Smaje has been locked in life-or-death tussle with the journalist George Monbiot - bravely articulating what many of us think about Monbiot's celebration of lab food. Monbiot here is reduced to a very brief cameo - somewhat like a pantomime baddy; mercifully diminished.
"Finding Lights in a Dark Age" is, instead, a much more personal book. Smaje draws on his experience of the realities of managing land and market gardening. I laughed when he said he has been described locally as "not really a farmer" because it highlights the sclerotic attitudes of conventional farming and the countryside's too-common snobbery.
Bang up-to-date with the latest academic and sociological perspectives, the book nevertheless falls into the grand tradition of radical self-sufficiency. One could be reading Scott and Helen Nearing or John Seymour.
J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World" gets a very welcome mention and a highlight for me was the epic chapter twelve in which Smaje renders a genuinely excellent "Soi-Fi" projection of life in the South of England in the coming Dark Age he has conceptualised throughout the proceeding book. I'd read a whole book of that.