The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

by John Michael Greer

The visionary classic that traces out the twilight of the petroleum age

In 2008, as the price of crude oil spiked to record levels, John Michael Greer's The Long Descent pushed past the stereotyped debates of the time to offer a harrowing but hopeful vision of the future of industrial society. As believers in perpetual progress insisted that something would turn up to replace depleting petroleum reserves, and believers in apocalypse insisted just as fervently that the spike in oil prices would send industrial society crashing down in ruin overnight, Greer's epochal book reframed the entire debate in terms of the great rhythm of rise and fall the marks the history of civilizations.

The Long Descent traces out the ragged course of decline that has brought every previous civilization to its end, and is doing the same with ours. It takes the average civilization one to three hundred years to descend from its peak into a dark age out of which new civilizations will be born, and that same process is visibly under way in our own lives. The global challenges facing industrial civilization are not problems that we can solve, but predicaments that all of us must live with, as our societies stumble down the long slope to the deindustrial future.

Much can still be done as the petroleum age winds down, and the interval between one spike in oil prices and the next offers opportunities that will no longer be available when the price of everything made from petroleum starts soaring again — as it will. The Long Descent offers crucial insights into what individuals, families, small groups, and local communities can do to brace themselves for the changes to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Economics, Politics, Environment, Science, Sustainability

303 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

John Michael Greer is an author of over thirty books and the blogger behind The Archdruid Report. He served as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His work addresses a range of subjects, including climate change, peak oil, the future of industrial society, and the occult. He also writes science fiction and fantasy. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife.

Reviews

[Zora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, if somewhat repetitive, until the last two chapters.

Thesis: Fossil fuels will be gone one day, and industrial civilization will collapse, not in the way Hollywood (or many a book you can find on goodreads) suggests, in an apocalyptic fall to tooth-and-nail fighting and cannibalism, but how all other major civilizations have fallen, in a slow stair-step manner, with minor recoveries slowing the fall as populations decline. Nor will technology save us. Solar panels take as much energy to manufacture as they return in 10-20 years, hydrogen power ditto, nuclear (ignoring its dangers) is limited because we're almost at peak uranium too, and not everybody has tides and wind or year-round streams to work with (though those places that do are certainly where the reduced population will want to live; goodbye Phoenix and Las Vegas). Ethanol will help keep the vehicles running briefly, but you'd have to starve 90% of people in the US and cut down every remaining tree to produce enough corn fuel to make cars go for the other 10% of people who survive.

This likely future probably won't affect you in dramatic ways, but your great-grandchildren will be living a somewhat different life than you, and their great-great grandchildren will likely be subsistence farmers, just as your great-great grandparents were, with a pair of draft horses pulling their plough. Industrial society was a blip in human history. (And wasn't it fun to live through? I'm glad I got antibiotics, birth control pills, Hubble images on my computer screen, and avoidance of having to thresh my grain with flails in order to eat through the winter.)

And that's all so, or at least I find his arguments echo my own understanding. History teaches us that civilizations don't collapse overnight, and it's hard to see the collapse from inside as it happens, and it's already happening. He talks about the wrongheaded views (apocalyptic thinking and "tech will save us" thinking) from a po-mo perspective. (He's less good, as are we all, at identifying his own metanarratives that might be blinding him to reality.) His social science writing is pretty good.

Where he falls down is in the chapter about what to do about the inevitable collapse. Yes, you should learn some subsistence skills and teach them to your children--canning, sheering sheep and carding wool, milking goats, keeping chickens, gardening, beer brewing, hunting and fishing and building a smokehouse, or whatever your life and locale and pocketbook and interests can support. (Some of these he fails to suggest.) But some of what he says in that chapter is nonsense. To wit:

1) Lovelock's suggestion to make sure all current scientific knowledge gets printed out on non-biodegradable stock so people can continue to know truth beyond the Collapse is silly, Greer says, because science is always understanding more and supplanting old theories with new. Huh? So knowing lots of truth isn't good because it's not perfect knowledge and ignorance/superstition is preferable? I don't think so. The stupidest thing he says in the book is regarding this, that Newton's physics is "as imaginary as Oz" since Planck and Einstein. In the world he foresees, with people driving oxcarts into cities to pull wiring out of abandoned office buildings, I'm not quite sure what the time dilation effects of NAFAL travel will matter to people on the 2 mph oxcart. Newton works for everything you and I will ever encounter as subsistence farmers. Newton's physics is less imaginary than Kansas, in fact.

2) He doesn't get some things at all yet. His answer to food preservation is to find an old RV 12-volt refrigerator, a marine battery, salvage an alternator, and hook it up to a windmill and presto, refrigerated food post-collapse! Uhuh. Well, bud, here's the thing. RV fridges last about 10-12 years. Marine batteries, if you buy them new and never run them all the way down, last about five years (acid-lead batteries and AGM batteries both, under real FT use conditions, despite what the manufacturers might claim on amazon). Who manufactures new batteries and delivers them to consumers absent fossil fuels, hmm? If you tried to replace the acid in a battery, just how would you manufacture that substance? (Forget manufacturing new AGM.) Running an appliance off a windmill requires, derhay, wind to be blowing, at least half the time. Running them off solar panels requires, at current costs, and only if you live at the right latitude, three big panels, maybe 1200 US dollars right now (and they might last as long as 50 years--we just don't know yet), and lots of sunlight. Three days of rainy weather, and the fridge stops working, the batteries are drained down to under the critical 12.2 volt level (shortening their lives) and food spoils. And how on earth will you get more freon (or whatever coolant) for such a fridge or pressurize it in the system? So if you just can't bear no fridge, I guess you can do what he says and have one for about five years after electricity stops working, if you luck into finding a pristine one hidden away, and it'll cool food some of the time, and then what when it breaks? May as well skip over that brief phase and adjust to the future quickly, as far as I can see.

