Blog
Graeber & Dennett said the same thing
One of my favourite quotes from David Graeber is: The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently. Graeber, D. 2024. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, pp8. 1st ed. London: Penguin And one of my favourite books is Daniel Dennett‘s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which for me is that the world is inescapably full of possibility.
September 11, 2025
The joys of a new plugin
When I’m writing new notes, I like to use YYMMDD as a prefix, so that the filenames line up in orderly fashion. I know, this is a bit geeky. I was using Templater to create a new blog post with the blog template, but for such a simple task, you can use the core plugin Unique note creator, which does exactly the same thing. You can even remap Ctrl+N to Unique note creator to create a new unique note!
September 11, 2025
Humans have monetised life
This is what my 15yo said on the way to school this morning. “Other animals don’t do this” he added. Puts me in mind of Marx’s differentiation between personal property (that which we use about our selves) and private property (used to create profit). We live in homes, the house is our personal property. (h/t my civil partner).
September 10, 2025
Less Is More - Degrowth in Development
I’ve started reading for my SPEP, and practising my acronyms, always a useful skill for academia. SPEP stands for Sustainable Planning & Environmental Policy. Past few years I‘ve been focussed on the nature and climate emergency we‘re at the beginning of, and I was a bit worried that planning and environmental policy aren‘t really focussing on the systemic failings of capitalism. And then I remembered Jason Hickel.
August 24, 2025
From economy of occupation to economy of genocide
Zotero is fantastic piece of software to read and annotate books and reports. I’ve been reading UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s ‘From economy of occupation to economy of genocide Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session59/advance-version/a-hrc-59-23-aev.pdf It is damning about Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide. I‘ve been thinking about why the UK government finds it so hard to oppose genocide, and I think it‘s because the UK quite literally has a vested interest in Israel, historically, politically and economically.
August 19, 2025
List of Historic Welsh Place Names talk
Dr James January-McCann, Place Names Officer for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, gave an amazing talk to Cilgerran Festival today. Slowly, he is helping piece together the historical place names of the whole of Wales. This is incredibly valuable work for the process of connecting people with their landscape, recommoning and nature recovery (which is my day job). historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk Go here and have a look for yourself.
August 18, 2025
Zotero: from zero to hero
As an ex-frontend developr (building websites), I‘m fairly technically-savvy, although I’d never used any reference management software before. I installed Zotero a few weeks ago, after exploring the joys of publishing my masters reading list in Cardiff Harvard Referencing citation format. Geek out ✌️ 🤓. But what use was Zotero? My daytime PC runs Linux Mint, and my PDF reader of choice is Okular – lightweight, fast, with ability to highlight text. However, my tablet runs Android, and the choice of PDF readers is peculiarly bad and invasive (Adobe, Foxit etc). It was then that I realised, Zotero handles PDFs! Magnificent, and I can reference, highlight and annotate to my heart’s content.
August 14, 2025
This Is America
Childish Gambino - This Is America Seems more relevant with each passing day.
August 11, 2025
Whose land are you on?
Whose land are you on? What to know about the Indigenous Land Back movement _TED Talk by Lindsey Schneider, April 2022_
August 11, 2025
The Abuse of Property
My wife is studying the philosophy of property and housing, so a lot of cross-over with my recommoning work. (I don‘t actually know what else to call it, so that will do for now.) This conversation was with Daniel Loick, Brenna Bhandar and Jacob Blumenfeld.
August 7, 2025
Political music
BYE BYE 25! When I was thinking of lyric ideas, it occurred to me to use words taken from a site that had all the words that Trump has essentially banned, meaning any grant or piece of a project or proposal for research that includes any of those words would be immediately disregarded or “cancelled.” I guess Trump does believe in cancel culture, because he is literally trying to cancel culture.
July 29, 2025
Introduction
Well, I’ve been accepted on the MSc in Environment and Development at Cardiff University, I have a potential mixed enterprise agroforestry site in mind, and I‘ve had some good feedback on a grant application. 🎉 The name of the site is Recommoning, because I think there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of how society is organised to tackle the nature and nature climate crisis. For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Increasingly, it’s looking like we have no other choice
July 22, 2025