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Jan 6, 2025 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
Ed. note: This piece was published on Chris’ blog on December 21, 2024. And so we come to the end of another year’s blogging. Twenty-six posts authored by the editor-in-chief here, with two guest posts from Alice and Jake – my thanks to them. All told, there were 1,886 comments (including my responses) to my own authored posts. And, when aggregated, my posts amounted to 68,704 words.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
A few news items curated for you from the Small Farm Future office:First, the aforementioned office is pretty much where I’m going to be living for the next few months, having just signed a contract with Chelsea Green to write a new book provisionally entitled Lights in a Dark Age with a view to publication in Autumn 2025. I’ll say a bit more about the book in future posts but since most of it isn’t written yet I spy an opportunity for some reader input.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
Apologies that I’ve been so silent on here of late. Too much going on. My thanks though to Alice for keeping the flame burning here with her guest post – very interesting discussion. In other news, Jim Thomas has filed this interesting report from COP16 in Cali, and in its budget this week the British government has applied limited inheritance tax for the first time to farmland transfers.
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Sep 23, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
The news cycle just keeps spinning in the murky, corporate-fuelled spaces of the alt-meat and political influencing industries, so although I signalled my intention in my last post to move on from my critique of ecomodernism, I think a quick news bulletin is in order before I pause and take stock in the latter part of this post.
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Sep 22, 2024 | 
chrissmaje.com | Chris Smaje
Posted on September 22, 2024 | 6 CommentsThe news cycle just keeps spinning in the murky, corporate-fuelled spaces of the alt-meat and political influencing industries, so although I signalled my intention in my last post to move on from my critique of ecomodernism, I think a quick news bulletin is in order before I pause and take stock in the latter part of this post.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
There’s one last bit of business outstanding from my previous project critiquing ecomodernism. This concerns the forces that may drive either ruralisation or further urbanisation in the future. In comments on this site, perhaps most relevantly here and here, Cameron Roberts disagreed with my view that future ruralisation is likely – and that if we don’t try to make it happen by design soon, it’ll happen by default later. I said I’d offer a longer analysis of this issue, and here it is.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
A couple of news items just in, relating to my recent critiques of manufactured food. Apologies for harping back to this theme, but I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the unfolding story. At the end, I’ll cast forward to new themes. So, this recent article is another rather starry-eyed piece heralding the bright future for Solein, the protein powder manufactured from bacteria by the Finnish company Solar Foods.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
I’ve made a case in my writings that, to oversimplify, the future is likely to devolve into low energy-input local societies based around widespread agrarianism in one of two main ways: We persist with the present mostly fossil-fuelled economy until the resulting global heating, along with other drivers, brings the curtain down on our present civilization, leading to a (bad) small farm future for those (un)lucky enough to survive We stop using fossil fuels, resulting in a lower energy...
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
chrissmaje.com | Chris Smaje
Posted on August 12, 2024 | 1 Comment I’ve made a case in my writings that, to oversimplify, the future is likely to devolve into low energy-input local societies based around widespread agrarianism in one of two main ways: We persist with the present mostly fossil-fuelled economy until the resulting global heating, along with other drivers, brings the curtain down on our present civilization, leading to a (bad) small farm future for those (un)lucky enough to survive We stop using fossil...
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
resilience.org | Chris Smaje
I thought I’d introduce a new element to the blog starting today with this first ‘news’ post. The idea is to intersperse my longer essay-style offerings with shorter postings on matters that seem newsworthy according to my idiosyncratic view of world affairs. ‘News’ in the sense of a mix of facts and opinion, because as The Guardian doesn’t say but ought to: ‘comment is free and so are facts and it’s harder to separate them out than you might think’. Anyway, let me know your thoughts.
