Year's end

I said my next post would cover my discussions with Tom Murphy, but I’m afraid time has caught up with me and I’m going to sign off for the year with this more general offering involving snippets from here and there. I promise that I’ll get to the Tom Murphy discussion early next year. There have been a few other promised posts I’m yet to deliver on too. I’m feeling the stress of next year’s blogging already.

Ah well, I did manage to put out twenty-six posts in 2025 (or a round twenty-five if you exclude Eric F’s guest post). The most commented on, at 134 comments, was Words and Worship, a twisty tale of nationalism, media, kings and religion. The least commented on, at six comments, was the preorder information for my book – no doubt occasioned by the fact that everyone had rushed out to bag themselves a copy.

Oh, that’s another thing I did this year. Wrote most of a book and published it, thanks to my friends at Chelsea Green. Responses to it so far have been mostly positive. I’ll put a few posts out about it next year. It feels like I’ve been marking time a little on this blog this year, but it’s hard to write a book, run a blog and try to do some farming too. I need to raise my game on the latter front next year, which may slow the pace of blogging, but I’ll try to offer some nuggets here as best I can.

What else to talk about? Well, I recently watched Dave Borlace’s YouTube video about the National Emergency Briefing in London, involving a bunch of experts basically scaring the hell out of us about climate change and demanding that it gets proper media attention and political action. Amen to that, although I found some of the presentations disappointingly confident that staving the emergency off while retaining business-as-usual is all in the bag if we just pull our finger out – a matter of renewable energy, EVs and plant-based diets. Perhaps we need another national emergency briefing to brief the national emergency briefers that far more radical change than that is needed.

Another thing that could do with proper media attention and political action is the corporate corruption of science. One recent example that was (not much) in the news: a heavily-cited study in a peer-reviewed academic journal that claimed the herbicide glyphosate was safe for humans was retracted after it turned out that its authors had been paid by the herbicide’s manufacturer Monsanto, and that Monsanto staff had partly ghostwritten the paper.

I used to write a bit about GMOs but for the most part I’ve stopped, partly because I got bored with the hectoring from biotech trolls (there’s a link between glyphosate and GMOs which I won’t elaborate here). I remember one such character crowing about the retraction of the Séralini study that had suggested health risks with glyphosate. He wrote something along the lines that “finally, there’s now no longer any study in the academic literature that shows any health risks for GMOs” and I remember thinking at the time that having the biotech industry crawling all over every such study made that rather self-fulfilling – a clear case of bias in both the technical and everyday sense. As food campaigner Pat Thomas wrote in response to the glyphosate retraction “Good…but also I’ve watched colleagues be attacked, and even lose their jobs for trying to shine a light on the scientists for hire behind glyphosate “safety” claims. Count all the ways fake corporate science ruins lives.”

I can’t say I’ve ever lost my job for trying to shine a light on dodgy scientific claims, though I suppose that’s unlikely to happen when you’re a self-employed writer and smallholder. Still, I felt a few chill winds when I published my critique of the erroneous figures and corporate-friendly spin in high-profile journalist George Monbiot’s food book Regenesis.

I’ve ended this year revisiting my disagreements with George – a revised and expanded analysis of my previous post discussing his Jeff Bezos-funded adventures geared around verifying financial markets in soil carbon has just been published on Resilience. As outlined in that piece, I’m at a loss to know how to push back against food ecomodernism. Get into the technical details, like George’s dodgy energy figures for bacterial protein powder, and people glaze over. Try to tell a different story of how we might live, or might have to live, and you get likened to a Nazi or a cottagecore fantasist.

I think there’s a lack of integrity on George’s part for not – to my knowledge – recanting his demonstrably erroneous figures, but maybe that’s my naivety. Not many people really care about plain facts, even when they set out their stall otherwise. A recent article about a journalistic titan of an earlier era, Walter Lippman, describes the argument of his 1922 book Public Opinion thus:

modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’

I guess that’s it. People are great at inventing ‘public fictions’ together through devices like language and money. Eventually these fictions usually collide with ‘real environments’. We find that we can’t feed the world with bacterial protein powder, or that present levels of fossil-fuelled urbanism were never sustainable in the long run. But for now the public fictions hold firm. Alas, this makes the eventual reckoning with real environments all the more disastrous when they come.

Another reckoning with hard reality – the war in Ukraine. A lot of us discuss it from a distance on this blog and rehearse our various geopolitical ideas. I got an angry comment from a Ukrainian reader about some remarks in the comments under my last post. I didn’t publish it because it didn’t meet my moderation standards, and the commenter was unwilling to revise it, although I did have a positive email exchange with them. A reminder for us all, perhaps, that some people have more skin in the game on topics discussed here.

Talking of skin in the game Mick, a friend, has recently been sentenced to twenty-six months in jail plus hefty costs for his part in climate change protesting, with evidence for his defence in respect of climate change ruled inadmissible in court. In my much more minor brush with the powers that be for climate protesting I was cut off by the magistrates when I spoke about climate change. I’m not a big fan of prison for anybody except the seriously dangerous, and I believe that people charged with an offence should be able to say what they like in their defence and have it considered, but there we have it. Mick’s a good man with real integrity who’s worked hard for the local community here. I’ll be sparing a thought and raising a glass for him while I’m enjoying my family Christmas. Likewise for the Palestine Action hunger strikers putting themselves on the line – one more grisly episode in a horrific litany of them for which Western governments including Britain’s bear a lot of responsibility.

Anyway, talking of Christmas, that’s it from me for the year. I’m going to be offline from now through until early in 2026. Maybe I’ll see you at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on 8 January, where I’ll be signing books and talking about Finding Lights… with my editor Muna and my wife Cordelia.

Meanwhile, many thanks to everyone who comments here and makes this blog a living entity. There have been some really excellent comments here this year that have obviously involved a lot of time and effort. I’m sorry that I can’t always find the time to respond as fully as I’d like, but I very much appreciate them. I’m looking forward to new conversations next year. If you’ve got any thoughts on topics to cover or different ways of doing things on this blog feel free to use the suggestion box below. For now, here’s wishing you health, happiness and spiritual rejuvenation on this wounded earth.

Current reading

Paul Kingsnorth Against the Machine

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie The French Peasantry 1450-1660

Henrik Meinander A History of Finland

John Tutino The Mexican Heartland

Jan de Vries The Industrious Revolution

Also, I found this article interesting – any thoughts?

It’s a pretty white male list in all honesty. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with white men as such, but diversification suggestions welcome…