Lifepod S01E02
Guest: Chris Smaje with "Finding Lights in a Dark Age"
Air date: February 27th, 2026

Adam Greenfield: Welcome to Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire. I’m your host, Adam Greenfield.

The strength of a set of ideas is not in whether you, as the person encountering them, are moved to agree with them immediately. It’s that you’re compelled to ask yourself why you shouldn’t. And that’s what I think the small-scale farmer and former academic Chris Smaje has achieved in his thoughtful new book, Finding Lights in A Dark Age, in a significant and most welcome development of ideas latent in his two earlier books, A Small Farm Future, and Saying No to A Farm-Free Future, Finding Lights is broadly about how we transition from the largely urban, high-energy, acutely supply chain-dependent lifeways most of us enjoy now — if, indeed, “enjoy” is the word — to modes of collective being more suited to the set of ecological, economic, social, political and psychological circumstances that will persist across the period that we’ve now entered together, and which, for want of a better term, I’ve called the Long Emergency. I’m looking forward to discussing Finding Lights with Chris, and hearing what he has to say about the prospects for ultimately a more collectively beneficial way of living on the land together. Chris Smaje, welcome to Lifepod.

Chris Smaje: Hi, Adam — yeah, thanks for having me here.

AG: Yeah. It’s a real pleasure. I found the book, as I say, you know, just, just really a very important contribution. Much of the book is spent exploring the various ways of being necessary to support what you call “livelihood communities,” or those that generate a sustainable livelihood from a local ecological base. What steps do you think are necessary before somebody highly urban, and adapted to that way of being, can participate meaningfully in such communities, and in the generation of such a livelihood?

CS: Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think there’s many different ways. There’s many different skills. And I think, you know, we tend to underemphasize the sort of people skills that, I guess, tend to be more to the fore in modern urban life. But those are important too. You know, I certainly, I think sort of mediation and sort of restorative-type skills, dealing with conflicts and so on, are really important.

But ultimately, you know, we have to, you know, we have to live materially. So, yeah, you know: food, fiber, textiles, water, shelter, building, all of these things are important. And, you know, they tend to be accorded a secondary role in terms of, you know, the way that we, um, the value, certainly the monetary value that we, that we sort of put on things in terms of people’s skills, so, so developing those skills of basic livelihood — making, craft skills, food production, simple gardening, all of that sort of stuff — seems to me important too. And you know, the thing with this is that, you know, obviously, we can’t predict the future. You never know what suite of skills is going to be useful. But I mean, you know, if you know how to grow some veg, or do some simple building, and you know, you know how to get along with people, or, you know, can, can sort of channel your best self in that, that’s never going to be a bad thing, I guess, would it. You know — I mean, in the face of the profound challenges we face, it might seem trifling, but I mean, that’s where to start, I would say.

AG: How did you yourself find your way to those skills? I mean, if I understand correctly, you come from an academic background, and you now earn a livelihood as a small farmer. That seems like an unusual…

CS: Well, I wouldn’t say I earn a livelihood as a small farmer! I mean, most you know, across the whole range of farming, not many people are making any money out of it. But I have, yeah, I have spent time as a commercial veg grower. But, yeah, it’s, it’s tough out there to make a living at it, which is, you know, I mean, in a way, it’s the microcosm of the, of the larger problems we face, where, you know, this sort of catabolic collapse idea where, you know, we’re all relying on the over-monetary valuation of property and other things to sort of, to get by. I have for the last twenty-odd years been running, helping to run, a small farm here in Somerset. And as you say, prior to that, I was an academic. I mean, my route to it, I suppose, two things: kind of early in my career, I studied anthropology and kind of got interested in peasant consciousness from this kind of, you know, fairly sort of intellectual kind of perspective of sort of understanding ideologies of capitalism and all this kind of stuff. I didn’t actually know anything about what peasants actually did day-to-day, you know, in terms of producing food and livelihood. But in some ways, you know, I sort of came back to that in later life. Partly, I got into it in the ‘90s. I guess it was the time when climate change was beginning to be sort of recognized as the huge issue that it is. And, you know, it struck me that food was food, and food systems — or these kind of material, you know, the sort of life-support systems that, you know, that we’re talking about — struck me as a real, sort of critical point there. And I guess I was a bit disillusioned with my, you know, office-based academic career. So kind of, yeah, started learning about gardening and farming, and yeah, ended up buying, with my wife, this kind of small property down here in Somerset. And yeah, kind of getting going with it as best we could.

AG: I should be clear that when I say “earn a livelihood,” I don’t mean as measured by financial terms, but you’re actually able to put calories and protein into your body from…

CS: That is true, yeah, yeah. I suppose, in a way, I made that misstep there in assuming, in kind of assuming “livelihood” as in monetary livelihood. But yeah, I mean that, that is one way that we approach things here, is having a sort of low-input/low-output, as it were, but the output is the material livelihood, you know, it is food and shelter and energy and so on. Yeah, so that’s exactly right, yeah, which is the right way of thinking about this stuff I think.

