What Cuba’s “organic revolution” taught me about AI
The Cuban experience now looks to me like an even more impressive success story, showing purely human intelligence coping with a seriously life-threatening situation at nation-state scale.
Building resilient food and farming systems
Localism, manufactured food and energy futures: thoughts from the Groundswell Festival
There will be no food factories on a dead planet, and there will be no low-carbon manufactured food in a fossil-fuelled energy system.
CAP Strategic Plans: More Money, Less Accountability
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, the agricultural sector has found itself embroiled in an ongoing crisis.
Saying No to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje
Who needs to read Saying No to a Farm-Free Future? Anyone thinking that the ecomodernist prescription might be a good idea; and anyone arguing with ecomodernists and looking for data to back up their feeling that “food” factories in megacities is not the best path.
Review: Saying NO to Ecomodermism. Smaje Versus Monbiot, It’s No Contest
How do those raised in a culture of separation from nature, with abundant exosomatic energy from fossil fuels and vast transportation networks, develop the knowledge, skills, and new culture that draws from the past while preparing for a very different future? Chris Smaje helps us out.
Stepping beyond the livestock sustainability debate
If you know people who are raising livestock in low impact and low energy ways that enhance your local food system, then hold tight to them because they are probably pioneers who will be needed as we enter new worlds of agrarian localism.
‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’ – out this week
My book is a polemical critique of George Monbiot’s book, Regenesis. In it, I make the case for agrarian localism in the face of his derision for the same.
CAP Environmental Derogations: What is the Impact on Food Security?
The science is clear: the long-term challenges for our food systems are adaptability to climate change and reversing the decline of biodiversity. But as is often the case, science was muted.
We need less competition
In reality, the antonym to competition is not at all monopoly but is rather cooperation and solidarity.
Five bad arguments against agrarian localism
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism.
Putting the Meadow Back Into Your Loaf
We evolved with fermentation. Our language and cognitive function, our physiological and social structure, evolved around bread.
Rural Realities | Testing Grounds for Wellbeing
The countryside is a nice place to live. Farmers are happy. That’s what we heard on the ground in the cooperative farms we visited in France in 2021 and 2022.