All the king’s horses

It would be folly to continue building bulky, heavy, massively overpowered vehicles to move one or two passengers along roads, and therefore devoting a huge share of our still scarce clean power supplies to building and/or operating that oversized vehicle fleet.

A Neo-Distributist Proposal

It certainly feels as though some new ideas are needed to overcome the ecological, political and socioeconomic troubles of present times. There is a way to address these troubles, not so much through an old book as through an old political movement, namely distributism.

The Work of Radical Frugality

But with time, our lives as consumers in the capitalist economy will appear frail when compared to a life in the home economy. And eventually, we’ll come to understand that this is about more than making cupcakes. A lot more.

The Authoritarian Fetish

This article questions the wisdom that climate-induced political changes are inevitably authoritarian; and suggests instead that centralisation and political dominion will weaken as we leave the stable Holocene era, potentially — but by no means necessarily — opening the possibility for more reciprocal models of political organisation.

A novelist, a journalist and an anthropologist…

When it comes to applying these lessons to agricultural history in Britain or elsewhere with a view to creating a just and renewable agrarian future, what I take from Sahlins’s thought is almost the opposite of what a superficial reading of ‘The original affluent society’ might suggest.