(I lived off the grid for 8 of the last 10 years, manufacturing all my own DC electricity--pittance that it was--and surviving happily with only 50 gallons of water a month, 10 gallons of gasoline, and 10 gallons of propane, plus one trip to a laundrette where I did use the bad kind of electricity rather than beating my clothes on a rock by a stream. Without the infrastructure out there, the oil-dependent one, I could not have done it. Someone had to have made my tires, my solar panels, etc. It had to get to me somehow, via burning fossil fuels. I know off-grid living. He doesn't. He should have asked someone who does know, though while living off the grid we tend not to function in the blogosphere where he hangs and can be hard to find).

The answer to food preservation post-collapse is 1) don't (kill it and eat it quickly), 2) cool it in a mountain stream or snowbank or use an old fashion ice-box with horse-drawn ice deliveries from the straw-filled ice house down by the lake that freezes most winters, 3) smoke it, or 4) salt it. 5) Or can it. Getting a USGS map of salt deposits for your state and a good antique two-man ice saw would be a far better use of your time than digging through automotive salvage yards for an alternator and RV fridge.

And, picky complaints, I wish he wouldn't have kept saying "organic gardening." Absent petroleum-based chemical farming using diesel machines, farming is just farming and doesn't need an adjective. And if industrial society collapses, I'd sure like to know of what use he's going to find that slide rule.

The final chapter on religion/spirituality made no sense at all to me. Not sure what it was doing in there, except that he's religious (he's a druid). I do think there'll be plenty of religion post-collapse, but I don't expect it to be a pretty thing or at all helpful.

Anyway. I did go on, didn't I? The first 150 pages, pretty good. The rest, not so much.

[Guy · Rating 3 out of 5]

First book I've read by a druid... and a very interesting book it is. Greer is an out-of-the-box thinker: faced with a choice between two alternatives, he automatically looks for a third. And into the critical debate over how industrial civilization will respond to ecological overshoot (peak oil, peak soil, resource shortages, overpopulation, and so on), which is dominated by a vigorously contested struggle between Cornucopians, who think that science and technology will find a way for economic growth and progress to continue ad infinitum, and Doomers who think that Cormac McCarthy's "Road" is perhaps optimistic, he injects a very plausible third alternative: gradual stepwise decline.

Intellectually his forefathers are the historians of civilizations (such as Spengler, Toynbee, Tainter, and Diamond), whose primary interest has been to explain why civilizations rise and fall. What Greer adds to the picture is his assertion that despite our wonderful science and technology our modern industrial civilization will be no different, because it has an Achilles heel: the continued availability of adequate supplies of cheap fossil fuels... and this is coming to an end (if you don't believe this, you haven't been paying attention).

Greer does a good job of explaining such key concepts as net energy, overshoot, problems vs predicaments, and the roles of myth and political interest in our collective inability to see and respond to our Achilles heel, while pointing out the implausibilities of the arguments of both the Cornucopians and the Doomers. He is less good on explaining the role that global warming will play, but since it basically reinforces his other arguments this is not a major flaw. He has certainly convinced me that a gradual decline punctuated by crises is the most likely scenario (although I remain more optimistic about the ability of science and technology to arrest and then reverse this decline at some point prior to a reversion to a medieval pastoral lifestyle). But in his prescriptions as to what we should do to prepare for gradual decline he goes astray.

His problems, I believe, are twofold. First, I think that he has spent too much time around Doomers -- despite his explicit rejection of their theses, his thinking has become coloured by their worldview -- and as a result he loses sight of the implications of his own ideas. Second, despite advocating a focus on preparing to survive the intermittent periods of crisis during the decline, his own focus is too long term. Both of these problems are visible in his recommendation that we should learn basic skills such as soap-making and herbal medicine as a way to prepare for the decline. While we may eventually get to the point where every community will be more or less self-sufficient, Greer's own timeline of 150 years or so of decline means that none of us alive today will see the endpoint. In the interim global supply chains will almost certainly break down, but regional integration and consequent advantages of specialization and economies of scale will still apply: there will continue to be soap factories and medical clinics for a long time yet. Learning how to make soap in your kitchen and to perform simple surgery in your woodshed will not be particularly useful in this case.

Still, the book is very well worth reading. Greer is an excellent writer and a first-rate analyst -- he cuts through to the heart of very complex issues and creates clarity and understanding with a modicum of fuss. But at the end of the book, although you'll understand the problems our civilization faces well, you won't have a clear and useful plan for what to do about them, or what you can personally do to prepare for the Long Descent.

[Mook · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars

This is technically my second read of this book. I first read it way back in university for one of my classes. However, like a lot of things I read in university, I read it very quickly and I didn't necessarily remember it in great detail.

