Chris Smaje visits Crazy Town for some farmer-to-farmer straight talk with Jason Bradford. Are these two long lost cousins? Both dropped out of academia years ago to become philosophizing farmers (can we call them “pharmers” with a “ph,” as in PhD?!?). Chris’s latest book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft explores how we can move from modernity’s unsustainable political economy toward a re-organization of society, driven by communities and local food systems. In this wide-ranging conversation, Chris and Jason cover everything from Viking raids to agrarian populism, from societal collapse to the practicalities of making your way in a failed state. And they can’t get away from the shop talk of gardens, livestock, and home economics. Originally recorded on 4/2/26.

Sources & Links

• Chris Smaje’s Blog
• Finding Lights in a Dark Age by Chris Smaje
• Excerpt of the book on Resilience
• Second excerpt on Resilience
• Review: Saying NO to Ecomodermism. Smaje Versus Monbiot, It’s No Contest

Related Episodes

• Episode 98, “Bargaining With Collapse: A Superabundance of Lab Grown Meat and Dryer Balls”

Credits

Production and editing by Alex Leff. Editorial assistance and transcripts by Taylor Antal.

Theme music is “Way Huge” and “Don’t Give Up” by Midnight Shipwrecks, used with permission.

Thanks to all the Crazy Townies, our listeners who are trying to understand humanity's overshoot predicament and do something about it.

I'm Jason Bradford.

I'm Asher Miller.

And I'm Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town, where the only way to make ends meet as a sustainable farmer is to sell your gourds on OnlyFans. In this episode, Chris Smage visits Crazy Town for some farmer-to-farmer straight talk with Jason Bradford. Are these two long-lost cousins? Both dropped out of academia years ago to become philosophizing farmers.

Can we just call them farmers with a pH, as in PhD? Chris's latest book, “Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft,” explores how we can move from modernity's unsustainable political economy toward a reorganization of society driven by communities and local food systems. In this wide ranging conversation, Chris and Jason cover everything from Viking raids to agrarian populism.

from societal collapse to the practicalities of making your way in a failed state. And they can't get away from the shop talk of gardens, livestock, and home economics. Enjoy.

Jason Bradford:

So there's this guy in the United Kingdom, right? You've heard of that place?

Rob Dietz:

Have I?

Asher Miller:

Does it start with The Lord? Sir?

Jason Bradford:

I don't think so, but he's like a former academic, but sociology, I believe is what it was. He wrote this book, "Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work, and Craft. Who am I talking about?

Asher Miller:

Sharing land, working craft?

Jason Bradford:

Work and craft.

Asher Miller:

Oh, work and craft.

Jason Bradford:

Who am I talking about?

Rob Dietz:

King Arthur.

Asher Miller:

Uh... Wait, let me think about this.

I'm just thinking of British people here.

Jason Bradford:

He's a farmer now.

Asher Miller:

Mr. Bean.

Jason Bradford:

God, I'm talking about -

Asher Miller:

I'm trying to think of British people.

Jason Bradford:

I'm talking about Chris Smaje.

Asher Miller:

Oh, Chris, right, of course.

Jason Bradford:

Okay, so he writes more books than I do. He's got a farm.

Rob Dietz:

He's a better farmer than you are.

Jason Bradford:

Probably a way better farmer than I am.

Rob Dietz:

Smarter, better diet, better looking.

Jason Bradford:

I think so.

Rob Dietz:

Eats a better diet.

Asher Miller:

Better accent.

Rob Dietz:

He's a better tennis coach than you are.

Jason Bradford:

I know.

Rob Dietz:

He birds way better than you do.

Jason Bradford:

I don't know about that, but anyhow, I'm excited because I feel like we've kind of been living these parallel lives, but on different sides of the pond or so they say, and I'm even on the other side of the continent.

Rob Dietz:

I mean parallel, but he's the real thing and you're like Chris Smaje light.

Jason Bradford:

Probably, probably. But anyway, I'm going to do it.

Asher Miller:

You're a smidger. He's a Smaje.

Jason Bradford:

I'm a smidgen of Smaje. But I'm kind of excited to talk to him because I mean, face it, finding lights in a dark age. I have some pretty gloomy views about what it's going to be like as we deal

with the great unraveling, blah, blah, blah. And his book is not like all puppy dogs and unicorns and lochness monsters, but it's anyway, mythological creatures.

Rob Dietz:

It's not all puppy dogs, unicorns and lochness monsters.

Jason Bradford:

See, like I say, I don't make sense all the time, but Chris makes a lot of sense. Right?

Rob Dietz:

Let's get him on then.

Asher Miller:

So wait, you're going to talk to him about Lochness Monster?

Jason Bradford:

No, sharing land, work and craft.

Asher Miller:

Right. I mean, Chris, so here we are giving you a hard time. Chris is great. I'm looking forward to your conversation with him. We've published a lot of Chris's stuff over the years at resilience.org. We've actually talked about Chris before because I don't even know what episode you guys always remember episode numbers. I don't remember episode numbers. I just remember we talked about Chris because there was a kind of a brew haha between him and George Manby a little bit.

