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. Sheesh, I got so exhausted from all that blog writing that I decided to take a break and do something different – so now I’m writing a book.
Sincerest thanks to all commenters for keeping things alive here. My least commented post was Another England, or Another Rome? with a mere twenty-four comments. It was one of my longest too, meaning I had to expend 142 words for every response. C’mon guys, help me out a little.
The most commented post was How many solar panels can dance on the head of a pin?,with 184 comments, turning out at twenty words per comment. A bit more like it.
It’s customary at this time of year for me to hold out my begging bowl and politely ask for donations in recompense for all those words. So many words. Well, if you’re minded to click on the Donate button so I can run out and buy an extra parsnip for my festive meal, I won’t try to stop you (I’m joking of course – the parsnips are in the garden, if only we can remember where we sowed them…) And for those people with a paid subscription on Substack or who have otherwise donated during the year, I extend my sincere gratitude.
But having somewhat embarrassed myself earlier in the year by moaning about the impoverished life of the writer/grower, I’m not going to actively ask for donations. Compared to most people in this crazy word, I’m more than fine financially. Embarrassment aside, I do think it’s good to check in with myself and others sometimes about how to value things. Ultimately, if there’s any value in my writing it’s in non-monetary forms, so what I’d most welcome is a few words if you’re minded to give them in the comments below about whether it’s all worth it. I get quite a lot of positive comments about my writing, and a few brickbats too. So, as Santa gets his sleigh organised, I’ll settle for the usual end-of-year moral accounting – on balance, have I been naughty or nice?
I’ll wrap up this post, if you’ll pardon the pun, with some more Christmassy accounting via a nod to Charles Dickens. Time, then, for three short ghost stories of the past, the present and the future.
A ghost from the past
A personal ghost from the past I’d like to lay to rest is spending too much time arguing against ecomodernist techno-fix solutionism in general, and more specifically its food system variants in the form of things like manufactured food and radical ‘land-sparing’ rewilding, which I’ve critiqued in recent writings like this one, and this one.
I wrote quite a bit over the last year that followed up on my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, laying out some positions around ‘feeding the world’ with small-scale local mixed farming, renewable energy and the energetic implausibility of manufactured food (see also here) in response to various critics – many of whom were polite (thanks!), but not all of them. I think I’ve now pretty much said what I want to say on those topics, at least for the time being.
But a propos of my past critique of manufactured food it’s worth checking out this recent comment from much valued commenter Steve L, who’s been tracking the share performance of pioneering bacterial high-protein slurry manufacturers Solar Foods. Just as Steve says, with shares currently a snip at under €5, I trust those who’ve been telling me – quite loudly in some cases – that I’m just an ol’ backward-looking romantic who’s off the pace of developments in the modern food industry will put their money where their mouths are and buy in.
As I see it, the real backward-looking move belongs to the ecomodernists, with their ultimately apolitical 1960s-style ‘white heat of technology’ framings around how to solve the world’s problems – what Anthony Galluzzo calls an “ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist “lost futures” of the twentieth century” in his book, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in Seventies and Today. I wrote about his book here, and I’d thoroughly recommend it – at least for those who like to take their social theory neat.
Anyway, dispelling naïve tech solutionism is a thankless task. No sooner have you laboriously critiqued one dread manifestation of it than another one comes along. I want out. Die, damned ghost!
A ghost from the present
Meanwhile, farming is hot in the present news cycle here in the UK in respect of the farmer protests arising from the government’s partial removal of inheritance tax relief on farmland.
I won’t get into the details of this, wherein the devil lies. I favour inheritance tax in principle, but I believe this policy change will be the final death knell of the few remaining mid-sized family farms and a gift to further corporate and rich-list landownership.
What’s been especially depressing is the outpouring of public bile I’ve seen against farmers, and the endless repetition of ignorant talking points along the lines of farmers as subsidy junkies, “if they can’t make their farms pay, then they should quit and let someone who can take over” etc etc. The nadir for me came when somebody online dismissed a farmer’s statement that people relied on farmers for all their food as “incredibly arrogant”.
