John Michael Greer's Blog, page 76

Animals II: Chickens, Rabbits and Fish

When people think about animals in the context of rural homesteading or backyard gardening, odds are the earthworms and bumblebees discussed in last week's post won't be the first thing that comes to mind. The reason for this is simple: they simply aren't tasty enough. I recall a book I read years ago with the winsome title Butterflies In My Stomach: The Role of Insects in Human Nutrition that made a strong case for dining on insects, but I confess to never having put its recommendations i...

Animals I: Birds, Bats, and Bumblebees

I should probably send Rob Hopkins a thank you note. I'm not at all sure he meant to draw attention to the Green Wizards project just as the forum at http://www.greenwizards.org went live, but that's the way it turned out, and the results have gone past my most improbable hopes. Measures of forum activity I'd hoped to pass in six months have been shouldered aside in six days, and the forum staff are scrambling to deal with a far more lively online community than any of us expected this soon.

T...

Green Wizardry: A Response to Rob Hopkins

Since the Green Wizards project got under way two months ago, I've wondered off and on whether it would field any sort of response from the Transition movement. Thus it was not exactly a huge surprise to read Rob Hopkins' blog post on the subject yesterday. I admit that the tone of his response took me aback, and so did the number of misrepresentations that found their way into it; I have no objection to criticism – quite the contrary, an idea that can't stand up to honest criticism isn't w...

The Care and Feeding of Time Machines

The distinction between intensive and extensive food plant production discussed in last week's post has implications that go well beyond the obvious. When you garden a backyard or a few acres intensively, you can spare the time, energy, and resources to do things you can't do on an extensive farm of a few hundred acres, and the payback can be spectacular.

This week's post is going to explore one set of these possibilities. I could be prosaic and give that set any number of labels, but half ...

Two Agricultures, Not One

Talking about the future after peak oil is a challenging thing. One of the things that makes it most challenging is the extent to which so many people seem unable to imagine any way of doing things that isn't business as usual in some lightly modified form. Last week's post made a passing reference to this odd blinkering of our collective imagination, in the context of current worries in the peak oil blogosphere about "peak phosphorus."

It's true, of course, that the rapid depletion of the wo...

Thinking like an Ecosystem

Last week's post on composting had, as my more perceptive readers will probably have noted, more than one agenda. First on the list, obviously, was the straightforward goal of getting as many people as possible to start practicing one of the simplest and most useful skills in the green wizard repertoire, and getting plant nutrients out of the waste stream and into the soil in the process. Still, there's more involved here than that sensible step.

Composting, as I mentioned in passing last wee...

A Friendly Greeting from Annelids

Over the last few weeks, this blog has sketched out the basic outline of a green wizardry rooted in the appropriate tech movement of the Seventies but reshaped to meet the needs of the deindustrial future now taking shape around us. So far that outline has been drawn on a relatively abstract level; that's useful as a starting point, but the practical dimension has to be addressed if a project like this is to have any impact at all on the profoundly concrete predicament facing the industrial ...

The Cybernetics of Black Knights

Serendipity's a funny thing. When I started planning out this post a couple of days ago, I knew that I was going to have to pull my battered copy of Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature off the bookshelf where I keep basic texts on systems philosophy, since it's almost impossible to talk about information in any useful way without banking off Bateson's ideas. I didn't have any similar intention when I checked out science reporter Charles Seife's Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion ...

Closing the Circle

A couple of weeks ago, Energy Bulletin revisited some predictions made in 2000 by Amory Lovins, then as now one of the most vocal proponents of technological solutions to the crisis of industrial society. Under prodding by energy analyst Steve Andrews, Lovins insisted among other things that by the year 2010, hybrid and fuel cell cars would account for between half and two thirds of the cars on the road in the United States.

Lovins was completely wrong, as we now know – hybrid cars account f...

The Ways of the Force

By now those of my readers who have joined me on the current Archdruid Report project – the creation of a "green wizardry" using the heritage of the appropriate technology movement of the Seventies – should have downloaded at least one of their textbooks and either have, or be waiting for the imminent arrival of, the rest. Now it's time to get into the core principles of green wizardry, and the best way to do it involves shifting archetypes a bit. Give me a moment to slip on a brown robe, t...