Jason Bradford:

Yes.

Rob Dietz:

On the whole, yeah, an you use technology to solve our problems or not?

Jason Bradford:

Can you feed people with vats of bacterial slut?

Asher Miller:

You had me at bacterial slush.

Jason Bradford:

No, you can't. And Chris -

Rob Dietz:

That sounds delicious. I can't wait for that.

Jason Bradford:

Chris knocked that out out.

Asher Miller:

You're going to talk to Chris about that, right? Like recipies?

Jason Bradford:

Not too much. No. I think we've dealt with that. So I'm looking forward to this and hope people will give it a listen.

You open your book with this sort of theoretical look of like a Google Earth kind of flyover and you kind of start in Los Angeles and you go across the U.S., Midwest and the East coast and you go up into Northern Europe and kind of come back down to your area and the title of your new book is "Finding Lights in a Dark Age." And part of the imagery is that in this future flyover, assuming you can actually have satellites that can give you this imagery, there's not as many lights and maybe Las Vegas isn't glowing anymore. I guess make that connection then between what we're doing and this belief that you and I both have that we're facing this kind of crisis, multifactorial, but energy being part of it.

Chris Smalje:

The reality basically is that the distribution of the global population now is massively urban and massively not really in centers that are promising agriculturally. That will change. I sort of play on the idea of dark ages in various ways. One, when you fly over the earth now, particularly all

the richer countries, you just see all the light of the cities and the highways and so on. So there is a kind of literal sense of a dark age of less energy, which has all sorts of implications. But the dark age idea really is more of a social, economic, political one. The idea of a dark age when a civilization falls that I'm going to play with as well in the book.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah. The idea that the Western Roman empire collapsed and what that did for where you live, the changes that happened, it's really interesting.

Chris Smalje:

Right.

Jason Bradford:

You're kind of playing on dark age as this, everyone thinks it's a boogeyman when in a sense that's sort of a misconception, at least in part, as all bad. So what is a little bit maybe of those misconceptions, why are dark ages all so bad?

Chris Smalje:

Right. Yeah, I mean, well if we look at historical dark ages post Roman Western Europe or whatever, or Britain is a good example where one historical narrative is, oh, the Romans brought civilization to us. Wild Britain's here and gave us baths and mosaics and things and wasn't that great. But the reality is that they were an invading colonial power. And the evidence from archeology and so on seems to suggest that once the Romans left Britain that the sort of ordinary, average, everyday Britain was better off, better nutrition. And the thing is, we get these sort of historical narratives about the collapse of Rome, or whatever, come down to us from elites, from the literate people. So it's like, oh, it's all falling apart. It's terrible. But the reality of those situations was often more taxation to sort of fund the kind of centralized policy, more military conscription, more militarized societies. So what is called a dark age because it kind of disappears from history a little bit, from a perspective of ordinary people, was often quite good. And all sorts of interesting aspects, gender aspects to that where extractive commercialized farming tends to become more patriarchal for example. Whereas it's kind of better gender relationship - Obviously I'm generalizing. So I kind of try and play with that idea in the book. I mean, what I would say is that I don't want to sort of create this sense that I'm arguing, oh, it'll be great when we lose fossil fuels and society collapses because we now, I think, are in a kind of a different situation, which is much more challenging. So I don't want to sort of suggest that the picture is rosy. But the other aspect of this is that we don't seem to have any real, apart from marginal people like you and me, we haven't really got any sort of mainstream political narratives of how we get out of this. We have the techno fix narrative. So I think it will emerge out of crisis and that will involve suffering. But that's already baked. I mean there's already suffering built into the existing model. That's already baked in. It's not a case of keeping the existing show on the road at all costs. There are ways that we can respond to it and people are creative when forced to be. The problem really is the transition and the speed of the transition. The problem is not the fact that we can't create a congenial livelihood in small scale agrarian societies. We know that we can.

Jason Bradford:

You had a really also early discussion in the book, this fascinating story of Vikings. The idea that there was sort of this environmental catastrophe that happened. And it was just sort of a climate shift happened, a little ice age kind of thing and nobody was at fault. But what it did is it kind of kicked off this reaction by Vikings and you now sort of make the case that in some ways that was the start of the madness we've had to deal with for the next 1,500 years or so. Can you unpack that a bit.