AG: And I reckon that that degree of self-sufficiency makes you fairly unusual in Western civilization at this moment in time.

CS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I’m under no illusions that we’re, you know — it’s not, it’s not about being sort of part of some, you know, sort of glorious isolation. And, you know, I mean, we’re…it’s a very kind of technical, you know, things like PV panel, you know, we’re off-grid energywise, so we’ve got PV panels. So I’m kind of under — which is great, you know — and there’s a level of autonomy, and then the level of, you know, there’s a level of connection to, sort of understanding, you know, what, the level of energy that we can and can’t apply to things. But obviously it’s still a highly, sort of, modern, industrial, connected kind of technology, you know. So I’m not under those illusions. But I think we’re starting from such a low base — even, “Can I, you know, can I do the laundry today? Oh, you know, it’s not sunny enough. No, I can’t,” is, is… there’s a degree of connection to local environment there that, you know, generally, we don’t have in modern society, and that does make you think, you know?

AG: And to my understanding, you’ve pursued this, not perhaps as a North American might, in terms of a rugged individualism applied to the family unit itself, but more or less collectively, is that right? You’ve gathered multiple households on your small farm, and they’re collectively able to make a go of things?

CS: Yeah…I mean, we started, you know, it’s kind of a long story with many twists and turns. I suppose the quick version would be, yeah. I mean, it’s…the land was privately owned by by me and my wife. Originally, we didn’t live on-site, but then we managed to sort of make that happen. And we, we have other people either doing projects on-site or living on-site. And, I mean, I’m no longer the main grower. We’ve got younger, more energetic people doing that now. But we’ve tried to set it up, yeah, we’ve gone through various iterations, which I sort of touch on briefly in the, in the new book.

You know, there’s always been difficulties of thinking this through, and it’s partly the larger bureaucratic difficulties of what the powers that be say you are or aren’t allowed to do. It’s partly, I suppose, all of these issues about households and commons that I talk about in the book, and that are so critical to most agrarian societies historically, you know. It’s trying to find the structures within which people feel they, you know, are motivated, and sort of empowered, and have the security to do, you know, to do the things they do. But you know, always the difficulty, which going back to when, when I kind of demurred at your livelihood thing is, if you’re trying to produce basic food or fiber or, you know, some basic product from the land, it’s very hard to do that within the sort of economic structures of the larger economy. So, you know, you’re always getting pushed either into using more industrial, more high-energy product — you know, diesel rather than human labor, for example — or in kind of working offsite, in the “working for The Man” sort of thing, you know. So that’s always been a struggle.

And then socially, I guess, there’s issues where, as owners, that gives us enormous power, and therefore other people, you know, are less likely to invest long term in the project. Or if you do something collective, I mean, you touch on this in your own writing, sort of interestingly I think, you know: it’s a case of sort of endless meetings in order to achieve not very much, you know. So it’s like finding the right politics and the right human relationships, you know, is very challenging. But you know, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve tried our best and sort of gone through different iterations of that over the years.

AG: One of the things that I really appreciate in this latest iteration of your ideas is that when you talk about these livelihood communities coming into being — and I would agree with you that the skills, the predilections, the predispositions that are necessary for that are very difficult for people like me to access — but one of the things that I’m most grateful for is that, in some contrast to your earlier books, you do allow that livelihood communities need not be rural. If I’ve understood you correctly.

Your argument is that — and I think it’s a reasonable argument — is that people will favor areas where they can best secure occupancy rights for viable local livelihoods. And your argument is simply that most such areas, by their nature, are outside to be, are likely to be, outside the dense urban conditions in which most of us now live. What advice would you give for somebody who essentially bought your argument about the necessity of forming a local commons, a local livelihood community, but isn’t prepared necessarily to make the trip out to the land, has no pathway to do that, is somewhat limited by the circumstances in which they find themselves, but wants otherwise to undertake the program that you you commend to us?

CS: Well, I mean, I think, you know, there’s, there are a lot of food and fiber growing opportunities within urban or suburban, I mean, you know, not necessarily kind of megacity centers, you know, but broadly within urban and suburban settings. So, you know, I think the key thing is to start identifying — and defending, probably more to the point — places to produce food. You know: allotments, community gardens, connecting with other people, developing a sort of local politics around food and access to food.

Education is another key thing, you know, which has moved forwards a bit in recent years. You know, sort of education at all levels, but certainly with children and sort of, you know, trying to instill better knowledge as an understanding. There’s loads of things that can be done. The sticking point, ultimately, as I think we, you know, we do have a population distribution that is not ultimately particularly suitable for sort of long-term, land-based livelihood and sustainability. So I think there is going to be a kind of urban-to-rural movement. It’s obviously urban/rural is a very bald dichotomy. And, you know, there’s, there’s endless shades of gray within that that we can, we can discuss.