The Long Descent takes a look at our society and how it must change as we confront the inevitable end of oil. It's not an infinite resource, so what happens when its gone? The point of this book is to take a reasonable look at several possible scenarios. The idea that we'll go overnight from our current society, to no oil and mass destruction overnight, is not realistic. Instead Greer pulls on history, looking at previous societal collapse, and matches the cycle that has played out previously onto our current state.

A few points: it was current when I first read it, but it's a decade out of date now, so things have changed. Some drastic changes and some little ones. Also the book is fairly American-centric not only in describing the state of things but also in describing current opinions/beliefs. Finally, Greer occasionally comes off as very condescending. I think it's supposed to be an inside joke with the reader - "aren't other people so silly and short-sighted and blind? Good thing we're better than that" - which can be grating and off-putting.

The book has 6 parts: (1) The end of the industrial age; (2) The stories we tell ourselves; (3) Briefing for the descent; (4) Facing the deindustrial age; (5) The tools for transition; (6) The spiritual dimension.

Part (1) outlines how previous societies have collapsed, and points out the parallels to our own society. It's the 'how we came to this' explanation. Part (2) is about the stories we tell ourselves about our society. The myth of progress, i.e. that all of history is a story of unending progression. The sort of group-think that makes people unable to believe something drastic could possibly change/destroy their society. The danger of knowing one story - being unable to conceive not only of future problems, but more importantly, future solutions. Part (3) takes what is discussed in part one and applies it to our situation in more depth. Specifically how a slow, drawn out loss of oil will affect various aspects of our society. This is where the sort of "staircase" aspect comes in. As oil becomes less available we'll start using less simply because it will be too expensive. This decrease in use will mean that temporarily there's enough for everything, before we jump down a step because our restricted usage becomes too much. It isn't anything far-fetched or out of the norm. Greer lists things people already do to restrict energy use - retrofitting, biking instead of driving, etc. But he goes past that to describe what happens when there isn't enough oil left to make things like the machines we rely on for everyday life.

Part (4) goes in depth into the steps society needs to take to realistically face a slow deindustrialization. This explanation covers things that our society should do as a whole, and things you can do as an individual. These seem sensible so I'll list them here too: (i) replace your bulbs with energy efficient ones; (ii) retrofit your home; (iii) cut back on gasoline consumption; (iv) plant an organic veggie garden/grow your own food if possible; (v) compost/recycle/reuse/repair; (vi) take up a handicraft; (vii) adopt an 'obsolete' technology; (viii) take charge of your own healthcare (this one is very American specific advice, not gonna lie, doesn't quite apply to places where it doesn't cost your entire life savings to get treatment); (ix) help build your local community; (x) explore your spirituality.

Part (5) discusses how in an ideal world we'll use our remaining resources strategically to build what we need to live in a de-industrial world, before everything becomes critical. This sort of strategy is vastly unlikely but Greer gives a interesting description of the sort of things he thinks we should focus on, and the ones that won't be worth it. His short-list of what communities will need: (i) local organizations (as the large complex ones dissolve/collapse); (ii) a core group of people who know how to do things without fossil fuels. Aka practical life skills that most people who live in cities don't have. (iii) the ability to meet basic human requirements, like obtaining food/meds.

Part (6) is about how much of our actions are dependant on the way we view the world and how we'll need to rely on new stories and make the most of the ones we have in order to get through the upcoming upheaval.

TLDR I found it interesting, and it made me think but I didn't agree with all of the author's arguments/conclusions. It also has become slightly out-of-date.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The Long Descent' makes a very valuable point that deserves wider consideration: that presently there are two main narratives of the future, endless economic growth and material accumulation vs apocalyptic collapse, chaos, and die-off. Both are mythic stories of a sort, linked to and influenced by religious traditions. Neither forms a realistic or helpful assessment of what is actually likely to happen in years to come. Greer systematically critiques these unrealistically optimistic and pessimistically survivalist positions very effectively.

Greer concentrates his discussion almost exclusively on peak oil, pointing out that other sources of energy, renewable and otherwise, rely on oil as a key support, for instance to the manufacture of power station machinery, the mining of coal, and the transport of gas. In some ways, the arguments he puts forward would be strengthened by more coverage of climate change. It is mentioned as an aggravating factor to energy shortages, but in my view not given the weight it deserves in his theory of collapse. On the other hand, I think that the extremes of weather that climate change brings weaken any predictions of the future, however circumspect. It's also fair to say that peak oil and climate change are closely linked issues, and a lot of Greer's points apply just as well to both.

As well as applying a theoretical approach, known as catabolic collapse, to the present, Greer sets out practical things that people can do now to prepare for the Long Descent into a future of expensive energy. These chapters reinforced something I have thought a lot about; that America is screwed in a future of peak oil and rapid climate change. The built environment, economy, society, and culture is wholly dependent upon cheap oil. Climate change will likely bring drought to its agricultural areas and terrible storms to its densely populated cities. Moreover, the populace possesses 300 million guns. It seems more legitimate to tend towards a more apocalyptic vision of the future if you're in the US, frankly. Reading this book reminded me how lucky I am to live in Europe.