Chris Smalje:

There was these big volcanic eruptions in the sixth century just prior to late Iron Age, just prior to the Viking expansion that created this volcanic winter, kind of like a nuclear winter that just devastated northern Europe. And the result of that was a time of violence basically in which the sort of warrior aristocracies emerged. And that was sort of the genesis. Previously it had been small scale farmers operating within these kind of petty kingdoms, but it created this real kind of expansionary, militarized, aristocratic world. And that was the genesis of the Viking period. And again, I sort of play with that in the sense that everyone talks about the way that the Vikings connected people. They were great traders, they cracked a lot of heads, but they also connected people and traded. Of course, one of the major trade items was slavery. And that became a sort of self-reinforcing cycle of more slaves, more production, more ships, more raiding and so on. And so I kind of play with that idea in the sense that that is the modern world. The modern world has been built on this kind of nexus of trading and raiding and slaving. And although nowadays it's all more gentile, although slavery of course does still exist worldwide, it's not a kind of major legal trade. And we've sort of fooled ourselves into thinking that we've got this whole modern narratives of the wealth of nations that trading is a good thing. And I'm certainly not arguing that there should be no trade, but it is kind of a Viking world. It's a world of getting competitive advantage, getting profit, that whole nexus of political and economic and military power, colonialism, and so on. So that's one model. That's one way the world has gone and we are the inheritance of that in a way, arranging all this sort of trade goods to come to our doors via Amazon, or whatever, from anywhere in the world with these murky power relations behind it all.

Jason Bradford:

Instead of having the ships that you're orring and these guys with these horns on their helmets, they're flying across the oceans and they're landing and they put on a three piece suit and they go into meetings. And they're financing new factories being built, and they're financing the modernization of farming in another country so that you can export instead. And yeah, we made it pretty.

Chris Smalje:

But the horns are still there. Underneath the suit, the horns are still there. So yeah. So that's one way it could go, but the other way it can go, I sort of play with that idea, but I think we have this model that comes out of Thomas Hobbs and Leviathan and all that sort of thing that unless we have a kind of state, unless we have a strong government, then we're all at each other's throats and it's sort of dog eat dog and the top dog wins. That is one model of society that undeniably exists and always has and always will. But there's other aspects too. And generally if you look at global history, people are pretty good at figuring out collaborative ways of working. I mean it's one thing that distinguishes us from our great ape cousins is we are better at actually coming up with peaceful collective arrangements and people are very, very creative in terms of figuring out

how to generate low impact, more or less, sustainable livelihoods and with often very subtle, more subtle, I think in many ways than our modern thinking about property and land. The sort of subtle complexities around, what do I produce as an individual or within my family or household. When do I come together and work with other people on larger scale projects? How do we share out access to resources? So there's a whole history, complex history, that's often very specific to place, but I guess more general wider principles behind it. I think that needs emphasizing as well and that for sure is what we need to be working on in the future I think to avoid that Viking outcome,

Jason Bradford:

Yes.

Chris Smalje:

We have this whole narrative of progress and modernization and how wonderful it's been. And I don't want to deny that. I mean, I possibly don't big it up as much as I might because there's plenty of other people doing that, but we don't talk about the downsides. We don't talk about what we've lost and where we're going, where this so-called progress is taking us.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, I once listened to a Wendell Berry speech that was given at a World's Fair that was in Spokane, Washington. I don't know, like 50, 60 years ago or something like that. And it's exactly what needs to be said today. Things haven't changed. I remember when I started realizing that these incredibly articulate people who are considered national heroes have been saying the same kind of thing for decades. And I'm like a 35-year-old guy who just goes, "Oh no." What can I say that's going to make any difference if these people haven't had any luck? So a part of me is like, it almost has to fail before people will figure it out, which is sad.

Chris Smalje:

The reality basically is that the distribution of the global population now is massively urban and massively not really in centers of promising agriculturally. And so that will change.

Jason Bradford:

A lot of people, when you bring up ruralization and getting people back into the countryside, a lot of people sort of steeped in these modern progress myths are worried. They're like, well if you put everybody out there, they'll destroy the place. And I always go, have you been out there and seen what it's like? It's already pretty messed up. And personally, what I need is, I need help. I need people to help me plant these trees. I need people that can helpe do these restoration projects, restore native grasslands where I can. Those are manual labor jobs and people paying attention and caring for a place. Nothing seems to be cared for anymore because these people are

driving around in these giant machines trying to make their 8% margin if they have a good year. What do you think this comes from? This notion?

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, it's kind of funny how almost all other job sectors, people say, great, we've created more jobs in this. Whereas farming it's always like, oh, it's great. We've mechanized this. There's even less people needed now. I mean I think it partly comes from this progress narrative, which is not a very well examined one. The kind of arc of history is away from farming and towards urbanism. And I think a lot of urban people, I think you're right, they don't necessarily see - You live in the city and then you probably go to a national park for your holiday. You don't go to some massive farm in Iowa or something.

Jason Bradford:

Industrial farm. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Smalje:

So you think, oh, nature. Nature looks great in Yosemite or something. I'm glad we've got this situation of overproduction in farming where the economic incentives work is like, let's crank out more stuff. Let's buy all these inputs and crank out more and more stuff to try. And it's kind of a race to the bottom where you're always producing more to try and stay afloat. And then it's like, well, let's add value by feeding it to livestock or making it into biofuels or whatever. And the whole thing is massively, and typically in places that are potentially quite ecologically fragile, and we shouldn't really - Growing soy in Brazil or whatever.

