Finding Lights in a Dark Age

My book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, is officially published today in the UK (US publication is 11 November). It’s available in paperback, e-book and audiobook versions. There’s a launch this evening at the town hall in Frome, my hometown. It’s fully booked, which is nice.

I wrote a little bit about the book here. I’ll start a short-to-medium length cycle of blog posts about it soon, but I think not immediately. At least that will give those who read my online posts and are planning to read the book a chance to get stuck in before I offer my meta-commentary. And I have a few more posts on other matters in the pipeline.

I’m thinking of Finding Lights… as the third and final book in a trilogy that I’ve published with Chelsea Green. Maybe it helps to introduce it in relation to those books. In A Small Farm Future I explained the crises or driving forces that I believe are impelling us away from globalised state welfare capitalism, and further explained why these forces will impel us toward small-scale farming and agrarian localism. To quote the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, I believe we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Though actually, I don’t think the easy way is any longer an option. We can do it in hard ways or harder ways, but a small farm future seems like a given. I’m just trying to highlight the hard ways we might achieve it, to help avoid the even harder ones.

In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I tried to warn against the siren song of ecomodernism, specifically in the farming and energy sectors. Ecomodernism has been aptly defined as “a movement that treats green technology as a substitute for political and economic change” and indeed there is a narrative style in the book and policy worlds which involves scaring the hell out of us with terrible future scenarios before pulling a rabbit out of a hat with some high-tech, high-energy new gizmology which supposedly will preserve high-energy urban civilization with little fundamental political and economic change. The touted gizmologies rarely stand up to scrutiny (the fanfares for the manufactured bacterial food that I critiqued in that book have already pretty much faded to black just two years later), but alas people keep falling