John Michael Greer's Blog, page 77

Seeking the Gaianomicon

The archetype I proposed as a model for an appropriate-technology revival in the age of peak oil – the archetype of the green wizard – comes with certain standard features in folklore and fantasy. One of them happens to be a full-blown archetype in its own right: the book of ancient and forgotten lore. Those of my readers who plan on becoming green wizards will need to provide themselves with the grimoires, literally "grammars," of that art, and in this post I propose to explain how to do j...

Merlin's Time

Perhaps the most interesting responses to the discussion of mass movements here on The Archdruid Report have been those that insisted that the only alternative, either to a mass movement in the abstract or to some specific movement, was defeat and despair. That's an odd sort of logic, since mass movements are hardly the only tool in the drawer; I suspect that part of what drives the insistence is the herd-mindedness of our species – we are, after all, social mammals with most of the same inb...

A Pathless Land

The discussion of revitalization movements and fantasies of collective redemption over the last two weeks here on The Archdruid Report had an interesting though by no means unexpected result. Several people asked me whether I thought it might be possible to harness some movement of the same broad sort to get people to do the things they need to do to get ready for peak oil.

This is hardly a new idea, of course. Back in the late 1990s, when the first peak oil email lists were taking shape, the ...

Waiting for the Millennium

Part Two: The Limits of Magic

The first half of this essay sketched out the unfamiliar terrain that's beginning to open out in front of the peak oil community as the concept of hard energy limits seeps back out into public awareness, after thirty years of exile in the Siberia of the imagination where our society imprisons its unwelcome truths. One probable feature of that landscape is the rise of revitalization movements among people in the industrial world. Last week I talked about those mo...

Waiting for the Millennium

Part One: Peak Oil Goes Mainstream

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that one of its central projects early on was an attempt to deconstruct the most deeply entrenched set of myths industrial culture uses to define the future. To borrow a phrase from Carlos Castaneda, the myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse were worthy opponents, and I hope the confrontation with them was as educational, and occasionally entertaining, to my readers as it was to me. I'm pleased to say, though...

Magical Thinking

As I write these words, the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico continues unchecked. It seems almost obscene to suggest that anything positive might come out of an oil spill that is already the largest in US history, and of course it's true that whatever good might be salvaged from the situation will offer little consolation to the ravaged ecosystems and destroyed communities of the Gulf. Still, as teacher and Foxfire founder Eliot Wigginton noted, learning is only made possible by failure, an...

The World After Abundance

It has been nearly four decades now since the limits to industrial civilization's trajectory of limitless material growth on a limited planet have been clearly visible on the horizon of our future. Over that time, a remarkable paradox has unfolded. The closer we get to the limits to growth, the more those limits impact our daily lives, and the more clearly our current trajectory points toward the brick wall of a difficult future, the less most people in the industrial world seem to be able ...

Garlic, Chainsaws, and Victory Gardens

The uncontrolled simplification of a complex system is rarely a welcome event for those people whose lives depend on the system in question. That's one way to summarize the impact of the waves of trouble rolling up against the sand castles we are pleased to call the world's modern industrial nations. Exactly how the interaction between sand and tide will work out is anyone's guess at this point; the forces that undergird that collision have filled the pages of this blog for a year and a half...

After Money

The discussion of the risks of complexity in the last few posts here on The Archdruid Report dealt in large part with abstract concepts, though the news headlines did me the favor of providing some very good examples of those concepts in action. Still, it's time to review some of the practical implications of the ideas presented here, and in the process, begin wrapping up the discussion of economics that has been central to this blog's project over the last year and a half.

The news headlines...

The Principle of Subsidiary Function

I trust my readers will recognize a hint of sarcasm if I say that the good news just keeps on rolling in. Of the smoke plumes that were rising into the industrial world's increasingly murky skies as last week's post went up, one – the billowing cloud of assorted mis-, mal- and nonfeasance bubbling out of Goldman Sachs – has faded from the front pages for the moment, though it will doubtless be back before long. On the other hand, the two remaining – the cratering of Greece's borrow-and-spend...