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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
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 September 2, 2025 | 23 Comments
With the publication of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age fast approaching but not yet arrived, I’m at that awkward stage in an author’s journey with a book where it’s too late to change anything in it, but it’s not yet left the nest and made its own way in the world. Already, I’m visited too often by an internal monologue along the lines of “should have included that, shouldn’t have said that, should have said that better”. Something I like about writing books rather than, say, blog posts is their fixed and tangible material presence in …
Continue readingPosted on August 15, 2025 | 49 Comments
The year moves through its seasons, and so does the farm over longer cycles. In recent days, I’ve been stepping off the veranda and plucking greengages, figs and apples from the surrounding trees for my breakfasts. I have my petty gripes, but I’ve got to admit that my life is about as close to Eden as any mortal sinner could reasonably expect. Meanwhile, in a part of the world closer to the setting of that biblical paradise, other people are going through something more like hell. My last post about my trip to the Glastonbury Festival left hanging some questions …
Continue readingPosted on August 4, 2025 | 19 Comments
I was invited to give a couple of talks at the Speaker’s Forum in the Glastonbury Festival in June, which I’ve just reprised at the Green Gathering this weekend. In this post, I’m going to tell some stories loosely about my trip to Glastonbury, focusing less on the talks and more on the trip. There’s a chapter in my forthcoming book in which a narrator living in a crisis-ridden fictional future walks from London to Glastonbury, so when it came to speaking at the festival I felt I had no option but to stick with that storyline and walk there. …
Continue readingPosted on July 28, 2025 | 57 Comments
I mentioned in my previous post the recent kerfuffle about animal agriculture and climate change associated with the work of Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop (see this podcast and this paper). I also mentioned that I’m kinda done with getting into the details of all these ‘here’s my one weird trick to save the world’ approaches. But various people have asked me to explain further why I find Wedderburn-Bisshop’s position problematic. So … oh well, here goes. See, this is exactly my problem. You’re not helping. (For those on the other hand who’ve already had their fill of this issue, do just skip …
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