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 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 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 5, 2022 | 86 Comments
I’ve written quite a bit on this blog over the years about urbanism, ruralism and the case for deurbanization – the theme of Chapter 15 of A Small Farm Future where this blog cycle has currently lighted. To be honest, I get a bit exasperated about urbanism. It’s not because I’m against city living as such. In an ideal world, I’d like it if everyone could live wherever they damn well pleased and do whatever they wanted. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and it seems to me that climate, energy, water and waste realities are going to …
Continue readingPosted on June 28, 2022 | 19 Comments
Time to move onto the next chapter of my book A Small Farm Future in this blog cycle about it, which is Chapter 15 – ‘The country and the city’. I’m probably going to write two or three shortish posts on this topic. In this one, I’ll approach it obliquely with an account of a walk I took last week. To blow off a few cobwebs, I decided to spend a couple of days hiking a part of the Ridgeway, which has been in use for around 5,000 years and is supposedly Britain’s oldest road. It’s now a national hiking …
Continue readingPosted on June 21, 2022 | 54 Comments
I’ve been trying to blog my way through the chapters of my book A Small Farm Future, but I’ve got a bit stuck of late somewhere in the middle of Part III. This was a hard part of the book to write, because I wanted to avoid construing effortless but improbable future utopias of my own devising. The opposite danger is writing an over-generalized account which, when all is said and done, doesn’t amount to saying much more than ‘blow me, this is all really complicated and there aren’t any ideal options’. This is of limited help to the reader, …
Continue readingPosted on April 25, 2022 | 48 Comments
This post addresses some questions of household, family and gender relations in a small farm future. I wrote about this in Chapter 12 of my book, and also in this article and this post. But there are some things I’d like to add – partly a few new thoughts, and partly by way of response to points made earlier that I wasn’t able to respond to at the time. So, a brief reprise and reformulation before I move onto other things. As I see it, for reasons much aired on this website over the years, there will probably be a …
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 March 27, 2022 | 36 Comments
A couple of people suggested I might write something about the situation in Ukraine and associated events in relation to my thinking about a small farm future. There are two good reasons why I think I probably shouldn’t do that, one not such good reason, and one reason why I should. The two good reasons are, first, it’s a bad intellectual habit to assimilate every new event as retrospective proof of one’s prior position, and, second, it’s a bad ethical practice to use the death and suffering of multitudes as an excuse to say ‘I told you so’. The less …
Continue readingPosted on March 20, 2022 | 47 Comments
To complete my present mini-series of posts on rural and agrarian gentrification, I want to talk about what I’ll call the internship problem. This relates to the practice of employing young or new entrant people at low or no wages, usually on the basis – or at least the pretext – that the opportunity gives them experience that will enable them to get more gainful employment in the future. This practice seems to be proliferating across various job sectors nowadays as part of more general workplace casualization. The problems with it in terms of job security, potential exploitation of the …
Continue readingPosted on March 7, 2022 | 51 Comments
With Russia invading Ukraine and the IPCC bringing out its direst warning yet about the existential threat of climate change, the past week has showcased what’s always struck me as the two most likely ways for the complacent ease of life in the wealthy west to end – geopolitical and strategic conflict, or climate catastrophe. Meanwhile, here at Small Farm Future HQ we’ve been worrying about … taxation. You might think this is something of a first world problem in the present situation. But that, as I hope to show, is precisely the point – how can the disastrous consequences …
Continue readingPosted on January 25, 2022 | 68 Comments
This is the last in a somewhat interrupted series of posts about property rights in small farm futures and small farm pasts, which started here, looked at the idea of work and self-ownership here, considered private property here and common property here. The missing piece in terms of standard definitions of property ownership is public or state ownership. So here I’m going to address public ownership to complete this part of the blog cycle. But I’m not going to say much about the forms of state ownership emanating from national, federal or local government familiar from everyday modern politics. For …
Continue readingPosted on January 1, 2022 | 42 Comments
I wouldn’t normally be straining myself to get a post out on New Year’s Day, but (checks archive) blow me if today isn’t the tenth anniversary of this blog’s inception. Three hundred and fifty blog posts. Ten thousand comments. It’s quite some wordage. Has it all been worth it? I couldn’t possibly say, but I hope the landmark is enough for me to be forgiven the self-indulgence of a short trip down memory lane. When I started the blog I was four years into my tenure as the main grower for Vallis Veg, the small local veg box scheme that …
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