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Among the ancestors
Among the ancestors Note to Substack readers. I replicate the essays that I publish on my chrissmaje.com site here on Substack. I’ve switched comments off here because I don’t want to juggle two parallel conversation threads, but if you’d like to discuss my essays feel free to join the conversation over on my website. Currently, all my […]
It takes an ecovillage…: some thoughts on ‘Going to Seed’
It takes an ecovillage…: some thoughts on ‘Going to Seed’ I enjoyed writing a book review for my last post so much that I’m going to write another one this time around. But whereas last time it was a long review of a very long book addressing itself to a large slice of human history, here I […]
Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns
Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns This is the last in a somewhat interrupted series of posts about property rights in small farm futures and small farm pasts, which started here, looked at the idea of work and self-ownership here, considered private property here and common property here. The missing piece in terms of standard definitions […]
Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership
Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership I’ll begin with a brief account of how our modern global grain trading system was invented in Chicago in the 19th century, which is maybe a bit of a jolt from the present focus of this blog cycle on the forms of property but hopefully […]
Property ownership in a small farm future
Property ownership in a small farm future And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book. A lot of people I encounter profess complete disdain for the very idea of ‘owning’ land, usually along the lines of […]
Small Farm Future: Why some anticipated problems will not arise
Small Farm Future: Why some anticipated problems will not arise In his book Small Farm Future Chris Smaje worries about some problems that might arise in a society in which these kinds of farms meet most food demand. This area is also targeted by Alex Heffron and Kai Heron in their critique of the book, which their […]
Pig apples: or, why small farmsteads are efficient and effective
Pig apples: or, why small farmsteads are efficient and effective Nearly twenty years ago, we planted seven acres of woodland on our holding with help from a government grant that stipulated the trees must be native woodland varieties. Among the ones we chose were crab apples, which we planted along the rides and woodland edges […]
Our household farming future
Our household farming future Back to the blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future with a little more about household-based farming. A couple of posts back Greg Reynolds suggested I might write some short declarative sentences about my case for household farming, which struck me as a good idea. So here’s my best shot at […]
Commons and households in a small farm future
Commons and households in a small farm future As I mentioned in my previous post, The Land Magazine recently published a lengthy article from me, ‘Commons and households in a small farm future’. In this post I’m simply going to reproduce the article. The version here is my original draft which is slightly, but not very, different […]
How I grew, and lost, a rainforest
How I grew, and lost, a rainforest And so I’ve come to the end of my posts concerning Part II of A Small Farm Future and I shall soon be moving onto Parts III and IV, which are the ones that have generated most of the discussions and disputations over the book. I include this post by […]
It isn’t nice to block the courtroom…
It isn’t nice to block the courtroom… A bit of news from the home front here at Small Farm Future, and a few reflections based around it. Today, my wife received a suspended prison sentence for disrupting a court as an act of protest against government inaction on climate change. Here is a short video she made […]
Two hundred miles from Hartlepool
Two hundred miles from Hartlepool I’m going to interrupt my present blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future for one post to comment on recent political events in Britain. Where this post ends up in fact is pretty relevant to some of the larger arguments of my book. The events I’m referring to are last […]
The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth…
The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth… …is a vegan diet. Well, at least it is according to Joseph Poore. But I have an alternative suggestion. The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth is to stop thinking there’s a single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet […]
Can organic farming feed the world?
Can organic farming feed the world? I discuss various aspects of so-called ‘alternative’ agriculture at some length in Chapter 6 of A Small Farm Future1, and I don’t intend to retrace many of those steps here. But there’s a couple of further things I do want to say in this blog cycle. Here, I’ll focus on […]
Home is not the house but where the garden is
Home is not the house but where the garden is My title is a quotation from archaeologist Francis Pryor’s book about ‘prehistoric’ Britain, but it serves well enough as a summary of the general argument in my own book about our likely global future, and the need to refocus the household from a place of […]
