John Michael Greer's Blog, page 3

A Vision: Stories of Michael Robartes and his Friends

Perhaps the most important thing that sets A Vision apart from other works of occult philosophy in its time is that its author was one of the greatest writers and poets of the age. The occult revival that Eliphas Lévi launched in 1854 with the first volume of Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic produced plenty of philosophical syntheses, Lévi’s first among them. It also yielded no small number of works produced, as A Vision was, by automatic writing or some other mediumistic method—but it only pro...

Climate Change: An Unwelcome Future

The audience reaction to the last two essays I’ve put up here turned out to be something of a surprise to me. A month and a half ago—has it been that long already?—I posted the first of two parts of an essay on climate change, listing three things that each side of today’s climate debates get hopelessly wrong, and exploring the “crisis management model”: the system by which our managerial class exploits crises rather than doing anything useful to help people deal with their consequences. I expec...

June 2025 Open Post

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

A Brief Guide to Status Panic

Yes, I know I said I was going to return to the theme of climate change as soon as I got back from my working trip to England. Regular readers will know that my muse is an unpredictable lady, however, and what she decides to talk about is not always what I had in mind. Add to that long hours sitting on planes and trains and Underground cars, brooding over certain recent events, and unexpected insights are hard to avoid.

The recent events just mentioned, and thus the insights, centered on a conve...

On Hiatus

Just a reminder to my readers that this blog will be on hiatus until June 18. I’ll continue to put comments through on the previous open post when I have the chance, but long delays are pretty likely. See you then!

May 2025 Open Post

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Climate Change: The Crisis Management Model

These days we live in a hyperpolarized political environment where most people assume that if you’re not all the way over to one extreme, you must be all the way over to the other. That’s a major cause of the collective stupidities that afflict the world today, since the opposite of one bad idea is quite reliably another bad idea. Me—well, put it down to autism if you like, but I’m fine with offending both sides. For years now, in fact, if I don’t field roughly equal numbers of shrill denunciati...

A Vision 2: A Packet for Ezra Pound

By the late 1930s William Butler Yeats was an old man. He celebrated his seventieth birthday in 1935; his health, never robust, became increasingly fragile as the 1930s wore on. Gone were the days when he went on lecture tours across the English-speaking world, sleeping on trains to save expenses while giving one lecture or poetry reading after another for weeks on end. The rain and snow that sweep in from the North Atlantic and make Irish winters so bitter were more than his failing health coul...

The Fall and Rise of Peak Oil

It’s now been close to fifteen years since the Peak Oil movement collapsed and lost whatever temporary grip it had on public awareness. We could doubtless have an interesting conversation along the lines of “did it fall or was it pushed,” and there may be a point to that conversation a little further down the road. For now, though, I think something more basic is called for: an update on where we are just now on the long slow slope of Hubbert’s curve, and what we can expect in the years immediat...

A Case Study in Stimulus Diffusion

From an outsider’s perspective, the sibling rivalry between Christianity and Islam is a fascinating slice of religious and cultural history. Though the propagandists of both faiths tend to deny this heatedly, they have many more points in common than differences, especially when compared to religions elsewhere in the world. Both developed in the eastern penumbra of the late Classical world, where Hellenic and Semitic cultural currents tangled and blended; both took the basic principles of Judais...