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 March 16, 2024 | 46 Comments
I published this article at Front Porch Republic to sign off from engaging directly with ecomodernists and ecomodernism around food, energy and ecological futures, the theme of my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. The article draws on Naomi Klein’s fascinating book Doppelganger to try to make sense of some of the debates around my book and the weird emergent political world we seem to be entering. It also defines ecomodernism and explains why I find it problematic. The responses I’ve had to Saying NO… have been mostly positive and appreciative (thanks!), but with some negatives too – …
Continue readingPosted on November 16, 2023 | 153 Comments
A few brief announcements before I launch into a hopefully relevant one-post digression from my present theme of exploring my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. First, Christmas has come early to readers of this blog, with my publishers offering a 25% discount until 1 January on my two books. Frankly, I’d be disappointed if anyone reading this doesn’t already have them prominently displayed on their shelves. But I’ll never know the truth of it, so for the laggards among you, just click here or here and use the code SayingNo25 to claim your reward. This offer, incidentally, applies …
Continue readingPosted on July 17, 2023 | 92 Comments
Before I wade into blogging about my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I’d like to take a step back and try to characterize some of the broader political contours that have now put me in a different camp to George Monbiot, the main antagonist in my book, despite our similar starting point on what some people would no doubt characterize as the ‘far left’. One strand of that left-wing starting point emerges out of Marxism and the history of Marxist regimes, with a strong influence on the left beyond those who explicitly identify as Marxist. It emphasizes …
Continue readingPosted on May 14, 2023 | 91 Comments
The impending publication of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, along with … y’know … the need for me to say yes to my non-farm-free present, is beginning to impose itself upon my time, so I may have to hold off on new blog content here for two or three weeks. Rest assured that I’ll be getting back to Bakhtin and his implications for contemporary politics soon. I’m also in the process of upgrading this site – more on that soon too. In other news, there’s a possibility that I might travel to the US of A in …
Continue readingPosted on March 26, 2023 | 81 Comments
Continuing the final descent of this blog cycle to finishing its discussion of A Small Farm Future, Chapter 18 of my bookis called ‘From nations to republics’. I hope to say more on this theme in the future, but for now just a few words here on this chapter. Nationalism has been much the most successful of political projects worldwide over the last couple of centuries, and a major employer of politicians, writers, historians, cartographers, soldiers, bureaucrats, priests, academics, architects, policy wonks and others whose work has helped build the story that the modern political power emanating territorially to the …
Continue readingPosted on March 8, 2023 | 59 Comments
It’s time to get stuck into the final few posts of this blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future. At long last, we’ve now reached the fourth and final part of the book, ‘Towards a small farm future’. Probably the most important idea that I try to develop in this part of the book is what I call ‘the supersedure state’. I don’t plan to go over the same ground here as in the book, but here’s a quick overview. Most mainstream positions across the political spectrum are invested in getting control of the modern, centralized, bureaucratic nation-state …
Continue readingPosted on November 28, 2022 | 41 Comments
Here’s the final instalment in my series on health and welfare in a small farm future.This one started life as a draft book chapter, subsequently unpublished, and is herewith being put out to grass unamended as a blog post. Let me know if you’d like a full citation for any of the references at the end. As previously related, I’m currently hard at work on a small writing project, so please forgive me if my activity on this blog takes a downturn over the next couple of months. As proverbially social animals, humans look to each other for support through …
Continue readingPosted on November 7, 2022 | 24 Comments
We debated the pitfalls of diving too deep into the likely politics, including the social policy, of small farm societies of the future under my last post. Maybe this post runs that risk. Or maybe it doesn’t dive deep enough. Anyway, here I’m going to broach under five headings a few aspects of social policy that I think small farm societies of the future will wrestle with – I hope without easy solutionism or false optimism. Then in my next post I’ll publish the draft chapter about social policy issues I cut from my book. And that will conclude this …
Continue readingPosted on October 25, 2022 | 70 Comments
It’s tempting to divert from my present cycle of posts to address the latest melodrama in the ongoing dark comedy of British parliamentary politics. However, it’s a temptation I’m going to resist. There are some things I want to say about it inasmuch as it illuminates the crooked path to a small farm future, but I think they can wait for a month or two while I work my way through my present agenda. It’s possible that by then we’ll be onto our fourth prime minister of the year. But the underlying reasons for the turbulence won’t have changed, and …
Continue readingPosted on October 9, 2022 | 50 Comments
This post is the third and final instalment of my engagement with the Eden story and its contemporary implications for a small farm future, based on the debate I’ve had with Sean Domencic and other commenters here. My thanks to Sean and everyone else for raising so many interesting issues. I can’t pursue everything that everyone’s raised, but below I address a few of the points that came up, and this (with apologies) already amounts to a pretty long post. If you’re not so interested in all this stuff, hopefully you’ll join us next time for a look at welfare …
Continue readingPosted on September 5, 2022 | 52 Comments
Time to move on in this blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future,with a post about the last chapter in Part III – Chapter 16, ‘From religion to science (and back)’. If, however, you’re bored of reading what I have to say about a small farm future, you can listen to what I have to say about it instead. A couple of interviews have recently landed here and here, although one of them was recorded quite some time ago. A change is as good as a rest, they say. Anyway, back to Chapter 16 for those inclined to …
Continue readingPosted on August 8, 2022 | 44 Comments
In this post, I aim to pick up where I left off last time with my review of George Monbiot’s Regenesis, mostly in reference to its theme of urbanism (there’s also a bit of housekeeping and an apology at the end). But first, since it’s kind of a propos, some brief remarks on the trip I took last week, which involved me bicycling from Frome to Chepstow and back, among other things for an enjoyable in-conversation session with eco-philosopher and activist Rupert Read at the Green Gathering (a recording of most of it is here). Much of the southern part …
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