But inasmuch as the small farm societies of the future will be peasant societies I think they’ll be ‘reconstituted’ peasant societies., rebuilding themselves out of the declining structures of an earlier economic system in the absence of an ‘authentic’ prior peasant tradition – albeit, I confess, in a very different historical situation.
After liberalism, then, I believe the task is to steer our societies towards a small farm civic republicanism of the front porch and not the front parlour variety. I don’t think that’s going to be easy.
My main purpose in the book was only to suggest that a small farm future is pretty much a given, and whether that future proves attractive or ugly is collectively down to us and our successors.
I’ve always thought that a long-term positive of Brexit might be a dawning realization that if you want to eat food locally you probably need to produce it locally, for the most part.
When the high-energy authoritarian political centres fail, which ultimately they will, my hope is that some of these ‘irrelevant’ places will have forged resilient material cultures and mature political institutions that will enable them to usher our descendants into the next chapter of human history.