Thanks for these comments. Not much to add & I'm now focused on the writing, but I've read & learned from them all. There's also some interesting discussion on my website, which I'd encourage folks to visit & to place comments there to improve efficiency for my responses - but feel free to comment here if you prefer!
I think Lights in a Dark Age would be showcasing all the good land based, low energy, low resource use projects and plans that exist (past and present) around the world. What actions/legislation(?) would be needed to support them. You might also invite some other people/writers to articulate their lights in the dark to create a more rounded, collaborative vision, just like you’re doing here? I would see it as a hopeful vision that will inspire people in the present to change how they are working to prepare for the future.
re - the Light in the Dark Age - is it not about focusing on the light, the dark is all the stories we can imagine for sure - but why go there? regardless of what that 'dark age' is - which would simply be a science fiction re tell - a guess, potentially a doomsday story of all that is wrong with the world and how we got there (is that now?? hmm) its the light that matters. And the light is us - each of us. The light is the story of those who leant in and out of all that was possible now and built on all that energy to be sturdy and resilliant in times to come.. yes because they embraced small farms (who by then had undergone inheritance tax BUT finally FINALLY the world understands what it costs to produce food and somehow we have masterfully worked that into the costings) yes because they found their hands and hearts again.. yes because they returned to what was the most powerful commitment they had - community.. and the light was the realisation of arms locked and striding forward AS A PART OF LIFE ... as a part of the living system
Hi Chris, as someone who came to this line of work via activism, through doomerism, into what ever this might be, it has retrospectively felt a little like taking a walk at night and adjusting to the light. Perhaps your book could adjust the reader to this new environment and find the bright spots where they are. I think a move towards meaning and away from clutter should be a theme as well. I think we will all need a good dose of Stoicism to steady ourselves with the incremental steps away from what we currently take for granted, a consistent reframing "I didn't like always-on wifi anyway!".
I don't know if this is entirely relevant but I feels like the best place to share:
To your knowledge, has any modern state had anything like compulsory farm and food production work as part of the national curriculum?
Details could obviously be negotiated, but I imagine something like the odd day here and there for young children, increasing to longer periods of time as they get older - so possibly a whole season or longer by the age of 16. Perhaps involving as broad a range of experiences as possible, from tiny veg patches to industrial scale (so everyone knows exactly how their cheap fried chicken is made). Though I'd prefer if it were balanced more towards smaller more ecologically friendly farms, and perhaps the huge increase in labour force would help support that.
Apart from the availability of labour, I can see it working wonders for the children involved, and for the farmers, and for the general connectivity of society as a whole. Sure, it would necessitate some infrastructure - temporary housing, transport, logistical admin - but nothing we can't handle.
And moving on a step, I wonder what would be the main objections to it (including reluctant kids' themselves), and also how to keep it out of the hands of anyone who might abuse it (eg large corporations).
I think this is a great idea, that is if you can keep it out of the hands of corporations. Maybe if it was a National Service kind of thing where even the little kids just knew they would be doing it. Of course that would only work if EVERYONE had to do it, even the so called elites. Not like the American draft where better off people could get college deferments so it ended up with working class and poor people serving.
Thanks. I have very little expertise in this area and can see that for this to happen it would take a lot of well-coordinated effort, that's why I've put the idea here, in the hope it might seed something or somehow be picked up by the right people. I might have to keep shouting it out though!
Yes the idea is it would be compulsory to work directly in growing food somehow. Just as its compulsory to study maths or science or history in a classroom.
And I think part of the point is that whoever does it would gain deeper embodied senses of participation in not just the whole life cycle, but their own survival and capacity to live freer of the vast shadowy global systems of extraction that most people feel dependent on and chained to. The optimistic side of me hopes that would entail positive growth in all sorts of ways, and if some people want to miss out on that, they might find themselves isolated and weakened by their isolation.
I can imagine a lot of effort from big agribusiness towards propagandising that style of farming, as already exists. I just wonder how much that could actually stand up to the reality of experiencing the miseries of eg thousands of animals cooped up in their own shit, calves and mothers crying for each other. They would need to ensure that nobody experienced even the possibility of another way of farming, and go to some lengths to either change the way things operate, or change the way it seems they operate. I guess its totally conceivable that they would try either. But that whole model of farming relies more and more on technology and less on human input, so it feels like the easiest, natural, path if least resistance for the extra resources of human hands (and hearts and voices...) to go to smaller farms where they might be more readily received.