True, some of the agitation against the policy has come from self-interested rich folks who stand to lose out from it (Jeremy Clarkson, get outta here). True, also, it’s wise to ignore blowhard opinions on the internet. But I’ve seen much the same ignorance from senior academics and thought leaders.
Now, I’ve been feeling slightly bothered about how unbothered I’ve been about Trump’s electoral victory over in the USA. Oddly, the IHT brouhaha has got me down more. I mean, it’s more immediately local to me, but possibly less important in the scheme of things. I guess in the case of Trump, the problem is that the electorate was basically presented with the question ‘Trump or Harris?’, to which the correct answer is no. So giving them a bald either/or choice is a blunt tool. Whereas the outpouring of absolute blame ignorance about the basic realities of food, farming and material life from otherwise thoughtful, well-educated and caring people I’ve seen around the IHT issue leaves little doubt about people’s true thoughts. It also leaves me somewhat despairing about how we’re going to pull through.
One part of this relates to the whole question of absurdly low food prices and absurdly high land and housing prices that we touched on in discussions here recently, and I’ve also written about from time to time. It’s a deep structural issue that the government isn’t addressing. Fiddling around with IHT doesn’t begin to address it.
Another part is about the political dividing lines that are opening up. A sideshow issue here is that the Labour Party had a historical opportunity to bring the traditional Tory-voting farmers onside in view of farmers’ disillusionment with the latter party, and they’ve blown it big time within a few months of taking power. But there are so few farmers (part of the problem…) that it doesn’t really matter electorally. The Labour Party’s indifference is similar to the Tories’ indifference. To both parties’ shame and to the long-term peril of this country, they both care more about return on assets than about food security. Maybe it takes a farmer to talk some sense about this issue.
A more interesting aspect of the dividing lines is something we’ve touched on here from time to time and I’ve been feeling more strongly in myself lately in respect of the way that the old left/right distinction is breaking down and politics is reforming in different ways. I’ve recently been reading some of the literature about the professional-managerial class – I was embarrassingly ignorant about it until recently, kind of assuming it was just a US term for middle class or white collar. Reading up on it, a few things have clicked into place for me about my own politics, my career trajectory from university teaching to the land, and why I find myself embracing a somewhat eclectic mix of political views that cross familiar old political barricades.
I hope to say a bit more about this. But not now. In the future.
A ghost from the future
I’m spending a lot of time at the moment writing my book, currently titled Lights for a Dark Age. Writing books sucks. Writing books is hell. The book is about the future. I can’t wait for the future to happen so that I’m not writing the book anymore. My festive wish is for light at the end of the tunnel for Lights for a Dark Age. Obviously, though, it’s going to be a great book. When I’m in the future, I hope to look back at the past and be delighted that I wrote it back then. In the past.
The book, and pretty much everything I’ve said above, circles around a similar set of issues. Our present historical moment emphasises limitless self-referential synthetic refashioning. This isn’t going to turn out well. We need to emphasise limits, local ecological implication, appeal to the virtues and critical tradition-making. It’s easy for this not to turn out well too for various reasons, among them the fact that we’re so far down the road of limitless synthetic refashioning it’s hard to change course safely. But we have to try. I will give you the manual. But some of the pages are a bit blurry at the moment.
And with that it remains for me to wish everyone a joyous festive season. I will be back in 2025 with more hard-won wisdom from the editor’s chair. But probably not all that much wisdom until I’ve finished writing my book.
Current reading
I’m reading a whole bunch of stuff at the moment as background for Lights for a Dark Age. Recreationally, I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Though it’s a twisted form of recreation – anyone who calls me a doomer ought to spend some time in the dark dystopian world of Ms Butler’s imagination. I’m gonna give myself a one-day break on Christmas day, and have a look at Laurie Lee’s Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry.