In addition to the sparse references to climate change, I felt this book was lacking consideration of the ways in which a catabolic collapse in the developed world of the 21st century would differ from that of, say, the Roman Empire or the Mayans. Greer considers a variety of such historical parallels, without discussing the unique aspects of life today. For instance, could the internet survive peak oil and for how long? I am genuinely curious about this. Also, surely we should be looking to the developing world for lessons upon how to live in a less resource-intensive manner? Cuba, for instance, manages to keep its populace amazingly healthy despite being very poor in financial and resource terms. I like it when books make me think of further questions to research elsewhere, however, and this book is only 240 pages long so cannot cover vast amounts of ground.

There is much to be said for writers that acknowledge peak oil and climate change are not information deficit problems (in other words, if the public & politicians knew the true facts & costs they would act rationally to deal with both). Academic work, especially in more quantitative fields, has a foolish tendency to assume this. Rather, peak oil and climate change are predicaments that will inevitably arrive sooner or later, which cannot be adequately addressed without shifting the infinite-growth-and-progress mythos to something more pragmatic. Greer understands this well. He's also a druid, but I don't hold it against him.

[unperspicacious · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little of this, I suspect, will be new to anyone familiar with the brief explosion of literature on peak oil and transition movements since the 1970s, but this is nevertheless an excellent updated introduction to the genre, as well as the reality we are already facing in various forms. It has some warts (both factual and conceptual), but these are minor blemishes on what is generally a well balanced and thoughtful exploration of imminent de-industrialisation in the face of depleting resources, chiefly petroleum. I say well-balanced because everything in Greer's book flows from the view that complex societies do not implode instantly from resource overstretch. Historically it has tended to take several centuries at a time, to the point that it is actually impossible for any one generation or individual living in it to even grasp the sheer scale of the ongoing process (see Tainter 1988 and others).

Once one has accepted this premise, and as well the implications for how much suffering this is still likely to involve on a personal and societal level, Greer's suggested ways to cushion this slow decline are correspondingly sensible and reasonable. We can still make choices within decline, but those choices may become increasingly narrow and painful, depending on how our elites and local societies navigate the early stages of the transition. To speak of peak oil having been pushed back by several decades because of the commercialisation of shale deposits, tar sands, heavy oils etc, is less a sign for optimism than a failure to recognise that industrial societies are burning through the dregs of dense liquid energy carriers. These could be instead helping us to retool our overbuilt, overstretched and dysfunctional infrastructures into systems that will actually endure more than a few decades without a constant need for fossil fuel inputs. This involves not just reorienting transport and distribution systems for food and shelter provision, but weaning entire systems of public health, energy and sanitation provision off fossil fuels, and reintroducing (and learning) older, intermediate technologies that will make more sense in such a world. The longer these processes are delayed, the sharper the decline will be, and the more lives will be lost enroute.

One has to be in the right sort of space to read this. I had been looking for a work that summarily discussed both the impacts of peak oil and the tools we would need to weather de-industrialisation. This has both. To be frank, I am not sure what else there is left to read in this regard, except to get on with things really, and start re-learning the basic but complex (thus labour and time-intensive) skills needed for use in re-localised economies. If this involves reading a book of sorts, so be it. But most of it will be hands-on work from here on.

This is a keeper, and it has the potential to be epiphanic.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good stuff in this book, but it took me a long time to finish, given that Greer's non-fiction writing style tends to put me to sleep after a couple paragraphs. As a regular reader of his blog, The Archdruid Report, I'd seen most of this information before, but there were lots of new things I'd never seen him discuss in the blog, things that, had he brought them up there, might have prevented several disagreements he's had with readers in the comments section of his blog.

At the end of the book is an appendix I would very much liked to have studied longer, but I had borrowed the book from the library and it was already a month overdue. The appendix covered the mathematical formulas by which one can determine the sustainability of a given society and the point at which it will collapse.

Greer's academic background is in the History of Ideas, and this really comes through in the book, as he discusses not just the rise of our technology, but the changes in our way of thinking and how this has landed us in our present predicament.

In a nutshell, his assertion is this: The natural state of humankind for most of the period of human existence was that of a "solar economy," that is, we lived on what the sun and Earth provided year by year. We grew food and ate it. We burned what fuel we could cut. We wore clothes that we took the time to make from materials we gathered ourselves. Living this way, there are built-in caps on how much we can consume. Empires rose and fell in a pretty reliable cycle, and technology, too, developed and was lost.

This is how things were until we discovered a way to power machines with fossil fuels, and the Industrial Revolution began. For 300 years, we burned up not 300 years worth of energy, but millions of years worth of fossilized energy. Now that we've pretty well burned it up, we've got to go back to life as usual.

There are some problems, though. One is that very few of us know how to live without modern, oil-powered contrivances. Many soon-to-be-necessary skills and technologies have been lost or are on the brink. A bigger problem, though, as Greer sees it, is the Myth of Progress. Rather than seeing the Industrial Age as a blip in our history where we found a big stash of concentrated energy, we've deceived ourselves into thinking that our modern lifestyle is the result of our natural improvement as a species. That is, we think we're smarter than our ancestors, more clever, more innovative, more efficient, etc., and that's why we're so much more affluent and enjoy so many more luxuries and conveniences. The natural progression of this line of thinking is that we expect things to continue in this fashion: one day, we'll explore the stars, colonizing distant planets and enjoying as-yet-unimagined wonders of technology. Greer's message: It ain't gonna happen. The party's over.

