Chris Smaje

My main purpose in the book was only to suggest that a small farm future is pretty much a given, and whether that future proves attractive or ugly is collectively down to us and our successors.

Supersedure situations in which the zombie state fails to deliver welfare locally and people have to start innovating their own local solutions can take many forms and by their nature are always going to be locally specific and deeply contextual.

I’ve always thought that a long-term positive of Brexit might be a dawning realization that if you want to eat food locally you probably need to produce it locally, for the most part.

When the high-energy authoritarian political centres fail, which ultimately they will, my hope is that some of these ‘irrelevant’ places will have forged resilient material cultures and mature political institutions that will enable them to usher our descendants into the next chapter of human history.

In this view, small farm society is almost its own welfare system. But, as with every political vision, no doubt the reality falls somewhat short of the ideal. How would people take care of each other in a small farm future?

Perhaps, as the shamans of old-time cultures knew, what matters most is the patient’s proper integration into the wider community. Which I take to be an encouraging pointer to the possible good health available in a small farm future.