But, you know, I think part of my writing has been, you know, I think there’s this tremendous, tremendous kind of romanticism of the urban and, you know, the idea of leaving the land as being this arrow of progress for humanity, and it’s problematic in so many different ways that I’ve, you know, I’ve tried to critique that against popular opinion. I’m not necessarily, you know, I don’t hate cities or or think that there’s no place for a degree of population concentration. But, yeah, we need to get started. I’m certainly not sort of arguing that everyone should identify the most remote, beautiful place to try and ride out the apocalypse, you know, it’s about sort of being in place and building from where we are, largely.

AG: Yeah, I think that’s probably the, the main axis of…to the degree that there’s a tension between our viewpoints about things, I tend — without, hopefully, romanticizing the urban, I hope you know, I hope you understand that I do not believe in any progress narrative whatsoever, that’s just not something that’s that’s part of my worldview. But I do think movement towards urbanization, you know, historically, people tend to aggregate in dense patterns of habitation, presumably because they think it confers them something and, you know, lowers the cost of access to informational resources, the ability to fend for themselves in some, in some ways more readily in dense patterns of habitation. But what I’m more interested in, really, is the fact that it’s sort of a fait accompli. I think that there probably will be some, some movement out of cities as, as and if, they become more difficult to wrest a livelihood from. But the concentration of the population in dense urban centers is so far accomplished that it will take a very long time to reverse that, if at all that the needle does move in that direction. So really, what I’m interested in is, you know, accepting so much of what you lay out for us, what does that look like in the hands of people who are not so lucky as to be able to afford themselves direct access to land, either individually or collectively?

CS: I don’t necessarily entirely agree with you that sort of mega-urbanism is a fait accompli. I mean, it’s happened relatively recently, and it’s happened as a result of cheap, abundant, basically, fossil energy. Obviously, it depends where we’re talking about, but certainly in a lot of global-South countries, yeah, there’s a lot of urbanism, but a lot of that can be kind of seasonal or cyclical migration. You know, people who are quite connected still to a rural place, they don’t necessarily particularly want to be there. Or, you know, the reason that they’re there is that they, again, they can earn the hard cash rather than the crop. But in a situation where the opportunities for earning that hard cash get harder or dry up, you know, it doesn’t take much to flip that. In the US, say, or in Western Europe, it’s a bit different. But again, I was sort of trying to play with some of those scenarios in the new book.

The countryside is also urbanized. You know, the two things go together. The corollary of dense urban residence is very big fields with big tractors, agrochemicals, you know, all of these things are forms of labor substitution. Which ultimately, again, rest on cheap, abundant fossil fuels and tend to be quite bad for nature, and are not sustainable. Basically, farmers are fighting this sort of losing battle to sort of keep on this treadmill of cheap energy and cheap agrochemicals to keep the commodity crops flowing to the cities. It would take more — I agree with you — in a, you know, somewhere like Britain, to reverse that. But again, there’s plenty of land available that can be repurposed for, you know, for other things, and for more people to come on board. And then, you know, then we get into a discussion about, you know, well, what would the, what would the politics of that look like? I mean, you know, one thing it’s important to remember is, you know, a lot of people assume that modern farming is incredibly productive in terms of food per acre, which is, I mean, it’s, you know, like all things, it’s complicated, yes and no. But largely no: you know, you can produce just as much kind of, wider, more diverse, nutritious diet by relatively low-tech, job-rich methods. But it’s the job-rich, or the labor-intensive aspect that’s significant. The whole thing about urbanism is reducing the number of people in farming or in, you know, increasing the productivity per unit labor. But, you know, my argument is that productivity per unit labor is is not ultimately, a very important…you know, it’s important in sort of modern urban capitalism. So, you know that, so…sorry, I’ve kind of forgotten your original question. [Laughter] But basically, you know, I think there, there are all sorts of ways in which the existing structure of the countryside and farming is kind of a corollary of, you know, existing urbanism and, you know, and I think they are going to change radically, you know, in sort of unpredictable ways, but ultimately, I think we’re going to see more people producing livelihoods on the land in rural areas.

There will be a kind of long-term, cross-generational shift from — a place like Los Angeles is, I forget the population of it there, you know, it’s not a great place by any kind of biophysical criteria to concentrate that many people. And obviously, as we’ve seen recently there, you know, there’s a kind of biophysical payback to that. So, you know, my pun is that there will be less people in Los Angeles in the future, and probably more in rural New England, so, you know. So it’s that kind of thing, you know, and that the timescales and the politics around that, of course, are complex and unknowable, but, but, you know, that’s the kind of patterning that I’m projecting.

AG: Yeah…I mean, I think that’s reasonable. One possibility that we haven’t really discussed, which I think sort of splits the difference between this otherwise invidious binary, is the seasonal migration that surfaces so strongly in the Graeber-Wengrow account of things, for example. And you know, so I don’t know how many of my listeners will know this, but like relatively recently in the historical past, for example, the entire East End of London would empty out seasonally, as people would flock down to Kent and work the fields, and then come back into the city when harvest was over. And I think that pattern is available, and I think that pattern is very realistic to see happening in many places.