I am one lone woman in the United States and I vote for neither Democrat or Republican. I think Harris is empty headed and never bothered to put forth a platform that I could see. Not being Trump is hardly a platform. The Dems act incredibly elitist and seem to have no clue what is going on with ordinary people and how our living standards have declined over the last several decades. Plus I think they are a war mongering party and that’s before we even start talking about genocide in Gaza. I cannot support a person who is such a rabid supporter of an ongoing genocide and who wants ,” the most lethal army in the world.”
Not very original, but my own sense of darkness lies in humanity's fork towards its own technology as the driver of all good. It's a tightening spiral because that's where the money is, and most humans now live in landscapes that are predominately products of tech, and so have no sense of the biosphere that makes it all possible. (Interesting that the word "innovation" only applies to things technological – you never see it being applied to novel ways of working with ecological processes.) We are being sucked down into a dark vortex of our own hubris. The light, I think, lies not in abandoning our obsession with tech, but recognising that we and our technologies only prosper to the extent that Gaia prospers. We need to enter into an exchange of intelligence with the Earth. That especially needs to apply to agriculture, which is the medium through which we mostly engage with the non-urbanised world. Agriculture has been colonised by technological thinking, which is not all bad, but it now excludes all ecological thinking, and that is disastrous.
My understanding of the dark ages is that they were characterised by a lack of centralised power, hence the lack of official written history, hence the 'darkness'. That then they were actually a flourishing time for the ordinary folk.
It is hard to see 'the world' accustomed as we are to the prevailing narratives of nation states, global corporations and imperial wars, dramatised like greek gods by global media systems. I like the idea of focusing in the dark, and reframing the sense of being in the world that those lights in the darkness reveal. There is something about industrial light and fire light and circadian rhythms from which an earth based realist framing emerges.
We are watching the retraction of the welfare state here in the UK, it is a daily decline. Homelessness, drug addiction, in work poverty are accepted parts of the urban environment. We don't have to imagine how it will happen, all the elements are already in play. Growing inequality placing more wealth and power in a global corporate oligarchy, a feed back system hollowing out what's left of political institutions, a slide into fascism as the captured media systems set the people against one another to exert violence and control. The cost of servicing the infrastructure and population is too much for corporate profit forecasts, power, water infrastructures fall into disrepair, rolling outages, stand pipes and food drops. It's all happening somewhere right now - like they say - the future is distributed unevenly. It will happen that same way.
Alongside this we see people, groups, associations and communities remaking the objects, systems and institutions of care (that are being systematically withdrawn), from direct local democracy models, regenerative farms and medium scale distributed machinery and production. In some ways the book can extend the arguments of a small farm future; ruralisation and local agrarian community provisioning, and with a view of what that presently is. I think what alot of discussion in this area misses is the foundation of your own thinking, the land, and that needs to be stressed, that without a fundamental shift in our practical relationship with the land, all relationships will fail.
Thanks as always for your thought provoking and prodding. Having recently witnessed an unsuccessful, 5 year planning battle for a simple house on a smallholding I’m feeling even more pessimistic than usual about how we go forward. Our local efforts to grow food are falling on local governments deaf ears.
That’s really sad. I think the inheritance tax plans would need to come with planning changes to allow more dwellings on small sections of farms that might be sold off. To allow for new small farms to happen.
I find the threat to deport illegal essential workers, sorry I mean illegal immigrants, the most concerning/interesting. Who's going to clean the toilets? Joking but not joking. I traveled along the southern border twenty years ago and was at one time invited by a young farmer to tour his property which was a sprawling vegetable farm. He had so many illegals working for him, and even though I suspect this may(?) have changed somewhat in the previous two decades, I imagine a huge part of what keeps the economies of those southern states (and California) grinding along are people that "don't deserve to be there".
As for what 'Future Dark Ages' mean to me, I am afraid of the loss of skills (as in craft and knowledge) to live in a non-industrialized society. As I'm a reader of this blog, I fully expect that the deindustrialised society will come whether we want it or not.
I know that fossil fuels will not run out suddenly but gradually butI fear that we industrialized societies will cling to them (be forced to cling to them by the elites, even) while they slowly run out, instead of making a shift and learning as we go. Then a dark age really will come, if by 'Dark Age' we mean cultural ignorance. We will be ignorant of what we need to survive.
