From Energy Transition to Energy Reduction
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
My request to those working in the renewable energy industry is to ask themselves before undertaking any new project: “Will this help people to live a lower energy lifestyle than they previously did?” – which, regrettably, is not something we can say of the low carbon energy installed globally to date. If they can’t answer yes to the question, I’d request they dump the project and seek another one. It’s urgent.
The Three Causes of Global Ecocide
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
In a recent post I questioned the well-known formula: Human Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. But I don’t question that humans now have a severe impact on earth systems. So if not PAT, then what? Here I’m going to lay out some other factors that I suggest underlie our impact and our present predicament in a more fundamental sense than the PAT variables.
After the Anthropocene: Notes from a Distempered Winter
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Ultimately, the song of nature is call and response. It’s a collective game of gambits and counter-gambits that doesn’t have much truck with uppity soloists. So while I half agree with this website’s go-to agronomist Andy McGuire that there’s scarcely such a thing as a ‘balance of nature’, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we humans have no need to seek our own kinds of balance.
For Whom the Bell Tolls: a Small Farm Future COVID-19 Special
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
In times of crisis, especially in urban situations, a lot of the usual individualist concerns drop away and people create ingenious new commons to get by, ‘paradises built in hell’ in the resonant phrase of Rebecca Solnit. But I’d argue the longer and larger task is to dwell less on this transient commoning and focus instead on building the conditions in which people can create their own livelihoods renewably and locally as individuals-in-communities.
The Population Problem Problem
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So while as individuals, as consumers, as parents or as non-parents, we agonize and sermonize over our own and others’ lifestyle choices, the oil companies will keep lobbying, and the GDP and emissions lines will keep tracking upwards until we reach a point of reckoning when the size of the human population or how many children anyone has will be the last of our concerns.
What if We Only Ate Food from Local Farms?
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So, if you’re rich enough to think about these things, I’d commend the opening question as a handy personal resilience health-checker. Are there farms and gardens within walking distance of where you live that can provide for all your food needs, and those of all the other local residents? More to the point if you’re not yourself a farmer or a grower, are there people within walking distance of where you live who are likely to be willing to provide for your food needs in future scenarios of energy, climate or economic turbulence?
Loss of a Small Abattoir and a Small Farm Future
By Chris Smaje, Sustainable Food Trust
To me, the more telling vandalism is in the gutting of local economies, wrought by the huge industrial abattoirs, markets, feedlots and all the other paraphernalia of modern large-scale farming which has been removed from public view. In the past, towns and cities usually grew up around working functions, as commercial or industrial centres.
Of Chancers and Last-Chancers
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
But I do have a Plan B if George’s vision succeeds. In that eventuality, I’m going to slip the fence of his urban dystopia with my sheep, find a pleasant grassy spot somewhere, and make my living as a mammal and a farmer, surrounded by other wild creatures.