Jason Bradford:

Ridiculous.

Chris Smalje:

I think it partly comes from that. It partly comes from this critique of this sense that people are talking about back to the land of farming. It's kind of this nostalgic, let's turn the clock back to the good old days. And there can be an element of truth to that critique, but also a lot of what happened that pushed people off the land was expropriation. It was thee enclosure of the commons. It was violent removal of people from the land. It wasn't this wonderful process of Dick Wittington going to London to make his fortune kind of thing. And I think also there's an element of self-justification. It's like, well, I quite like my rich urban job and I don't really want to go and work on the farm. But as you say, a lot of people do. A lot of people absolutely want to do the kind of work that we do and that sort of diverse, interesting, mixed farming. And you also get the kind of thing that crops up a lot. What sort of comes my way as like, oh, you're like the Khmer Rouge. You want to force people at gunpoint to fit in with your, I mean I've had this with my previous book and it's like, I don't want anyone to have to do anything or go where they don't

want to, but if we don't start talking about this, if we don't face the biophysical reality of energy constraints and energy decline, it's going to get pretty nasty. So this is not me trying to enforce my vision of ruralism on people. It's like, guys, look over your shoulder. Look what's coming.

Jason Bradford:

Like you say, so many people are already interested in this, prior to sort of the big collapse we're talking about, there's somewhat of a collapse already happening. Kind of in faith in the system. And so there are some people sensitive like you and I were when we were 20 years ago, sensitive of these right now and are trying to move out of the city. They're trying to get into these farming systems. So tell me about then what you've done. You say you took some land that was sort of what you might call bear farmland, let's say. There's not a lot on it. It was a field maybe just used by a neighboring farmer for their crop rotation and now you've converted into sort of this mixed use thing.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, exactly. So I mean originally it was one field in a larger dairy farm, basically permanent pasture, kind of semi-improved permanent pasture, and it was just owned by a farmer whose main farm was elsewhere that he just put his cows on it occasionally. So yeah, we bought it and we planted seven acres of woodland on it, which was all interesting issues about wood and woodland plantation. But that's worked out really well in all sorts of ways. It is really made the place in lots of ways and the wood is now get a lot of pleasure from seeing these trees towering over me now. And lots of uses out of that.

Jason Bradford:

Well that makes sense in a way. You get older, your joints aren't quite as limber, your back might go out at least. And it makes sense to pass on the hard labor aspects to younger people. And you've written three books in the last, I don't know, is it five years or so?

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it is partly passing on. I suppose it's also, I mean I'm sure as you well know, it's hard to make a sort of food production business work financially, work economically in the modern world. And so to some extent the writing was driven by, you can sort of know that in the abstract, but it's not until you actually grow the veg or produce whatever it is you produce and sort of try and sell it. You're like, "Oh, okay."

Jason Bradford:

No, it's absurd. I've done small veggie stuff, CSAs and little stand by my farm and sell things. And putting melons in the back of my truck and taking it to a neighborhood to sell. And you just wear yourself out. You're like, oh, I got a couple hundred dollars. It's just like . . . It's ridiculous. And people praise you like, oh, it's so wonderful. I love your produce. Oh my gosh, I want more of your melons. I'm just like, I don't want to grow any more melons for sale. They're heavy. They're full of water.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's part of what drew me into the writing is we kind of know what we need to do, how we need to farm, how we need to look after the land and so on. But these bigger systems don't really enable that to happen. So that's sort of what drew me back into writing really and sort of trying to get my head around what the obstacles were and how that might all pan out.

Jason Bradford:

I completely agree. There's this idea at first when you're farming, you're going, am I a real farmer if I don't make a living at this? And eventually I gave myself permission to just do what I could handle and make money somewhere else if I had to. And because it does become an absurdity. And part of what I've done at this place is I've given opportunities for other farmers to do their work. Watching them and their struggles to figure it out has been interesting. And I have a lot of tolerance for failure because I understand that and I'm trying to have small farmers.

Chris Smalje:

If you grow veg in your backyard or do sort of permaculture stuff, you can sort of delude yourself that you are being very productive and very efficient. And I suppose the finances of farming are just crazy and don't stack up. But I guess when you have to focus on, right, got to crank out this amount of produce and I've got to pay for these inputs that cost me, it of makes you think in a different and useful way. But the ultimate conclusion of that is that this global system that we've created is crazy.

Jason Bradford:

And you had a woodlot for gosh sakes. People are probably think you're insane. What are you doing planting trees on what could be a productive pasture for cows. But you're thinking about energy in the future and compassing and having maybe materials to make, I don't know, waddle and dob housing if we need it or something, right?

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, we're sort of mostly off grid and using the wood to provide sort of heat and hot water in the winter, starting to use it for constructional uses as well. But that's a big issue. The way that farming and forestry have been sort of split up and turned into two different things. It's sort of interesting historically because wood is big and heavy. Basically people used to grow it where they needed it because transport costs are huge. Whereas now with fossil energy wood, it's kind

of a low value product, so you tend to produce it as far away as possible on sort of low value land. But again, that's a feature of modern society. We need to claw some of that back and bring these different aspects of the farm landscape or the settled landscape back into relationship with one another.

