Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Hi, and welcome to my site. I’m an author, small-scale farmer and sometime academic social scientist, writing about this moment of vast change as the dynamics of climate, energy, politics and natural ecosystems upend familiar assumptions about how the world is supposed to work. I’ve written two books, numerous articles and a long-running blog that looks at all this from a variety of angles, but mostly grounded in the belief that we need to develop low-energy localisms that give people the means to make a practical livelihood from their surrounding ecological base – a small farm future, the title of my first book.
Do have a look around my site, and contribute to the discussion if you wish.
Please note that although my blog is long-running, this is a new site as of June 2023 and there are parts of it that I’m still building, so you may find that the content is cursory in places.
Chris
Finding Lights in a Dark Age
Sharing Land, Work and Craft
‘Incisive and irenic, this is Chris Smaje at his wide-ranging best, exploring the territories of liveable-but-realistic human futures. Chris sweeps away the cobwebs of late-modern thinking to sketch what a sober pathway through the coming morass might look like. A guiding light!’
Carwyn Graves, author of Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape
My new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age is being published in the UK in October 2025 and the US in November 2025. Global society is unquestionably heading into a period of grave crisis, when the modernist gods of state and market, left-wing and right-wing, will need to be abandoned. …
‘Incisive and irenic, this is Chris Smaje at his wide-ranging best, exploring the territories of liveable-but-realistic human futures. Chris sweeps away the cobwebs of late-modern thinking to sketch what a sober pathway through the coming morass might look like. A guiding light!’
Carwyn Graves, author of Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape
My new book, critiquing food techno-fixes and making the case for local food systems
The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
One of the few voices to challenge The Guardian’s George Monbiot on the future of food and farming (and the restoration of nature) is academic, farmer and author of A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje. In Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, Smaje presents his defense of small-scale farming and a robust critique of …
https://vetsalus.com/news/2024/01/book-review-saying-no-farm-free-future-chris-smaje
My first book
Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world. With fierce intelligence and rich evidence, he explains the vital role that small farms must play in this emerging future, artfully weaving together neglected strands of economic, ecological, cultural and political thought.”
David Bollier, director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics; coauthor (with Silke Helfrich) of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
From the back cover: “A Small Farm Future is a ground-breaking debut, destined to become a modern classic – planting a flag at the intersection between economics, agriculture and society during a time of immense crisis. Farmer and social scientist Chris Smaje makes the case for organising human societies around small-scale, …
“As a breakdown of the climate, state power and globalized markets pushes us toward an epochal transition, Chris Smaje offers us a hopeful vision of a relocalized, self-sufficient world. With fierce intelligence and rich evidence, he explains the vital role that small farms must play in this emerging future, artfully weaving together neglected strands of economic, ecological, cultural and political thought.”
David Bollier, director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Center for a New Economics; coauthor (with Silke Helfrich) of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons
I’ve been blogging about farming, ecology and politics since 2012. I welcome well-tempered discussion. Please note that if you’re a new commenter, or if you include a lot of links, your comment will go into the moderation queue before publication. I sometimes miss comments in the queue so feel free to nudge me via the Contact Form if your comment fails to appear.
Posted on October 23, 2025 | 93 Comments
A brief note here on a topic that’s been in the news lately – namely, the news. Or, more specifically, the so-called ‘legacy media’ such as national newspapers and television. And, alongside that, declining literacy and book-reading, which is obviously of great personal concern to me as the author of a recently published book, as well as a watcher of historical change. Also, religion. Let me explain. Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is a touchstone work on, well, nationalism, that religion of modern times. One of his arguments is that literate …
Continue readingPosted on October 14, 2025 | 39 Comments
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 …
Continue readingPosted on October 8, 2025 | 46 Comments
I’ve shared platforms with Westminster parliamentarians twice in the last few months, and more than that in the last few years, who’ve been dismissive in one way or another of my case for agrarian localism. Given that that case is itself quite dismissive of the ability of parliaments and centralized politics to deal with the problems of our times, perhaps it’s not surprising that I tend to find myself at loggerheads with such folks. Generally on these occasions, I’ve been on the receiving end of a mini-lecture along the lines that (1) the present world is one of mass urbanism, …
Continue readingPosted on September 28, 2025 | 46 Comments
It’s time for me to break my silence here – thanks for keeping the discussion going in my absence. Among other reasons for the pause was a long trip away, at least by my standards – mostly recreational, and mostly in Scotland. To get back into the swing of this blog I’m going to say a few things about the trip, relating them to some of the wider issues generally discussed here. Then, with publication of my new book imminent (tickets for the launch in Frome on 14 October available here – it’s free), I’ll start turning to some posts …
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