Arguing for a small farm future
In the future, employment opportunities will probably cluster in low-carbon, labour-intensive sectors – among which farming will loom large.
small farm future
A Small Farm Future: Could it happen in Wales?
We have here the ambitious groundwork, global in scale, for exactly the case for a small farm future that Smaje set out to write.
A Small Farm Future: Review
It likely improves the odds if we discuss and prepare for a small farm future; and reading this book can help. I envision study groups passing around a copy and then discussing it.
Both hands now – an introduction to ‘A Small Farm Future’
Well … don’t get me wrong … honestly, I’m with the left, and I’m with the agrarian renegades. But on just a few significant points I’m also with the mainstream economists and the sceptics of cornucopia.
The US election: perspectives from an ear of grain
The story of trying to hold the existing political centre will be a story of fascism, Caesarism, bread and circuses. Whereas the non-fascist story will be one of trying to create livelihoods as convivially as possible, mostly from the local resources – human and non-human – to hand.
Why We Need a Small Farm Future
If we’re to bequeath a habitable and abundant planet to our descendants, a key part of that reappraisal involves rethinking the relevance of small farm or ‘peasant’ societies that are often dismissed for their ‘backwardness’ or buried under an unusable legacy of romanticism and nostalgia.
A sociological farmer speaks…and answers questions about a Small Farm Future
But what’s perhaps of greatest import are the points where our human self-conceptions confront the wider world – and here farming looms large. Since I’m hopeless at multi-tasking, how fortunate, then, that I’m a ‘former’ social scientist and a farmer, albeit improperly!
A Small Farm Future: Excerpt
The heavy-handed nostalgia for a perfected vision of past modern achievements as the lodestar of human progress offered by figures like Steven Pinker is stuck in the past. It’s time to move forwards to a small farm future.
A Small Farm Future: Review
With great thoroughness, balance, and painstaking research Chris Smaje makes a compelling case for a return to, or revival of, the smaller, more diverse, farm culture, in order that we might feed ourselves well into the future as a nation, and even as a planet.
Beyond authenticity: the politics of agrarian localism
I’m thinking of these present two posts more as a kind of position statement on the politics underlying my forthcoming book, A Small Farm Future, and its arguments for renewable agrarianism, using the debate about XR as my foil.
A Small Farm Future
My book A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth is now hurtling on its final trajectory to land on Planet Earth mid-October.
Covid-19 Economics: Beyond Austerity and Debt-Finance
So to the question ‘how will humanity’s collective household pay for Covid-19?’ my answer is neither to squeeze the poor, nor to squeeze the future by closing your eyes and believing in the magic of the money tree. Instead, I’d suggest you look out your old spade and hoe from the back of the garden shed. There’s work to be done.