Jason Bradford:

And all the different tasks you can do. I find that if I do the same thing over and over again, I can get pretty bored and I might hurt myself, but a lot of what I get on this mixed farming is I'm tasked switching all the time. I'm repairing a fence, I'm planting trees, maybe I'm compassing, I'm moving the sheep, I'm planting some peas. You can do that all in one day at a modest scale and not hurt yourself and find it very interesting.

Chris Smalje:

I think the way that existing landowners and farmers go will be quite significant in a lot of places. And their model of farming is very, very dependent A, on costly, energetically costly inputs that will be melting away and B, on global commodity markets. And so how that plays out, that can play out in a lot of different ways. But my feeling is a lot of large scale farmers are not making any money at it either and are sort of interested in connecting with stacking small enterprises. That's one way it can go. It will also depend on the organization of people moving in. I mean, I talk a little bit in the book about the MST in Brazil, landless workers occupying largerstates. So you can have maybe to some extent armed or at least aggressive takeovers of land, which is almost like the flip side of the kind of feudal aristocracy or the landlord society. But what I would hope is that is to avoid those extreme sort of violent scenarios at either end. And there's a lot of different models of the way in which we can come together politically to sort these things out. The role of families, households, small scale agrarian societies, commons, and so on, that sort of middle ground of all of a sudden it's like hell, we've got to start producing more of our livelihood locally. What resources do we have? Well basically land and people and those things coming together. It's not only about more people coming in, more mouths to feed, it's also more people coming in, more arms to work, more hands on deck sort of thing. That can

play out in a lot of different ways. The more we sort of leave it and assume that all of this sort of fix or status quo political economies will solve it, the more likely it is to collapse I think in sort of rapid problematic, potentially violent ways. That's why I think it's so important for us to be having these conversations and trying to build this up now while we still have the time. And I draw on various frameworks in the book, distributism, agrarian, populism, republicanism and so on. A lot of this stuff that we've sort of forgotten about, but people have thought about this for a long time. And again, I think as part of this progress narrative that we sort of think, oh, anything that people were thinking or writing a hundred plus or more years ago, that's not relevant now, but it is. These were people that were living in low energy, more localized societies, often societies that had experienced political fracture or violence. How do we build up from that? It's really important to be having these conversations.

Jason Bradford:

I want to then get into some of the nitty gritty of this. This is a big part of the book. We're so used to this sort of corporate state duopoly and all the conversations have been about democracy versus communism or socialism or capitalism, and it's like people's framework is really, really narrow actually, and I do agree with you. The idea that we've got these big farms that are depopulated and instead of the problem being we don't need people because they're going to ruin it. The problem is we don't have enough people to actually care for these places absent the machines. And the machines aren't doing a very good job. Can you say anything about the potential for this more horticultural mixed farming model to actually sustain ourselves like peasants of the past?

Chris Smalje:

There's this narrative that modern farming is way more efficient or productive. It is more productive per unit labor when you've got one guy in a massive combine or a tractor compared to if you are out in your garden producing stuff, but it's not more productive in any other way really. It's not more productive per acre, which I think is the thing that's often in people's minds, or at least it can be. Apart from productivity per unit labor, I don't think scale is that relevant.

Jason Bradford:

It's a wash.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah. But as you say, what you are producing in a sort of horticultural situation is a much more diverse diet. The modern agricultural system is very good at producing cheap grains and grain legumes that probably are not that great for us in the quantities we eat them, but not good at producing the real diversity. But yeah, it's not more productive per acre really. It's certainly not more productive per unit energy or per unit agrochemical inputs. So I mean, I don't want to

diminish the work that's involved in producing the full livelihood, which I don't produce all of my own food here. I need to stop writing books and produce more of it.

The real problem, as I said earlier, is the overproduction that we have because it's so easy to produce grains and cereals and grain legumes cheaply in massive quantities. The problem that we have is global overproduction that then feeds into pretty disastrous livestock sector and biofuel sector and so on. So yeah, if you are producing your energy locally, living a lower energy, more localized life, diverse whole food production, you can do that on quite a small scale.

Jason Bradford:

Let's get into some of these other ways of thinking about politics, right? And one that you really kind of highlight is this concept of Distributism.

Chris Smalje:

Right.