The good news, if you want to look at it as such, is that this will all happen so gradually that most people living through it won't really be aware of its happening. There will be occasional downward lurches like wars and famines and such, but for the most part, you can expect your grandchildren to be living like your grandparents, and all along the way we'll be told by our leaders that things are getting better.

In a nutshell, this is great material, but pretty damned dry. If you're passionate about the subject, you'll get through the book and be glad you did. If you're not, you may just get the feeling he's beating a dead horse about something you aren't that interested in in the first place.

[Mark Hartzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The central thesis in Greer’s book is the inevitable end of fossil fuels and the resulting decline of our current oil based economy. Instead of the ‘Age of Progress’ we will (and have been) entering ‘The Long Descent’. He makes the interesting observation that we face a ‘predicament’ rather than a ‘problem to be solved’. “...a problem calls for a solution: the only question is whether a solution can be found and made to work and, once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them ‘solves’ the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.” Death is a predicament. You cannot solve that problem. Peak oil is also a predicament. There is only so much and then it will be gone. How we manage the effects of this diminishing resource is the crux of the book.

Predicting the future is obviously something of a fool’s errand, but I think Greer has identified some pretty good insights. One of the biggest is realizing our political system is not only not going to help us get out of our predicament, it will prevent us from taking steps that may alleviate unnecessary suffering. “Drill baby, drill” is obviously an utterly stupid response to Hubbert’s Curve. But it is a predictable response from a political party that is wholly beholden to its donors. (And yes, the Democratic Party is also owned by its donors to a lesser degree.)

I have some issues with some of his points, like how gold and silver (and weapons) are not as helpful as learning a new trade like brewing beer. I’m grossly paraphrasing, but my point stands. I don’t think you can rule out a cataclysmic collapse either. It may be a ‘Long Descent’, but it might also be a pretty damn short one too.

No one can know the future, but taking a variety of steps to inculcate one’s family from the inevitable and painful contractions facing us is just good sense. And this book offers some really well reasoned, and common sense ideas to ponder.

[John Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think John Michael Greer is one of our more perceptive thinkers. He is a deep critic of the conventional order. But what I like most about his work is that he keeps his balance between being a rosy-eyed optimist who thinks renewable energy and localization will be nirvana, and a pessimist who sees no hope in the future - he somehow seems to steer a middle course that may not be ideal, but should be livable if we can act soon enough and with enough wisdom. This book is a good example of his writing, but his blog and his other books are all worthy.

[Stephen Hren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't let the fact that Greer is an archdruid keep you from being blown out of the water by his cogent analysis of where we are and where we might be headed as peak oil, ecocide, and global climate disruption cause massive civilizational disturbances over the next few years and decades. To the point on a every level: a must read for every breathing adult.

[Rinstinkt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended to all people who live/think outside the times.
The book is about the topic of "peak oil"... but the arguments and angles it was tackled from surprised me, in several ways.
Very interesting thoughts on the nature of religion.
The religion of progress, the modern religion.
Hallucinated wealth.
The natures of empires. Like cancer that grow as long it has food. Romans grew by using and abusing resources from conquered lands, when they couldn't get more, their civilization starved. The resource the American empire uses is oil, the religion of the empire is the myth of unlimited progress. [Might read Dugin after this, to see if he sits well in the anti "myth of progress" crowd]
What technology we use, select and push forward, tells lots about the values the society has. See consumerism, insta-thot, cellphones created in such a way that pander to narcissism and the display of the most primitive animalistic signals, female fertility/beauty and male status/resources.
Very interesting analogy on the use ot r/K where the r end of the spectrum of individuals prosper, due to the unlimited resources at their disposals (made possible by cheap oil), while the humans more towards the K end of the spectrum suffer or don't fit well. Inevitable shift towards a more K-end of the spectrum domination in the future.

[Albert Kadmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

La parte de su obra relativa al colapsismo y el desaceleracionismo, desarrollada entre 2006 y 2017, parte de la conocida teoría del pico de Hubbert, una curva que tiene en cuenta el gasto de energía necesaria para extraer más energía y que, por lo tanto, marca fin al uso potencial de los combustibles fósiles como el petróleo. Para que se entienda con más facilidad podría ejemplificarse con los problemas para generar hielo esta verano a partir del incremento de los costes de la energía. No es que no vaya a haber hielo o petróleo, es que hay un punto en que no es rentable porque se gasta más energía de la que se consigue.

https://theobjective.com/cultura/2022...

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

In this book Greer lays out his prediction for the future of declining oil production which, because oil has by far the highest energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI) ratio of all energy resources, will lead to a slow descent of civilization to less complex societies with widespread deindustrialization. To face this he proposes people start to pick up old crafts to be somewhat more prepared for the future to come.

I started with this book because I was interested in a deep and subtle discussion on energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI) which I didn't find in the book. That in itself doesn't mean it's a bad book of course, just that I was expecting and hoping for something else than what was delivered. The book seem aimed at people already convinced peak oil will lead to a break down of society. I'm not. I'm not convinced it won't either, but this book if anything made me more sceptical about peak oil being a catastrophic problem than anything else. If you are convinced peak oil is that big of a problem I think you can dig in to some interesting arguments for why it will be a slow descent rather than sudden break down and also some thoughts on what you should try to do to mitigate the future challenges for yourself and your community. If you are not I would recommend you look for another book. I don't know which book, but there certainly most be one.

