Finding Lights in a Dark Age – Sharing Land, Work and Craft

The author has co-worked a small farm in Somerset for the last 20 years, and has an academic background in sociology and anthropology. His most recent book reviewed in these pages was Saying No to Farm Free-Future, taking an agroecological and local view also elaborated here. Like many other commentators such as Paul Kingsnorth and Paul Cudenec, Chris is radically critical of the predominant capitalist extractivism, which he traces historically back to the Norman conquest typical of Viking raids and what he calls conquest societies that were also responsible for colonisation and globalisation. We may not be able to stave off the deepening chaos, but we can work together towards better outcomes. This involves an orientation to land, craft, work and community.

The claim that global problems require centralised global solutions that only clever and powerful people can command is itself the root of a wider issue that looks to increasingly centralised control systems and regulations so typical of left hemisphere dominance. Chris suggests that we need to move from liberalism to what he calls distributism that implies localism. Many people are already living such a life of cooperative organisation where land and capital are distributed among households and intentional communities rooted in local ecologies and founded on a concept of common good – this was implicit in the commons system usurped by private landowners in the Middle Ages. In the future, he surmises, more people will spend more of their time producing the necessities of life directly from their local landscapes, and in the process will reconnect with nature and enhance their overall emotional and mental health in the process. The book is full of practical advice and suggestions, involving unlearning what we take for granted and learning new collaborative ways of living and relating to the land and each other. We have to find such ways of improvising to a new way of life.