breakfasts. I have my petty gripes, but I’ve got to admit that my life is about as close to Eden as any mortal sinner could reasonably expect. Meanwhile, in a part of the world closer to the setting of that biblical paradise, other people are going through something more like hell. My last post about my trip to the Glastonbury Festival left hanging some questions …
Continue readingPosted 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 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 March 28, 2025 | 41 Comments
To start with two news snippets. First, more developments in the world of manufactured food, as detailed here and in following comments by the attentive Steve L. I aim to write an update on this topic later in the year covering what’s emerged since my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – some interesting points of detail, but in general pretty much the story arc you’d expect from a technology over-hyped by journalists committed to easy techno-fixes rather than hard social change. Second, the small farm future blog has just gone multilingual, with a Portuguese translation of this …
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 …
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