The basic argument for the coming collapse/descent seem to be like this: the fossil fuels (and especially oil) we have used since the beginning of the industrial age is starting to run out, no other energy source matches up, the society of today has a need of huge amounts of energy, therefore society will collapse/descend. But Greer fails to show that alternative energy sources is developing and getting better and better. He might claim it won't be enough, but then he should have put forth and argument for it. To me the development of sustainable energy is moving along quite fast (although I would prefer an even faster development of course) and will start to really take of when prices on fossil fuels start to rise.

The lack of discussion on the plausibility of peak oil catastrophic impact on society is made up with psychological characterizations and straw man-arguments on side issues. Reducing the world views to "the myth of progress" and "the myth of apocalypse" in which very disparate ideas and thoughts are reduced to the same thing Greer can argue against. Of course he couldn't call the second myth "the myth of regress" since he must put his own theory of slow descent as something special which can't be reduced to cultural thought and psychological traits. So while those believing in progress or apocalypse is caught in mythical thinking, Greer is seeing and facing the reality of the world as it is.
When discussing a proposal of James Lovelock to write a book with all scientific knowledge gathered Greer is fast to point out that it's "hard to think of a better proof that most scientists don't learn enough about the history of their own disciplines". Even ignoring the fact that his "proof" about why it is bad is a single historical example of a book from medieval times, the way he moves from the proposal of one person to a conclusion about "most scientists" is dumbfounding. Broad generalizations is abundant in the book and leaves a bad impression on me.

The last thing I would like to point out is the lack of references. I had hoped to see a lot of references to studies and reports I could check up. As said I was interested in specifically ERoEI when I picked up this book and for that it would have been great with sources of the historical development in different countries etc. As the book now is written it is pretty much taken for granted you accept the "peak oil theories" of the coming collapse/descent. There are some references. I checked one up about death caused by doctors Greer cites a book by a doctor which some have had her license revoked in Canada and also claim to be trained in homeopathy. That reference surely did not inspire my confidence in the book. I haven't checked the real statistics , but if the numbers claimed were true I would think Greer would have used a more credible source.

There is an underlying theory about collapsing societies in the book I do find interesting. Quite a lot of that theory Greer has borrowed from Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies which he acknowledges. I think Tainter has written a much better argued book and would recommend that instead of this book. But of course Tainter deals mostly with the collapses of historical societies and doesn't discuss peak oil at all.

If I already was convinced peak oil would lead to the collapse/descent of society it might have been worth a read and my rating would have been higher. Now I came in as someone interested in the subject and ERoEI and left with the impression of a book preaching to the already convinced masses severely lacking in stringent argumentation and references.

(I'm still interested in the subject so I'm happy to take suggestions on more well-argued books/texts about peak oil.)

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some parts of this book haven't aged well. Other parts are timeless. Published in 2008, that's 17 years ago (currently mid-2025).

The author seems to think that photovoltaic solar cells have no future. Back in 2008, most of the solar cells on offer were monocrystalline cells which were sliced from ingots of super-pure silicon and processed in clean rooms. Purifying the silicon, casting the ingots and setting up a clean room which will remove even nanoscale pollutants, such that you can use semiconductor fabrication processes to turn the material into the cells, all require significant energy; the author is perfectly correct about that. Some of the solar cells being made back then were barely paying back the energy it took to make them; the author pointedly calls that out. He's not wrong. The author's talk about the need to consider "net energy return" (sometimes known as Energy Return On Investment or EROI) is one of the timeless parts.

String Ribbon tech really changed PV production, greatly reducing the energy required for manufacture. Modern thin-film PV has considerably lower energy requirements in manufacturing. Some of the dye-sensitized thin-film organic stuff needs a small chamber and multiple types of applied inks, no high-temperatures, ultra-pure silicon or clean rooms. Many of the solar panels being sold today pay back their energy investment within 12 months of installation, and they keep going for 20+ years. This puts their EROI at 20:1 or so. Eliminating the need for the energy-intensive processes makes it more likely that we'll be able to continue making such things, going forward. Ergo, I don't think his pronouncements about PV have aged well. No, we won't be able to replace all of the coal-burning powerplants, nuclear powerplants, petroleum-fueled transportation, etc. with solar any time soon; PV solar is NOT a drop-in replacement which will let us keep doing what we're (currently) doing. On that count, I do agree with him.

Back when he authored this book, it seemed ethanol was barely breaking even, in terms of EROI. These days, it's at least 1.5:1 on EROI; some forms of it are over 2:1. For a long time, it appeared that it was net negative. Then someone took a closer look at the researchers who were saying it was still net negative and discovered that they'd hadn't bothered to update their figures on energy inputs (assuming that farmers were still using the same equipment, fertilizers, seeds and processes as in the 1950s) and debunked their more recent works. That's when it was discovered that, yeah, ethanol has been break-even or better for a while. I don't know that the debunking had happened before this book was penned. The author is right that biofuels, such as ethanol, aren't going to provide the 200:1 EROI that we were getting from petroleum back in the day. But then, modern deepwater oil production, and fracked oil production, isn't getting that 200:1 EROI anymore. That fits perfectly with his main thesis: we've passed the age of cheap energy (oil production in decline, no drop-in replacements, etc.) so we need to start thinking about how we're going to downscale our consumption, our lives, our civilizations, etc. because our entire way of life, for multiple decades, has been built on cheap energy which is ceasing to be cheap.