Jason Bradford:

So maybe we start there.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah. One of the original ideas for the book was for it to be more directly about Distributism and in the end it was a sort of mixture of different things. I mean Distributism is interesting. It emerged out of Catholic social teaching. It emerged out of, I've forgotten which Pope, it was late 19th century Pope wrote Rerum Novarum and it was sort of a document that was attempting to steer - As you mentioned previously, the big clash of the 19th and 20th century was sort of capitalism versus socialism. So it was either people being turned into landless, wage workers at the whim of the market or it was these kind of huge governmental systems of co-opting labor. And the idea was that it was all kind of equal and the state was acting in the interest of the people, but it wasn't really. So the distributist idea was essentially for ordinary people to have access to their own means of production. So a small spread of land or local artisanal guilds that you could meet their needs outside of for themselves locally out with these kind of huge modern technocratic systems of capitalism or socialism. Part of it was private land ownership and that scares some hares. And I sort of come from a traditional kind of left wing background, but there's a big difference between small scale distributed, that's where the name comes from. The point is that nobody can accumulate a massive amount of land and then rule the roost that distributed private land ownership.

And what private means essentially is that you have a long-term stake in it that you get to have agency and autonomy and a long-term stake in the land so that it's not that you can do whatever you'd like with it. There is kind of local wider control of what people -

Jason Bradford:

Zoning.

Chris Smalje:

Zoning, exactly. There's this --

Jason Bradford:

Or a land trust that has rules for what you can do. Yeah.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah. We tend to have this kind of dualistic view of private property of get off my land, or it's my land and I can do what I like with it, but ownership is more complex than that. But that's the basic idea. So yeah, that's distribution in a nutshell, and I think it was an important movement that sort of got swept aside post-war period of globalization and economic growth and industrialization, and that socialism versus capitalism, the Cold War context and so on and so on and so on. But it's like a lot of these things, the time comes around again. It looks like that way of thinking was lost, but didn't really lose the argument. It lost the political conflict at the time. But those ideas are still waiting for us, and I really think we need to look at them with fresh eyes now because they can teach us things. You get a lot of people who are like, oh, we're so individualistic and capitalist in modern society. We need to - All has to be shared. Property is theft. All of this kinda, which I'm kind of sympathetic to up to a point, but -

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, me too.

Chris Smalje:

It can be too sort of . . . It's not a very subtle way of thinking. Either we're all individual and all private property owners and putting up fences around our boundaries or it's all collective and it all has to be done and sort of agreed with everybody. And you get power dynamics in that. Those kind of shared situations, you get the loudest voices that prevail and so on. So they're not free of power dynamics. So that's partly why I do favor that small distribution, the basic unit is your household and your garden and producing stuff for yourself, but then guilds and commons, they will start to emerge. You'll have to manage aspects of the larger landscape collectively and that's when you get into the detail. I think there's a danger of trying to run before we can walk, or assuming that the higher collective level is the right level or the best one, and often it isn't. It's got to be more musical than that.

Jason Bradford:

It's like a Humpty Dumpty problem where we destroyed these peasant cultures and it's like, putting 'em back together again it's not - You can't just explain it to somebody. It's like you have to live it. And that takes so much time. And so much is embodied knowledge.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, totally and I think this is the time when we need to be experimenting with, we do need to learn from the past and look at how people did this kind of stuff in the past, but not just to mindlessly replicate it, but to see why they did it and sort of the ways in which it worked or not. But equally in modern times, use what we have available now and recognize that we are de-skilled and just experiment with lots of different ways of doing things. And that's partly, again, coming from a sort of traditional left wing perspective. I talk quite a lot about family and kinship in the book, and that's kind of a bit of a no-no on the left. It's like families, it's kind of conservative and old fashioned and reactionary. But every culture, family, it's almost like humans like structure. We like to create, to formalize things, and kinship is a way of doing that. And it's particularly interesting I think in agrarian societies where you tend to have a relatively small household unit, but a wider sort of kinship. And that can work in all sorts of ways. I mean, one of the most interesting things I'd touch on in the book I think is matrilineal kinship, which tends to be associated with horticultural societies. So a woman with her own private garden essentially, and being inherited by her daughter. Again, it's kind of interesting in terms of some of our stereotypes about gender and private property and all this stuff being sort of patriarchal capitalism. It can sort of divide up in different ways. But kinship is interesting in that it's kind of extendable and it can connect with farming where there are times in the farming year when you need a lot of labor and you kind of reach out or find ways of connecting with other people, and then other times sort of lower intensity times.

So part of the book is like, don't dismiss kinship, but also don't dismiss non-kin neighborhoods, commons, working with other people, experimenting in all sorts of different ways. We need to do this and figure out what works for us in our contemporary settings for sure. And also fictive invented kinships. It's like the way we call people brother or sister or cousin or whatever.

Jason Bradford:

Oh my gosh. Oh, aunties and stuff.

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, it's partly about how we model the relationship.

Jason Bradford:

We have this reverence right now in this liberal modernism of indigeneity and these simple aesthetic ways and very little desire for most people to actually live like that. Is there any sort of way you see that this dark age forces this? An alignment more between what we say our values are, what we say we care about, and what we actually have to do?

Chris Smalje:

We're still in this stage where more and more people are seeing the writing on the wall, I think, but it's still sort of marginal. But as we were discussing earlier, the way that the state will increasingly, the centralized state will increasingly fail people and people will have to invent along the lines, you were just saying, make it up for themselves. And so I think that will be a time of enormous stress and difficulty, but also enormous invention and creativity, both practical creativity but also cultural creativity.