Thanks for these comments. Not much to add & I'm now focused on the writing, but I've read & learned from them all. There's also some interesting discussion on my website, which I'd encourage folks to visit & to place comments there to improve efficiency for my responses - but feel free to comment here if you prefer!
I think Lights in a Dark Age would be showcasing all the good land based, low energy, low resource use projects and plans that exist (past and present) around the world. What actions/legislation(?) would be needed to support them. You might also invite some other people/writers to articulate their lights in the dark to create a more rounded, collaborative vision, just like you’re doing here? I would see it as a hopeful vision that will inspire people in the present to change how they are working to prepare for the future.
re - the Light in the Dark Age - is it not about focusing on the light, the dark is all the stories we can imagine for sure - but why go there? regardless of what that 'dark age' is - which would simply be a science fiction re tell - a guess, potentially a doomsday story of all that is wrong with the world and how we got there (is that now?? hmm) its the light that matters. And the light is us - each of us. The light is the story of those who leant in and out of all that was possible now and built on all that energy to be sturdy and resilliant in times to come.. yes because they embraced small farms (who by then had undergone inheritance tax BUT finally FINALLY the world understands what it costs to produce food and somehow we have masterfully worked that into the costings) yes because they found their hands and hearts again.. yes because they returned to what was the most powerful commitment they had - community.. and the light was the realisation of arms locked and striding forward AS A PART OF LIFE ... as a part of the living system
Hi Chris, as someone who came to this line of work via activism, through doomerism, into what ever this might be, it has retrospectively felt a little like taking a walk at night and adjusting to the light. Perhaps your book could adjust the reader to this new environment and find the bright spots where they are. I think a move towards meaning and away from clutter should be a theme as well. I think we will all need a good dose of Stoicism to steady ourselves with the incremental steps away from what we currently take for granted, a consistent reframing "I didn't like always-on wifi anyway!".
I don't know if this is entirely relevant but I feels like the best place to share:
To your knowledge, has any modern state had anything like compulsory farm and food production work as part of the national curriculum?
Details could obviously be negotiated, but I imagine something like the odd day here and there for young children, increasing to longer periods of time as they get older - so possibly a whole season or longer by the age of 16. Perhaps involving as broad a range of experiences as possible, from tiny veg patches to industrial scale (so everyone knows exactly how their cheap fried chicken is made). Though I'd prefer if it were balanced more towards smaller more ecologically friendly farms, and perhaps the huge increase in labour force would help support that.
Apart from the availability of labour, I can see it working wonders for the children involved, and for the farmers, and for the general connectivity of society as a whole. Sure, it would necessitate some infrastructure - temporary housing, transport, logistical admin - but nothing we can't handle.
And moving on a step, I wonder what would be the main objections to it (including reluctant kids' themselves), and also how to keep it out of the hands of anyone who might abuse it (eg large corporations).
I think this is a great idea, that is if you can keep it out of the hands of corporations. Maybe if it was a National Service kind of thing where even the little kids just knew they would be doing it. Of course that would only work if EVERYONE had to do it, even the so called elites. Not like the American draft where better off people could get college deferments so it ended up with working class and poor people serving.
Thanks. I have very little expertise in this area and can see that for this to happen it would take a lot of well-coordinated effort, that's why I've put the idea here, in the hope it might seed something or somehow be picked up by the right people. I might have to keep shouting it out though!
Yes the idea is it would be compulsory to work directly in growing food somehow. Just as its compulsory to study maths or science or history in a classroom.
And I think part of the point is that whoever does it would gain deeper embodied senses of participation in not just the whole life cycle, but their own survival and capacity to live freer of the vast shadowy global systems of extraction that most people feel dependent on and chained to. The optimistic side of me hopes that would entail positive growth in all sorts of ways, and if some people want to miss out on that, they might find themselves isolated and weakened by their isolation.
I can imagine a lot of effort from big agribusiness towards propagandising that style of farming, as already exists. I just wonder how much that could actually stand up to the reality of experiencing the miseries of eg thousands of animals cooped up in their own shit, calves and mothers crying for each other. They would need to ensure that nobody experienced even the possibility of another way of farming, and go to some lengths to either change the way things operate, or change the way it seems they operate. I guess its totally conceivable that they would try either. But that whole model of farming relies more and more on technology and less on human input, so it feels like the easiest, natural, path if least resistance for the extra resources of human hands (and hearts and voices...) to go to smaller farms where they might be more readily received.