CS: Yeah. And another point, I mean, you made the point about people aggregating, and that’s true, but it happens at all sorts of sort of nested levels. You know, if you’ve got a kind of real land-based, grounded economy. I mean, it’s fascinating. In fact, you mentioned Graeber and Wengrow, you know, they talk about the so called megasites of Neolithic Ukraine, which were quite big aggregations of people. And the sort of three interesting things about that are, you see this pattern of households — small, you know, sort of family-based dwelling — but clearly set within a larger collective structure. You know, there’s clearly some larger political organization there, but it’s almost like the hub of a, of a larger wheel. So, you know, people are aggregating, but obviously, you know, moving out to tend the land around them. And that’s a very common pattern, you know, you see it. You see that kind of geography in many, many agrarian societies. But it can operate a different scale. So it’s kind of hamlet-scale, village-scale, you know, a larger thing, like that megasite, or, you know, even like your example you just gave, is a good one, I guess. You know, even relatively modern London, you’ve got a certain kind of geographic mobility like that.

So, yeah, people aggregate together. But what they haven’t done throughout human history up until now is aggregate together in 37 million people in Tokyo or whatever. You know, it’s a sort of unsustainable system in criticality that’s kind of been driven by unusual, modern circumstances and particularly cheap, abundant fuel, and the sort of global trade regimen that it enables. There’s all sorts of interesting settlement patterns and forms of aggregation at lower levels, small market towns, you know, like where I live, on the edge of the town of Frome, you know, I mean, one reason people like it is, it’s got all this nice old architecture, and a lot of it is, you know, kind of trapdoors on, on first floors and so on, which, you know, you can see, used to be part of a functioning agricultural economy of, you know, storage and, you know, it was only, only twenty years ago that the cattle market stopped being held in the middle of town, you know. So there’s all of that sort of interpenetration, which I think is, you know, absolutely to the point, as you say. But we’ve, you know, we’ve kind of lost that in relatively recent times.

And you know, Frome is now sort of more like this funky little town where the property values have been going through the roof. But, you know, you don’t have to go that far back to see the way it was much more connected into its hinterlands and the surrounding landscape as a kind of living embodiment of local livelihood making. You know, it also has an industrial history, going back to early Industrial Revolution and the, you know, the cloth trade. So there’s, you know, there’s layers of these sort of, you know, different levels of, of integration with economy at different kind of global levels. But my argument is that we’ve just gone way too far into that kind of, you know, massive global interconnectedness, you know, again, as I keep saying, on the basis of unsustainable energetic possibilities. So, you know, we need to pull back from that. But as you say, you know, there’s all sorts of levels and structures, you know, within which that pulling back can operate.

AG: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, it occurs to me, always, that one of the things that we bought with cheap energy is the state polity’s ability to organize space at scale. And you write for a time, I think, very interestingly, in which state polities suffer a radical inhibition of their ability to organize political space, you know. And anticipating this, you write that “We need to detach sovereignty from the state, and return sovereignty, capability and self-possession to ordinary people, families, households and communities.” Now, you know, as you note later in the book, there are certainly some on the left — Sophie Lewis comes to mind, but there are many others — who regard the family as kind of a nexus of coercion, control and harm that’s fully equal in its effects with the state and the market.

Putting that argument to the side — because I think that you engage it respectfully — but putting that argument to the side, other than that one word “family” in there, otherwise, this really does sound like a description of what somebody like Colin Ward might have called “anarchy in action.” There’s, there’s a lot in your writing that at least runs parallel to the anarchist current. Tell me why you take pains to distinguish what you’re you’re thinking and writing about from anarchism. Tell me why that word doesn’t seem to resonate with you.

CS: Well, I wouldn’t say that it doesn’t resonate with me. I mean, you know, it does in many ways. I wouldn’t claim to be, you know, incredibly knowledgeable or part of the anarchist tradition, but I mean, I’ve certainly been influenced by David Graeber, for example, you know, who does identify more with it. Um. Um, I mean, I think…sorry, I’m, you’ve silenced me with the the anarchist question. I mean, I, you know, maybe it would be about going into the territory of the family. But equally, it could be, you know, you could, you could ground it in a sort of Graeber-and-Wengrow-type stuff about larger structures within which humans operate.

It’s quite a tricksy argument, I suppose, because I’m quite, you know, I guess I have a problem. You know, the thing you just read out, you know, we’ve got into this kind of post-Westphalian, sort of massive overemphasis on the state, the centralized state — you know, Westminster, Washington, DC. And, you know, often, when I give talks, people often ask me, that’s the other way I get silenced is people say, you know, if you had the ear of the Prime Minister, you know, what would you tell them to do? We always think, you know, we always go to the center. You know, it’s like, I would tell the Prime Minister to resign and get an allotment, you know? [Laughter] I mean, I’m kind of anarchist in that sense.

