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 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 September 15, 2024 | 89 Comments
There’s one last bit of business outstanding from my previous project critiquing ecomodernism. This concerns the forces that may drive either ruralisation or further urbanisation in the future. In comments on this site, perhaps most relevantly here and here, Cameron Roberts disagreed with my view that future ruralisation is likely – and that if we don’t try to make it happen by design soon, it’ll happen by default later. I said I’d offer a longer analysis of this issue, and here it is. I’m going to structure it around Cameron’s comments, but his points are widely held so I see …
Continue readingPosted on February 28, 2024 | 38 Comments
The gist of my last two posts is that manufactured microbial food isn’t plausible on energetic grounds as a mass food approach unless there’s a rapid and large expansion of available global energy, and that the more likely future trend is in the opposite direction – towards less energy. Like it or not, I think that means a future of low-energy agrarian localism. The main reason I try to prepare the ground for agrarian localism in my writing is therefore because I don’t think we have much choice. I fear that the transition to agrarian localism might be troubled and …
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 November 5, 2023 | 114 Comments
It’s time to turn my attention to a blog cycle concerning my recent book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, which I imagine will probably occupy somewhere between ten and twenty posts working sequentially through the book, no doubt with some digressions in between. Incidentally, the book has recently been long listed for the Non-Obvious Book Awards – a pleasure and an honour that I didn’t see coming. Obviously. I’ll get started on the blog cycle in a moment. Meanwhile, just to report that my (mostly indirect) war of words with George Monbiot continues online, with George still enthusiastically trailing …
Continue readingPosted on April 6, 2023 | 22 Comments
Time to move on to a brief discussion of Chapter 19 of my book A Small Farm Future in this blog cycle. The chapter is called ‘Reconstituted peasantries’, which derives from a chapter in another book, Caribbean Transformations, by the late Sidney Mintz, an anthropologist who was one of my teachers during my brief and ill-fated sojourn at graduate school in the US. I wrote an obituary of Sid a few years back, and what I said in it in some ways formed the basis of Chapter 19, so I’m kind of retracing old ground here. But I think it …
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 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 25, 2022 | 82 Comments
Here, I’m going to respond to Sean Domencic’s commentary on my article ‘Genesis and J. Baird Callicott’ published in my last post, and try to pick up on as many of the comments beneath it as I can (albeit too briefly or evasively, I regret). Sean’s commentary is an exemplary exercise in constructive criticism of a kind that’s all too rare, and also a lovely piece of writing in its own right. My thanks to him for taking the trouble to produce it. I’ll engage with Sean’s commentary in a moment, but it’s been quite a while since I published …
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