I cringe when I think about the 12 MPG monstrosity I was driving when I first got my license; my current hybrid gets 36 or so, and I'm really wishing I had PHEV so I could do at least my local errand-running without burning fuel at all. I'm also wanting to get an e-bike (much more likely than the PHEV; order of magnitude cheaper). I've moved away from a rural area, as I recognize that anyone needing to burn multiple gallons of gasoline, per day, just to run errands and get to / from work ... that lifestyle is doomed. I agree with him, completely, on this count. I'm currently in the process of pivoting my career and ... ya know, being able to repair electric appliances, maybe sewing machines ... those are useful skills and there are too few people doing it now (check with any sewing supply place and they'll tell you that getting machines repaired takes a while 'cuz lots of demand for same but little supply; my beloved sews, which is how I know). Keeping extant equipment running longer is a useful thing. Sewing is more likely to come back into vogue, as shipping "fast fashion" clothing from China on petroleum-fueled container ships becomes too expensive.

The author also leans into what we need to provide for future generations, in terms of skills, materials and knowledge. He explains that there have been attempts, in times past, to compile some kind of "here's everything you need to know" type books and ... they've been boondoggles. In the 1920s, who would've seen computers, the Internet, multiple World Wars, etc? What advice could they have given to their descendants which would actually be useful? Sure, there is some knowledge from that era which is still relevant but it's probably NOT the stuff that people, at that time, would've thought relevant. So we need to provide not just data, but guides on how to explore, test and measure data, so future generations can continue to apply the Scientific Method and related things.

He also leans into psychology, myth and beliefs. Another, much lighter book I've read ("Change the Story, Change the Future" by David Korten) leans into this as well. So long as the ideal is growth, growth and more growth, which is simply not possible (long-term) in a finite environment, people will do anything and everything to keep the most popular modern religion ("progress;" what, you thought I was going to say Christianity? that's not even one religion ...) in vogue.

In the most recent US Presidential election, the Democrats were talking about how the economy is doing well, unemployment is down, the worst of the inflation is behind us; stick with us, because we're why things are going well. The Republicans were doing their usual "the world will end if THEY stay in power" and offering a buffoon who was promising to tear it all all down. Most people either embrace a "progress" view of religion (things are getting better and better, until you get to heaven) and others embrace an "apocalypse" view of religion (someone else is benefiting and you will never get anything better under the current system; destroy it all and you will finally have your chance). Most people in the USA are NOT seeing their lives getting better; a considerable fraction is facing the fact that they will never have enough economic stability to buy a home, never be able to retire, never be able to afford having children. Such people are not going to embrace an "all is well" message; a slim majority (49.8% vs 48.3%) chose apocalypse. I can only hope those reading this in the future can look back on our current predicament and sigh with relief.

The reality is that neither party is willing to tell the public that the best days, the most luxurious days, are behind us for the vast majority of the population, and we better get busy battening down the hatches, tightening our belts and learning how to grow food organically because ... petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, as well as petroleum-fueled heavy industrial farm equipment, are going to become unobtainium. Along with road trips to Disneyland. And flying to the Caribbean on vacation. And ... hell, easily 50% (or more) of the current jobs out there today. Too many modern corporations depend entirely on cheap energy; when that no longer exists, there will be a dearth of openings for jobs that only exist in large corporations. How many "marketing directors" does a such a world need?

Another book I've read recently ("2052: A Global Forecast for the Next 40 Years" by Jørgen Randers) explains that the reduced availability of cheap energy was, originally, foreseen by various computer models back in the 1970s and reported in "The Limits to Growth." This book references the same report. All of these books expect global population to peak and start falling; the only question is what year will be the peak. So much of modern life depends on cheap energy; when it ceases to be cheap, fewer people will reproduce (already happening; the fertility rate, in most countries, is below the replacement level) and average life spans will reduce (life expectancy been stagnant, if not falling, for a while; USA life expectancy peaked in 2014). The population will shrink until it's something which will fit within the finite resources of our finite planet. We've been in a state of overshoot for multiple decades. Things will get genuinely crappy for a while, then they'll seem to level off (whew!), maybe even improve a little (yay!), then sink considerably more. The future is a stair-step, over the course of centuries, down to a more agrarian, smaller-scale world. Star Trek, where we go to the stars and expand forever and ever amen, is not in our future. Nothing wrong with being entertained by the fantasy; just remember that sci-fi is fiction that's somewhat science-y.

Note: do NOT overlook the appendices in the back of this book. There are some very interesting things in there, just don't be scared off by a little math.

[Kitap · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enjoyable, thoughtful, and ultimately hopeful look at the downside of M. King Hubbert's peak oil curve. I highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks that, in the words of peak oil pundit Richard Heinberg, the party's over. I also highly recommend it to those who are still in doubt; Greer makes a compelling case that our belief in technoscience as savior is just that, a belief, and that as atheists have noted for the last century or more, simply believing something does not necessarily make it so. Better to be prepared for hard times and not have them arrive, than to face hard times unprepared.