You know, I do, I suppose I think it sort of does relate to the family point that we’re that we’re sort of dodging around a bit, I, you know, I think trying to formalize, you know, trying to sort of set up…again, it’s quite a modern sort of thing, to sort of assume that basically the family and the gods, or, you know, sort of deep, deep local structure are a bit problematic. So we need to have a very kind of secular, rationalist, sort of, you know, lots of meetings, you know, “Let’s, let’s sit around and sort of thrash all this out rationally,” you know, I guess, you know, I think we do have to do that. But I kind of think, you know, ultimately, humans…you know, one issue with family relationships is, I just think, you know, we can, we can sort of abolish them, and then we just reinvent them. And the violence is, you know, it’s not the family as such. It’s the people that we’re around with every day. You know, that’s where the tension is. That’s where the violence is. You know, the family doesn’t, you know, it’s not that there’s some special category of relationships [called] “family” that are particularly problematic. It’s that people are problematic, you know, and the people that we spend time with are most problematic, and we’re, we’re most problematic to them, you know.

Yeah, so I think it’s about sort of trying to minimize the amount of overly rationalist politics, but that you know that obviously, that you do need to build in sort of checks and balances. And there are endless ways in which power of various kinds — patriarchal power, aristocratic power — can sort of mess with more congenial ways of relating to each other. So you know, certainly there’s a need to build a collective politics that tries to mitigate that — you know, I think the problem is that we can end up overinvesting in the, in the rationalism of our politics and, and to some extent, the the agrarian focus, the focus on creating a, you know, creating a day-to-day livelihood, I think, can help to mitigate against that. Because that’s what we need to spend a lot of our time doing.

You know, was it Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity Anarchism, you know — I mean, obviously that was written many years ago now, it was a particular moment — but there’s almost that kind of, you know, there’s a parallel between that and the sort of fully-automated luxury communism idea [Laughter] that’s sort of, you know, that, you know, “We don’t have to worry about making our livelihood,” you know, “we’ve got machines and energy and stuff that can do that.”

I mean, I think that’s wrong — sort of just materially, sort of pragmatically wrong. But the the…the the advantage of it being wrong is that it gives us something to focus on. Like, actually, no: we do. We do need to ultimately be developing structures that enable us to produce food and fiber and buildings and so on. And then that’s where a lot of the interesting politics around sort of household-level versus commons, you know, built…you know, the way that people tend to talk about “commons,” I think, in sort of modern, urbanized contexts, is this rather kind of like having a community meeting, you know, it’s this nice feeling of being with other people. Whereas, you know, I think we need to look more at actually, how do you develop an agricultural commons when you know that, you know you don’t get on with that person, sort of across the other side of town? And how, you know, how do I make sure I get my piece of the pie with the irrigation water and so on?

So it’s quite, you know, it’s quite sort of realpolitik level [Laughter] that must need to get into this kind of stuff. And you know, that’s what successful commons have done. But, you know, we do need to be brought together by bigger structures. And I draw in the book on the traditions of Distributism, you know, coming out of Catholic social teaching, which I think is really interesting. You know, one of the problems with modernist politics is, you know, we sort of congratulate ourselves that we’ve got rid of God and we’ve got rid of the religious, but we’ve just kind of reinvented it in other, you know, secularized ways. And you know, so much of the horror and the genocide of modernist politics is kind of religious war in another name, really, I think. So. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to distance myself overly from anarchism, but I suppose I have a, you know, slightly different set of influences, too.

AG: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s one of the things I find most valuable about the book. Like, I haven’t really immersed myself in Distributism, and now I’m going to, you know — I’ve got some reading, I’ve got a reading list. I mean, that that’s, that’s how it happens.

One of the things that I do, I really particularly appreciate is the sort of unsentimentality with which you approach these questions of negotiating a commons. You know, I really appreciate your attention to what you call the “transaction costs,” and I think what somebody else might actually prefer to call the “emotional labor” involved in the maintenance of a resource commons. And, you know, more broadly, companionable life among people with differing needs and perspectives and interests and prerogatives. I think Bookchin certainly is one of these that kind of just glosses over that entirely and says, “Well, this is clearly the most rational way to do things, and therefore people will clearly just simply decide to do that.” And he waves a hand. And many people operating in this tradition, I think their weakness is that they wave a hand at these painstaking negotiations that somebody has to own, somebody has to hold, somebody has to moderate. Do you think that we can collectively get better about learning to perceive these so often glossed-over costs, and particularly whose shoulders they fall upon? Do you think that we can learn to be better commoners?

CS: Yeah, I think we can. And, I mean, you know, one of the, one trajectory on our little farm here is that we’ve learned to do that better and learnt to, you know, to sort of be more explicit and to sort of manage conflict better, you know, to sort of, to recognize that you are going to disagree and be annoyed with other people. You have to have some way of resolving that, not to go down bad routes of, sort of simmering resentment or, you know, just walking away, or violence, or whatever. But, you know, the interesting thing I think about agricultural commons historically is that they, you know, for one thing, they, they do tend to only…there is that emotional labor or transaction costs. So you don’t tend to develop them, except where you have to — you know, like you where you have to manage a watershed or something. You can’t do it on the basis of individual, private ownership. So you have to manage it collectively.

