Chris Smaje
Chris Smaje works a small mixed farm in Somerset, England, and blogs at smallfarmfuture.org.uk. He is the author of A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth. He has also written on environmental and agricultural issues for publications like The Land, Permaculture Magazine, and Dark Mountain, and in academic journals.
New Worlds to Build
George Monbiot recently came out swinging for me in his article ‘The cruel fantasies of well-fed people’, concerning my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. Since that book in large part is a rejoinder to his own volume, Regenesis, I can hardly blame him for aiming a few blows. I just wish they hadn’t…
Five bad arguments against agrarian localism
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism. If it does, obviously that’s fine. It’s a polemical sort of book, so counterargument is only to be expected. But my hope is for thoughtful, engaged…
Of George Monbiot, mathematical modernism and the case for agrarian localism
When you read a book with which you profoundly disagree, I guess it’s usually best just to shrug, put it back on the shelf and get on with your work. The hatchet job review is a popular but ignoble genre. Having been the object of one myself I can attest the outcomes are rarely positive,…
Making the Case for a Small Farm Future
For a good stretch of the last 20 years, I’ve tried as best I can to be a small-scale farmer. The results have varied from the worthwhile to the hapless, always constrained by a world geared to treating the efforts of farmers in general, and small-scale farmers in particular, with indifference at best. But my…
What If We Only Ate Food From Local Farms?
“We would die from starvation. It’s that simple.” Or so TV botanist James Wong recently tweeted in response to the title question, taken from a BBC feature. In this post I’m going to make the case that we wouldn’t, that it isn’t simple, and that in fact our chances of starving are probably higher –…