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 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 11, 2024 | 52 Comments
I wrote a long review article that’s just been published in The Land magazine, engaging critically with various books bearing on farming and wildlife in Britain, but hopefully of wider interest. I’m reproducing it here (if I have time I may give a bit of background to it in my next post): It’s fallen to me to honour the promise in The Land 34 of reviewing Guy Shrubsole’s new book, The Lie of the Land. I can only do this by putting it into a wider context, so this essay considers not only aspects of Guy’s preceding book, The Lost …
Continue readingPosted on December 1, 2024 | 33 Comments
Problem: how to keep this blog ticking over while I write my book. Solution: another guest post Much as I abhor nepotism, sometimes there’s nothing like family when it comes to getting you out of a hole. So I’m pleased to bring you the piece below from my son Jake, based around the research he’s doing with small-scale farmers in Bangladesh as part of his PhD at the London School of Economics. Over to Jake – Bangladesh is a small country that sits within the Northeast of South Asia with India wrapped around it, and Myanmar to the South. …
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 …
Continue readingPosted on August 12, 2024 | 87 Comments
I’ve made a case in my writings that, to oversimplify, the future is likely to devolve into low energy-input local societies based around widespread agrarianism in one of two main ways: We persist with the present mostly fossil-fuelled economy until the resulting global heating, along with other drivers, brings the curtain down on our present civilization, leading to a (bad) small farm future for those (un)lucky enough to survive We stop using fossil fuels, resulting in a lower energy civilization, perforce involving more localized and agrarian economies – a different (better) small farm future But critics have objected that I’ve …
Continue readingPosted on July 8, 2024 | 46 Comments
There’ve been two seismic events in British public life in the last couple of weeks. One was the general election. The other, of course, was the publication anniversary of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The latter has received strangely little attention compared to the former, so this post is mostly about redressing that balance. But a few opening remarks about the election seem in order, especially insofar as it illustrates some of the themes of Saying NO… I have to confess I didn’t pay much attention to the election campaign, having concluded long ago that mainstream party …
Continue readingPosted on July 1, 2024 | 29 Comments
This is something of a placeholder post, with four miscellaneous items on the general theme of looking back to the past and forward to the future, and then finishing with some questions for regular commenters at the end. So, looking back (and forward) … well, first, the first anniversary of the publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future passed last week. As previously signalled, I’m shifting my attention from the themes of that book to other projects, but I’ll be posting a retrospective about the book and a couple of follow up posts on specific themes from …
Continue readingPosted on June 24, 2024 | 24 Comments
The present global meta-crisis seems certain to affect not just global politics but also the underlying structure of global politics in the existing system of nation-states. What’s the outlook for modern nation-states as the crisis unfolds? The question is probably too broad, and better addressed on a case by case, or at least a power bloc by power bloc, basis. I’ll aim to do that here with reference to one country and one power bloc, with the help of two recent books bearing on the issues. Another England? First up is Caroline Lucas’s Another England: How to Reclaim Our National …
Continue readingPosted on May 26, 2024 | 39 Comments
To say there are now a series of interlocking and difficult worldwide crises that we must somehow navigate our way out of is hardly news. To say that we might fail to navigate our way out of them and therefore face societal collapses of some kind is a little more unorthodox, but isn’t exactly a bombshell. Even the British Government has just launched its own prepping website. In this and the next couple of posts, I’m going to draw on some interesting recent writings that try to discern the navigational direction, and test the waters for the price of failure, …
Continue readingPosted on May 2, 2024 | 122 Comments
Given my conviction that humanity’s long-term future is likely to revolve around low-energy local agrarianism, I’ve long pondered whether the example of people who’ve pursued that way of life in the past – namely peasantries – is relevant to this future scenario. The answer, I believe, is the same as the answer to many tricky social-political questions: yes and no. But I’m always interested in sources that can put a bit more nuance to it. One such source is a recent book by the eminent historian, Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Allen Lane, 2024). …
Continue readingPosted on April 21, 2024 | 43 Comments
I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me – one reason why I’ve been a bit less active on this blog of late. But now that she’s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother’s life as my starting point. My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in …
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