And more to the point you have to manage it sort of with everybody you know. Who are people that you don’t necessarily know that well, or particularly like, you know, it’s not just choosing — you know, you can have a companionable work with some people, and other people you’d rather not. [Laughter] But a commons, you know, it is, I mean, obviously there are — the commons has its boundaries, and who’s in, who’s out, you know, there’s, there’s a whole bunch of questions around that. But, yeah, I think we can learn to do that better. But I, you know, I think it has to be on the basis of that relatively unsentimental, you know, there’s just, just too often, you know, people just implicitly assume that something will work out, and it normally ends up either one person carrying the emotional burden or, you know, the thing falls apart.

And I think you know the — partly because we’re so, you know, ironically, in these sort of hugely-populated urban situations, you know, a lot of us are quite lonely, and sort of want more connection with people. And that’s, you know, which is great, that’s fine, but it’s a little bit of a different thing from developing a, you know, a functioning sort of livelihood commons. There’s lots of things like community gardens and so on, which I don’t know. Sometimes they can produce a lot of food. Often, producing food isn’t the main point, you know, it’s connection and purpose. And that’s all great. But, you know, developing a, you know, a livelihood commons is a little bit of a different thing. And I think, you know, we do need to be more thoughtful about that.

You know, partly, there’s you there’s this whole, again, talking to dualities, you know, there’s this endless, kind of Hardin-versus-Ostrom kind of thing that you, that you read in the literature. And Ostrom, I mean, she was brilliant, and her work was fantastic. But, you know, she’s often presented as having shown that “commons work, “you know. But you know, she didn’t really! She showed, she showed often how they failed, you know, and how they could be, how they could be undermined by power. And equally, you know, there is some truth, I think — I mean, you know, Hardin is a problematic figure for all sorts of reasons, but you know, the, his basic insight that you know, if people don’t have a kind of ongoing stake and feedback within the systems that they’re part of, things will fall apart, or people will, you know, will overuse the resource is basically true, you know. I mean, obviously what he was talking about was not commons, you know, it was a kind of open act, free-for-all, basically, you know. So I think you know that debate is, you know, that duality sort of conceals more than it reveals. But, you know, it’s almost become this sort of kneejerk, “Harden was wrong. Ostrom was right. Commons are great,” you know, we need to go a bit deeper than that now.

AG: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, one of the things that I get from Ostrom is this idea that…you know, she’s sort of necessary, but not sufficient, and that, I think, you know, what I get from her is the idea that commons can work, which…

CS: Yeah, for sure, absolutely, yeah.

AG: …in itself, is a really useful contribution, like a huge contribution, because it moves the conversation a different direction. But then, you know, to your point, it takes quite a lot of intellectual and emotional labor to make the commons work, and I think that’s what we need to get better at.

CS: Yeah. I mean, there’s also a historic, you know, people can be a bit overromantic about commons. And, you know, historically, you know, there’s kind of an interesting history of them, where they were quite often a kind of implicit class compact between aristocratic land ownership and ordinary people. So it was like, you know, the lord makes land available, or, you know, provides a bull for, you know, to, to inseminate people’s cows. And it sort of, it was a kind of — on the one hand — a kind of form of, of sort of welfare state, if you like, you know that, you know, people were, were too kind of poor and didn’t have enough land to own a cow, but if they could use a common then, you know, being able to have milk, you know, sort of supported them. So, you know, in some ways, it was a way of evading, you know, trickier arguments about who owned the land, you know. Access to land. And, and, it was a kind of economic, a strategy of economic development — you know, “Let’s, you know, let’s let a bunch of people sort of have at this land in a certain sort of way.” So it’s sort of complicated, and how we would think about that in a future, the kind of scenarios that we’re heading into, again, it’s a whole different ballgame. We have to do it. We have to do it at the level of collective politics. That doesn’t necessarily mean that organizing most aspects of our day-to-day livelihood-making is best done collectively. You know, that’s kind of part of the argument of the book.

AG: What the book seems to want is a shadow book, another book standing alongside it, which you kind of explicitly disavow. You say this. You say “How the bare land that my wife and I bought twenty years ago gradually acquired a household, a family, then more households of people working the land or passing through in one way or another, and how it fitted into wider frameworks of commons and communities…I won’t be telling that story in detail, but I’m struck by the way our modern narratives of localism, landwork and community, both in favor and against, are often quite generalized, stereotyped and bereft of lived complexity.”

I mean, when I read that, my question is: why? I mean, like, you know, I agree: yes, why not offer a corrective precisely by telling your story in detail? The example that you offer of the willow trees and the stewardship of the [inaudible] trees, you know, it’s vivid. It’s illuminating, it’s concrete. I’d read a whole book of that in a heartbeat. You know, tell me — tell me why you chose not to write that book.