Jason Bradford:

Yeah, I like that. You get at the fact that the culture is going to evolve in ways that we can't really predict. I kind of see that in the sense of awe I get and reverence and how much I care for this land, this place I'm at. The rainbows and the baby lambs and the river. I'm not religious in any way, but there is something that I think maybe ties me to this place now, where I sort of feel like in a sense you get into this natural law and virtues. In a sense, there's things that are more important to me about this place and who I want to be in relation to it now than I would've imagined just living in a city and not having a farm. How does this play out? Do you think over time as people move and become integrated into maybe these more rural communities?

Chris Smalje:

Like you, I come from a secular background and I've just been feeling my way quite cautiously towards a more spiritual and religious vision. And I do think one of the problems that we have in modernism is we've kind of said, "Oh, we don't need God anymore. Forget about God." But what's happened is instead of worshiping God, we've worshiped ourselves and money. We've sort of put ourselves and our institutions in the God slot. And that hasn't actually turned out very well for us. So I dunno whether the existing global religions, they've lasted a long time through a lot of ups and downs and churches I think are really key community institutions here in Western Europe. It's about the least religious part of the world that exists. But I think that kind of Richard Dawkins moment of atheism is going to sweep the world. I think we'll be mistaken.

Jason Bradford:

I think so too.

Chris Smalje:

So it may be that the existing religions kind of reinvent themselves, or it may be that new religions and nature religion, more localist stuff happens. I don't know. But I think you can't sort of just invent a religion.

Jason Bradford:

Right. They evolve.

Chris Smalje:

The people that try to invent an off the peg religion are usually charlatans, and we shouldn't be giving our money to those guys. But essentially, I've just been reading this book about the medieval period, the Mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. This notion that as commercialization took off in Europe, this idea of voluntary poverty of people giving up things and essentially going back to the land in some sense, or going back to the local and to the community. So again, that's another aspect of all this that I think needs more thought. How do we re-engage?

Jason Bradford:

You bring up St. Francis Assisi, which I think he was alive probably when there was some renaissance going on in Italy. Is that the idea? And over commercialized and -

Chris Smalje:

Yeah, I guess he was a little bit before that, but yeah. But it was the time - It was the kind of lead up into that as medieval European societies started becoming more commercial and more trade.

Jason Bradford:

And then he's worried about it. Like this over grandiosity. Maybe Venice was kind of insane at that point. And so, I know I've been there. That church, the church is very simple. Like, it's interesting. You go to Italy and some of these churches are super ornate, but the church in Assisi was very, very plain. Right? He had plain robes, right? These plain brown robes. And was in nature and stuff. So, it is very interesting to see these cycles of people that are like, wait a second. You know, we might lose ourselves if we go too far in this direction.

Chris Smaje:

And it’s interesting that, you know, throughout the world, most pre-modern cultures, asceticism had its place as the idea of a sort of religious renouncer. And in some ways, there was a model for that in farming as well, that, you know, that the good farmer was kind of frugal and modest and, you know, didn't throw their weight around, self-reliant and so on. But again, with this kind of Viking world that we've created, we've sort of lost that. You know, we've lost that sense, that simplicity or not rank poverty necessarily. And, you know, the sort of Franciscan way, the sort of extreme burn all your wealth and sort of, you know, just be on the road. You know, that's not for everybody, but just that sense that that model is an admirable one is something that we can emulate to some degree or learn from. We've kind of lost that in modern society. And there's this sense that it's all about creating economic growth and sort of accumulating money and busting all these boundaries and somehow keeping the show on the road, you know? So I think another thing that's important to look back to is those traditions of Asceticism and simplicity. To some

extent the green movement and sort of various elements of ecological thought have carried that forward in the modern times. But it's always been quite marginal. You know, it's not really part like.

Jason Bradford

Yeah, yeah it is. I think I kind of have a cultural materialism perspective on things. And so what I think will happen, I mean, again, not being prescriptive or overly predictive about anything is that the ideas that are going to help people cope with the hard times in the future are going to then rise again to the fore. And so drawing from the past, a lot of reinvention is going to happen. People will come up with these things on their own, but they're going to rhyme with what someone figured out in the past. And eventually, maybe our culture evolves to mimic more of these indigenous cultures, you know? And in some ways, it's interesting. I always felt like Catholicism was very good at going somewhere, and it didn't actually wipe out completely the other culture. Like there was still a bunch of paganism alive in Central and South America. It was really fascinating to see the fusion of the two. Like in your local saints, but then also local deities. Really still there? Animist kinds of religions persist even as Christianity spreads. Mhm. In these cultures that were still tied to that local place. But, um, is twenty twenty six going to be one of these years where so much breaks in people's normal world that suddenly, you know, Chris Smaje’s book is a bestseller.

