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 1, 2024 | 99 Comments
A brief post today to wish Small Farm Future readers a happy new year and to give a preview of plans for this blog in 2024. In the coming week, I’ll be at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, joining a panel with Lord Deben, chair of the Climate Change Committee, Kyle Lischak of Client Earth and the inimitable Rosie Boycott to discuss the role of agroecological farming in the transition to net zero. So … should you accept this assignment, you have roughly one day to get back to me with your suggestions for what I should say. If you’re at …
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 November 12, 2022 | 69 Comments
Just a quick info interlude before I post the final instalment of my present mini-series on health and welfare in a small farm future, probably on Monday. Mostly, I want to alert you to the fact that Steve L – a much valued member of the Small Farm Future community – has consolidated his analyses of the case for manufactured foods into a supremely informative document, which I’ve posted on the Research page – available here. I haven’t fully got my head around it yet and will probably need to read it several times to take it all in. But …
Continue readingPosted on September 13, 2022 | 28 Comments
Today, small farm future brings you a rare guest post, authored by Sean Domencic who regular readers here will know well. But before handing over to him, I probably need to sketch a bit of background. When I started thinking and reading seriously about food, farming and ecology in the late 1990s (and then doing it), it felt like a large gap in my education that I needed to fill with self-study, both in terms of practical skills and wider intellectual contexts. On the latter front, I came across eco-philosopher J. Baird Callicott’s Beyond the Land Ethic in a Seattle …
Continue readingPosted on August 15, 2022 | 92 Comments
I’d been planning to move on from my present focus on ruralism and urbanism, but since George Monbiot briefly broke cover to launch some fusillades at me on Twitter last week I’m going to ruminate a bit more on the issue in the light of his intervention. I mostly want to focus on the bigger issues that our little war of words raises, rather than the war itself. But a brief personal backstory seems relevant1. I’ve long argued that the likeliest long-term future for humanity in the face of climate, energy, water, soil and political-economic realities will involve a turn …
Continue readingPosted on July 19, 2022 | 147 Comments
A step sideways from my last two posts about urbanism and ruralism with a review of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis (Allen Lane, 2022) – though it’s kind of a propos, since his book showcases the pro-urbanism and anti-ruralism I’ve been critiquing. When you read a book with which you profoundly disagree, I guess it’s usually best just to shrug, put it back on the shelf and get on with your work. The hatchet job review is a popular but ignoble genre. Having been the object of one myself I can attest the outcomes are rarely positive, apart perhaps from a …
Continue readingPosted on May 24, 2022 | 46 Comments
I enjoyed writing a book review for my last post so much that I’m going to write another one this time around. But whereas last time it was a long review of a very long book addressing itself to a large slice of human history, here I offer you a short review of a much shorter book about the life of a single man. The man in question is Simon Fairlie, and the book is Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir (Chelsea Green, 2022). Disclosure: I know Simon a little, as I suspect do many people in England with more …
Continue readingPosted on May 9, 2022 | 63 Comments
Time for a book review to mark the passage of my present lengthy blog cycle about my own little book into its later phases. And so, with the usual caveats about my entirely unsystematic and biased approach to the reviewing business, let us take a look at Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Harvard, 2019). At 799 pages, it makes the 692-page doorstopper from Graeber and Wengrow that I last reviewed seem almost flimsy by comparison. But I have read every page of McCarraher’s tome (well, almost – see below) to bring you …
Continue readingPosted on April 3, 2022 | 46 Comments
I’ll start this post with a quick shout out to the good folks of Just Stop Oil putting themselves on the line for a habitable future, and seemingly getting noticed less than other recent climate actions of more generalized protest. Indeed, there’s been more coverage in the press of the allegations against my local MP than of Just Stop Oil. If these turn out to be true, it might explain the difficulties of trying to get a meaningful response from his office. What was it XR have been saying about the need to go ‘beyond politics’…? Anyway, on to the …
Continue readingPosted on January 13, 2022 | 65 Comments
I’ve only recently come across Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World but I thought I’d take a breather from my present blog cycle by taking a brief look at it. Actually, it’s not really a breather, as many of its themes run close to those I examine in my own book. Yunkaporta offers far more food for thought than I can cover in a blog post, so here I’m just going to pick out a few themes that interest me by way of ten discussion points. Then, in the next two or three posts …
Continue readingPosted on December 13, 2021 | 138 Comments
The late David Graeber and David Wengrow’s (henceforth GW) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Allen Lane, 2021) is the newest big book of revisionist global history on the block. I’ve been fighting the urge to write a review of it, but since it illuminates several themes of interest to this blog, what follows is a white flag of surrender to that fine ambition. When I say The Dawn of Everything is a big book, I mean really big. Several reviewers of my own tome commented with palpable tiredness about how exhaustively argued (272 pages), endnoted (12 …
Continue readingPosted on August 13, 2021 | 51 Comments
I keep writing prefatory posts before wading into the content from Parts III and IV of my book A Small Farm Future in this blog cycle, for which apologies. I promise this will be the last before I get down to business, although I do believe a little business is transacted below. Anyway, this means I’m going to hold off further discussion of Max Ajl’s important book left over from my last post for the time being. In this post I want to talk about another writer, and relate his work to the question of a small farm future. The …
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