CS: It’s interesting that you say that because I am thinking about, I suppose I have always sort of wanted to write that book, in a way, and haven’t. And it is partly because it feels like the story is never, you know. It’s sort of ongoing. It kind of feels like, you know, it’s like the sort of Owl of Minerva thing that never feels you know…It kind of feels like it’s too early to tell the story yet.

But I mean, this particular book arose out of sort of conversations with my publisher and with colleagues and people who read my blog and it sort of, I was sort of under different pressures, both internally applied by myself and other people to write about this or that thing, this, this forthcoming book, Lights in a Dark Age, sort of was a compromise. It was kind of a blend of all these, all these different things. I mean, it even has a bit of fiction in it, you know, people wanted, were suggesting I write a novel, you know, “Why not? Well, maybe not a whole novel, just, just, just a few, few thousand words. Maybe that’s the synopsis for a novel.” But I, yeah, I would like to write that story.

So it’s interesting to hear you say that — you know, perhaps that is what I will do next. I mean, the other side of it, which, again, is something, you know, I very much enjoyed reading your Lifehouse book. And, you know, one point you make in there is: we need to be discussing all these things and the, you know, the Long Emergency and how we deal with it. You know, I’m very nervous about sort of trying to write a blueprint, or, you know, “my three-step guide to how we survive the apocalypse” kind of thing. But, but we do need to be talking about this stuff at a more sort of granular level. But, you know, I suppose part of my argument about localism is that, you know, things are specific and different. You know, everybody, every place is different, you know. So you can’t necessarily generalize in easy ways. That is the other type of book to sort of get into the detail a little bit more, but I’m a bit nervous of that. So you’re probably right. I should write, I should tell the story a bit more.

AG: I mean, I would welcome it. One of the most valuable books on my bookshelf is, is a memoir. It’s by Mark Vonnegut. It’s Kurt Vonnegut’s son. It’s called The Eden Express. And it’s a story. It’s not even fundamentally about the Back to the Land or communal, intentional-community experience. It’s, it’s about a psychotic break he had in the course of trying to live, you know, his first year in, I think, rural British Columbia. But the granularity and the specificity, the detail of what it felt like on a day-to-day basis to negotiate that kind of life with people makes it far and away more useful to me than some of the more studied, academic, distanced accounts of the same moment.

You know, your story in its quiddity, in its specificity — people always want, I know this: audiences want this, publishers want this. They always want you know, “What are the best practices? What is the handbook? The manual, the guide?” And I share your, I deeply share your, your suspicion of, you know, any kind of abstract recipe for how to do this. I think that there are hints. I think there are useful heuristics. I think that there, you know, we learn from the experience of the people who came before us and the cultures that came before us. But nobody, and no format, I think, ever really represents that embodied insight better than just a straightforward account of one’s circumstances.

CS: Yeah. I mean, I suppose one of the difficulties is that, you know, it always involves sort of compromises. And you know, you’re always part of this larger, you know, cheap-energy capitalist system. So, for example, you know, I’ve messed around with keeping livestock on a small scale, and it’s the whole kind of livestock debate. But you know, a great book by Simon Fairlie called Meat where you know his, his his basic argument is, I mean, he coins the term “default livestock,” if you look at peasant farming systems, that the meat or the milk or the eggs or whatever are a kind of bonus. Really, what the livestock do on the farm is they’re farm laborers. Basically, they are ecological protagonists. Fundamentally, they help to tap or cycle nutrients that it’s hard for people, you know, if they weren’t there doing it — which, you know, in some situations of very dense residence, you know, it’s hard to have livestock. Which, again, is where commons comes in. You know, people are great at developing clever systems to create more productivity.

Yeah, that’s, that’s their role on the farm. So I’ve sort of messed around with doing stuff like that, but it’s hard when you’re under kind of modern-type pressures, you know. So it’s easier — you know, you can use pigs as tillers of the soil, for example, but it’s easier just to use a tractor. [Laughter] It would be interesting to write along those lines, I think, about, you know, trying to navigate that, that line. But you know, in some ways it’s something, you know, it’s something that I feel like it’s the journey I’ve sort of hardly begun and sort of drifted off into doing things like writing books. I’m trying to sort of spend a bit more time, actually, out on the farm than I have done in the last few years. You know, also, as we’ve been touching on the social side of it, both in terms of relationships on the farm and the wider world, is interesting. And you know, the beat of nature as well on the farm, you know? So, yeah, it would be an interesting thing to do. Thanks for the tip.

AG: Yeah. I mean, as I say, I would, I would buy and read that book.