Chris Smaje: That would be nice, wouldn't it? At least somebody would be benefiting from the collapse then, you know. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think obviously, you know, that's one of the problems of writing about the future is that you can't tell. And, you know, you very easily make yourself look foolish. But I think we do need to be focusing on the future because it's clear that the existing system is not sustainable weather that will collapse this year. You know, whether it will be the war with Iran, it's not going to be one thing like that. You know, it's kind of there will be sort of reverses and recoveries. But I think the general trend is for a more chronic, longer term, deeper, more systemic crisis. And that's an example of it. And I think we are seeing this kind of global superpower geopolitics, where the sort of long modernist period. The European conquest of the Americas, I think, was really significant in terms of creating a global system and the flow of crops as much as anything, you know, potatoes and maize from the Americas, wheat from the old world, and how that generated a kind of global food system and Atlantic slavery and sugar production and cotton and all this stuff. And then in more recent times, the Cold War and the U.S. as the sort of global superpower, global policeman as it were. And sort of creating global trade and giving military protection. And we're beginning to see that fray and that sort of global geopolitical post-war stability of a kind of U.S. backed global trading system is kind of falling apart. And obviously, we've got, you know, the geopolitics of China and Russia and the Middle East and so on. So yeah, I think all of that is boiling up into a world that is going to be very different, very much more unstable, less resilient politically and economically, more challenging, whether twenty six is the year. I mean, one thing I do every year is look at the global

energy stats. And I mean, you know, all this stuff very well. But the so-called transition to renewables. And every year you see that actually more fossil fuels were used with the exception of the financial crisis and Covid, you know, little dip. But the general trend is more fossil fuel use every year. It'll probably be different in the coming year. And there might come a point when it starts going down. But I think there's still this widespread assumption that, hey, you know, we don't need fossil fuels. We'll transition out of those. We'll have renewables and it will be business as usual again. I really for all sorts of reasons, I think that's not what's going to happen. And it's going to be bumpy. But I can imagine people cheerleading. Oh great. Fossil energy prices are up. You know, it'll push the transition. Everything will be good. I don't think it will be. But part of this is that we get more unpredictable, quixotic political leaders like Trump, who sort of throw a firecracker in a way that, you know, hasn't so much been the case in postwar global politics. So, yeah, there's a lot of work for us all to do on the ground to navigate all of this.

Jason Bradford: It must be very strange to be a wage earner living in an apartment in a big city and to become aware of what's going on globally. And if you like, grok how dependent you are and if maybe you start seeing grocery store shelves start becoming bare of certain items. How

many people are going to quickly make these connections and hear through social media, podcasts, the odd mainstream news article now and then about sort of these other ways of maybe going about it?

Chris Smaje: Yeah.

Jason Bradford: And I just hope more people get there faster. Right? Like you and I got there twenty something years ago for whatever reason. And I still feel like I wish I'd done it sooner because the learning curve is so steep.

Chris Smaje: Yeah.

Jason Bradford: But I appreciate books like yours because I learned a lot from that book, and I want to thank you for it. And it was one of the more unique books I've read dealing with this. You and I, I think, are both in these weird situations where we're dealing with these sort of land questions and new people coming in. And it's not theoretical, it's practical. And so your ability to go between sort of that theory and practice on some pretty complex, nuanced, highly contextualized subject matter. I just applaud that. And I'm glad you're a social scientist doing this because that's not my bailiwick.

Chris Smaje: Thank you. That's nice to hear. Yeah. I mean, I think people, you know, part of the problem we have now is farming is so divorced from most people's experience. I mean, you know, maybe gardening, horticulture is the way to get into this. But, you know, we've got this, this sort of situation of growing inequality in society. A lot of which is around housing prices and

then cheap food. It's like, we need to have this cheap food produced by these ultimately unsustainable global commodity food systems that can produce food cheaply. But it is this period of, you know, capitalism. It's the right word because ultimately it's about accumulating more capital than it can. There are times and places when that can bring benefit to people and more industry and more good things. But ultimately, it's about putting more capital in the hands of the people that have a lot of capital in the first place. I think that will become more obvious to people. But the question is whether it then becomes more of a sort of kind of traditional left wing. Let's equalize it more, which obviously needs to happen. We need to talk about land reform and housing policy and so on. But the problem goes so much deeper than that. And, you know, ultimately it goes into all of these things we've been talking about, about farming and local food production.

Jason Bradford: And the balance, these tensions. Mhm.

Chris Smaje: Yeah.

Jason Bradford: Great to finally actually talk to you.

Chris Smaje: Yeah, yeah. Great. Yeah. It's good to meet you.

Jason Bradford: I've been a big fan of your writing, so thank you so much for all your work. I'm so happy you found a beautiful farm to be able to experience all this with. I'm looking forward to, you know, hearing how things unfold in the future with you, so I want to stay in touch.

Chris Smaje: Right. Great. Yeah, that would be good. Yeah. Looking forward to keeping the conversation going. So yeah. Thank you. I'll put my horned helmet away for now. And work on connecting with people is the way to go.

Melody Travers: That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.