Finding Lights in a Dark Age – or, writing ἀποκάλυψις

I’ve all but finished my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, which will be out in the autumn. A few words here about its context, and some other bits and bobs of news.

I got quite a lot of input from readers of this blog about suggested content as I was preparing to write the book. Thank you – it was much appreciated. Some people were interested in more of the staple fare of this blog: agrarianism, climate change, energy futures, politics and suchlike from a quasi-academic perspective. Others pushed me to explore distributism, Catholic Social Teaching and matters of faith and spirituality in more depth. Some suggested a global overview of small-scale farming and societies oriented toward renewable local livelihoods. Yet others were interested in the story of my own little smallholding. And some advocated for a turn to fiction, with a future-focused novel about how local societies might fare in the context of climate change.

Obviously, I couldn’t encompass all those things within the pages of one relatively short book. There was a need to narrow it down. So what I did was … no, actually the book does encompass elements of all those things within its pages. It’s been quite a journey writing it over the last few months. Perhaps the book runs the risk of breadth over depth, or too many different approaches jumbled together. But on the whole I’m happy with it, and I hope others will find it interesting.

I’ll write a little more on this site about the book’s themes and content in due course. For now, I’ll just make a few remarks about the overarching context. The first being that I just can’t take seriously any more the idea that the existing global political economy is going to survive for long in anything like its present form – high-energy, statist, welfare capitalist, consumerist etc. That’s quite a dark idea, because there’s no way its dissolution can occur without a lot of suffering and conflict. Yet one of the features of past dark ages is that they weren’t so dark for everyone, especially for many ordinary people. So the challenge is to seek what light is to be found in the present impending dark age, and try to help manifest it.

We have numerous ways of ducking that challenge. Perhaps they can be broadly divided