It is those relationships to the wider world, or at least one aspect of it, that I want to kind of end our conversation on today. You identify yourself as one particular writer inclined to green antimodernism on the left, but you maintain what I at least perceive as an unusually generous posture towards those good-faith communitarians, who — you know, we would think of them as currently, and however uneasily perched they might be, on the right of the contemporary political spectrum. You, you just maintain a generosity to people that are not already immersed in the kind of shibboleths of left discourse. I agree that there’s, there’s both something in this thought and in this work that transcends the sterility of the left/right distinction, and there’s also more overriding that — there’s the practical necessity to cooperate with folks who might not share one’s own flavor of politics. Do you think, given that generosity — which I have a hard time with, myself — do you think you can say a little bit more about what it might take to build effective local alliances with people who don’t share a lot in the way of your viewpoints and commitments, without betraying our own core commitments to values of that we might variously think of as equity or justice or whatever?

CS: It’s a tough question because I, you know, I suppose I’ve been coming from a sort of fairly traditional, urban left background. I’ve sort of, you know, in some ways, I’ve found that quite a straightjacket. And, you know, things like the opening to Distributism in this book is, you know, is interesting. And, you know, I think the left/right dichotomy can be quite problematic. You know, there’s many aspects of Distributist thought, for example, that fit very comfortably with a sort of traditional left-wing emphasis on equity and social justice. But other aspects of thinking about the role of people within wider structures tend to sort of cut against the grain.

I mean, I think there’s something about individualism and the idea of freedom, which, again, is rehearsed in the sort of anarchist arguments — you know, like Bookchin wrote his critique of, you know, so-called “lifestyle anarchists,” and I think there’s an element of that in, in contemporary leftism, you know, this sort of notion of freedom of the individual that, that really doesn’t fit well within agrarian sort of peasant-Distributist traditions. And I’m, I’m, you know, I’m kind of personally struggling with that, because it’s, you know, it’s almost like two opposed arguments that I kind of agree with both of them. And can’t quite [Laughter], can’t quite, sort of, you know, I think we, I think we, you know, we need to let go of certain aspects of modern individualism, and yet, you know, that’s very much a framework that’s kind of made me, and that I, you know, I understand what, you know, why people are, you know, adhere to it very, very vigorously.

But in terms of connecting with other people, I mean, I think if we go into the discussions with other people, you know, talking about sort of Donald Trump, or, you know, Keir Starmer or Gaza or something, people tend to sort of adopt entrenched positions, which to some extent they’ve, we sort of recycle from, you know, the news, or from the kind of political champions that we identify with. Whereas, if you actually engage people’s sort of humanity and generosity it’s a completely different discussion, and…but I think the important thing there is for it to be quite unmotivated. You know, the point is not to sort of get them on your side and then tell them why, why Trump is a dick. [Laughter] It’s that, it’s that Trump being a dick is going to be irrelevant to our interaction here now — and inasmuch as Trump isn’t irrelevant, because there are these larger politics bearing on us, maybe it’s, it’s about looking at those politics from the local. From, you know, from the kinds of structures and communities that we’re trying to build, you know, rather than from the top down, you know, it goes back to the kind of, if you had the word of the president sort of thing. Well, I don’t have the word of the president, and I don’t want to, you know. So I’m playing a different game.

AG: Lastly, you know, I was amused to see in the book, you characterize your work as “cottagecore with toughness," because I’ve often thought of my own work as “solarpunk with teeth.” What would you say to the proposition that these modes of being can and arguably should coexist with one another?

CS: I only recently became aware of, you know, cottagecore, and I suppose you know there’s this…it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, the sort of romanticization of either the rural or the urban. And, you know, we need to sort of transcend some of those dualities. So I kind of like, you know, the solarpunk idea is not something that I’ve sort of pushed forward. But I, you know, I quite like that. But equally that, I mean, cottagecore, you know, is…it’s not quite as appealing as solarpunk? [Laughter] I think it definitely needs some some political edge to it. But, you know, there are these traditions of sort of rural radicalism that, you know in — certainly in Britain, more so in other countries, and it’s very easy for any sort of advocacy for, for the rural and the local and the agrarian to be sort of dismissed, as, you know, as just this kind of bucolic fantasy. And, you know, I think we need to sort of get beyond that. So, yeah, cottagecore with some teeth, with some edge. But, you know, everybody wants to live in the countryside. That’s why the house prices are so insane, and nobody can afford it, you know. So there’s got to be something to be said for it.

AG: Yeah, and maybe our rural environments, our countryside, will find their Winstanleys, will find their Ranters, will find their Diggers.

CS: Yeah, it’s time. It’s time for some more of that, I think — a bit of 17th Century energy.

AG: Fantastic. On that note, let me thank you, Chris. The book is Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft, and I anticipate that by the time certainly, that this podcast episode goes live, people will be able to buy it from their their local bookseller. Chris Smaje, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it, and I hope you had a good time.

CS: Yeah, thanks. I enjoyed it. Yeah, thanks, Adam. It’s great.

AG: Fantastic.

If you’re interested in what we’ve been talking about today, you might just enjoy my book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire, available directly from Verso at versobooks.com. Editing and audio engineering for Lifepod are by Laurence Green. The typography and graphic design are by Chris Lee. Thanks so much to Agriculture for permission to use their music. I’m Adam Greenfield. Until next time, remember: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.