I am one lone woman in the United States and I vote for neither Democrat or Republican. I think Harris is empty headed and never bothered to put forth a platform that I could see. Not being Trump is hardly a platform. The Dems act incredibly elitist and seem to have no clue what is going on with ordinary people and how our living standards have declined over the last several decades. Plus I think they are a war mongering party and that’s before we even start talking about genocide in Gaza. I cannot support a person who is such a rabid supporter of an ongoing genocide and who wants ,” the most lethal army in the world.”
My 2 cents, since you asked.
Thanks Heather - your answer appreciated!
Not very original, but my own sense of darkness lies in humanity's fork towards its own technology as the driver of all good. It's a tightening spiral because that's where the money is, and most humans now live in landscapes that are predominately products of tech, and so have no sense of the biosphere that makes it all possible. (Interesting that the word "innovation" only applies to things technological – you never see it being applied to novel ways of working with ecological processes.) We are being sucked down into a dark vortex of our own hubris. The light, I think, lies not in abandoning our obsession with tech, but recognising that we and our technologies only prosper to the extent that Gaia prospers. We need to enter into an exchange of intelligence with the Earth. That especially needs to apply to agriculture, which is the medium through which we mostly engage with the non-urbanised world. Agriculture has been colonised by technological thinking, which is not all bad, but it now excludes all ecological thinking, and that is disastrous.
My understanding of the dark ages is that they were characterised by a lack of centralised power, hence the lack of official written history, hence the 'darkness'. That then they were actually a flourishing time for the ordinary folk.
It is hard to see 'the world' accustomed as we are to the prevailing narratives of nation states, global corporations and imperial wars, dramatised like greek gods by global media systems. I like the idea of focusing in the dark, and reframing the sense of being in the world that those lights in the darkness reveal. There is something about industrial light and fire light and circadian rhythms from which an earth based realist framing emerges.
We are watching the retraction of the welfare state here in the UK, it is a daily decline. Homelessness, drug addiction, in work poverty are accepted parts of the urban environment. We don't have to imagine how it will happen, all the elements are already in play. Growing inequality placing more wealth and power in a global corporate oligarchy, a feed back system hollowing out what's left of political institutions, a slide into fascism as the captured media systems set the people against one another to exert violence and control. The cost of servicing the infrastructure and population is too much for corporate profit forecasts, power, water infrastructures fall into disrepair, rolling outages, stand pipes and food drops. It's all happening somewhere right now - like they say - the future is distributed unevenly. It will happen that same way.
Alongside this we see people, groups, associations and communities remaking the objects, systems and institutions of care (that are being systematically withdrawn), from direct local democracy models, regenerative farms and medium scale distributed machinery and production. In some ways the book can extend the arguments of a small farm future; ruralisation and local agrarian community provisioning, and with a view of what that presently is. I think what alot of discussion in this area misses is the foundation of your own thinking, the land, and that needs to be stressed, that without a fundamental shift in our practical relationship with the land, all relationships will fail.
Thanks as always for your thought provoking and prodding. Having recently witnessed an unsuccessful, 5 year planning battle for a simple house on a smallholding I’m feeling even more pessimistic than usual about how we go forward. Our local efforts to grow food are falling on local governments deaf ears.
That’s really sad. I think the inheritance tax plans would need to come with planning changes to allow more dwellings on small sections of farms that might be sold off. To allow for new small farms to happen.
I find the threat to deport illegal essential workers, sorry I mean illegal immigrants, the most concerning/interesting. Who's going to clean the toilets? Joking but not joking. I traveled along the southern border twenty years ago and was at one time invited by a young farmer to tour his property which was a sprawling vegetable farm. He had so many illegals working for him, and even though I suspect this may(?) have changed somewhat in the previous two decades, I imagine a huge part of what keeps the economies of those southern states (and California) grinding along are people that "don't deserve to be there".
Please advise how and where I can access your contact form.
https://chrissmaje.com/contact/
As for what 'Future Dark Ages' mean to me, I am afraid of the loss of skills (as in craft and knowledge) to live in a non-industrialized society. As I'm a reader of this blog, I fully expect that the deindustrialised society will come whether we want it or not.
I know that fossil fuels will not run out suddenly but gradually butI fear that we industrialized societies will cling to them (be forced to cling to them by the elites, even) while they slowly run out, instead of making a shift and learning as we go. Then a dark age really will come, if by 'Dark Age' we mean cultural ignorance. We will be ignorant of what we need to survive.