Now that the supply of petroleum is beginning to falter, the question before us is not how to keep burning something else at the same pace, or how to find some other way to power a civilization of a sort that can only survive by burning extravagant amounts of energy, but how to scale back our expectations and our technology enough to make them work within the limits of the same renewable resources our ancestors had four hundred years ago. (p. 59)

The religion of progress has maintained its hold for the last three centuries because it has delivered on its promises, filling our lives with technological marvels wondrous enough to distract us from the cost to our world, our communities, and ourselves. (p.70)

First Steps Toward Sustainability (pp. 152-156)
1. Replace your incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents.

2. Retrofit your home for energy conservation.

3. Cut back on your gasoline consumption.

4. Plant an organic vegetable garden.

5. Compost your food waste.

6. Take up a handicraft.

7. Adopt an "obsolete" technology.

8. Take charge of your own healthcare.

9. Help build your local community.

10. Explore your spirituality.

Those people who can use their own hands and minds to make tools, grow food, brew beer, treat illnesses, generate modest amounts of electricity from sun and wind, and the like, will have a major survival advantage over those who can't. Those communities that focus their efforts on helping members achieve skills like these, and pass them on to others, will become the seedbeds of the sustainable societies of the future. Whatever they preserve and develop will not need to be laboriously reinvented by their descendants. (p. 190)

Plus the book has an exhaustive bibliography for further reading and research. This is definitely a must-read.

[John Schneider · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading his book, I have read many of John Michael Greer's posts on his blog. Like the blog - the Archdruid Report - the book provides many insights about the contemporary world. Unfortunately, the book for its many virtues has a number of flaws as well. Although the work deserves to be read by those interested in how our culture operates, its predictions seem increasingly misplaced.

Greer's major economic fallacy is his belief in a variant theory of labor valuation. Many economic thinkers - perhaps foremost Marx - believed that the true value of a thing comes from the labor of the person working upon it. This way of understanding value competes with the Austrian theory of subjective value. The Austrian approach understand a thing's value based on its apparent subjective utility to the owner. A many with hundreds of pairs of sneakers values each pair less than the money he asks for them. What does this have to do with Peak Oil and economic decline? Everything.

Mr. Greer makes the mistakes of valuing petroleum on the labor it substitutes for instead of on the subjective use each person might or might not have for it. Also, Mr. Greer does not value oil in a stable currency - like gold. The price of oil in gold swings wildly but tends to return to its historic norm of 2.5 grams a barrel. This misunderstanding of oil pervades this work reducing much of Greer's analysis.

Still, Greer is worth reading because his basic point is true: we will eventually run out of oil and we might not be able to replace it with another form of energy. From this perspective, Greer brilliantly critiques the common ways that we understand the future - the myth of progress and the fear of apocalypse. Accordingly, his book is really a meta-argument about how to understand the predicament of mass culture and mass consumption - eventually, the "mass" part will end. When that end occurs, Greer predicts a series of collapses and recoveries that will reduce technological and population levels.

Although I do not agree with many of Greer's predictions, I think he gives a great conception of the world that we live in - a world of scarcity. Unless another source of cheap energy is discovered, our society will sooner or later hit the rock of expensive energy. The adjustment to that world is not likely to be pleasant but, as Greer points out, it won't be the end of the world either. If a 'long descent' is in the cards for human achievement, then Greer has done us a great service with his work. If it is not, he has done us at least the good of helping us to think more clearly about what we currently have.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The primary thrust of this book, that our civilization is entering a phase of "catabolic collapse" during which its decline will occur in a gradual, step-wise fashion leading to a "deindustrial" state, is based on the kinds of assertions which academics love to wrangle over. For example, the author assumes that peak oil has occurred, and along with it the peak of other fuel resources, particularly natural gas. Regardless of whether oil production has peaked or not, it stands to reason that production of a finite resource will inevitably peak at some point. Yet, peak oil is more complex than a simple production curve, and some choose to view the oil peak as that point at which demand outstrips active production plus new discovery. Given the voraciousness of the global economy, which results is an ever-increasing demand for oil, it is more reasonable under this point of view to assume that we have reached a peak. It should be self-evident even to the casual observer, after all, that our perpetual increase in demand is not -- cannot -- be matched by equal production, even if every cubic meter of oil-bearing shale on the face of the planet were fracked mercilessly.

Greer further asserts that the constituent members of our civilization largely fall into two groups, each of which subscribes to one of two diametrically opposed myths. On the one hand is the myth of progress, which states that the entirety of human development describes a linear progression from primitive barbarity to the moon landings and beyond, and that there is reason to believe that this ever-onward, ever-upward trend will never be interrupted by anything, especially given the infinite resourcefulness of the human mind and will. On the other hand is the myth of apocalypse, which states that the entirety of human development describes a linear progression from an idealized natural state to a state of reckless, immoral corruption, and that there is reason to believe that this ever-decaying, ever-downward trend will terminate in a cataclysmic event (or events) signaling the end of humanity, especially given our avaricious and implacable appetites.

What the author proposes is that the exploitation of fossil fuels represent a "pulse" event in human history, a unique and strictly limited period during which an irreplaceable resource has been exploited to its furthest extent. During this phase, a great deal of earlier technology, skill, and capacity has been abandoned to the dustbins of history, setting us up for a decline which parallels that of numerous previous civilizations.

All of this grew out of an earlier essay Greer wrote (reproduced as an appendix at the back of this volume) entitled "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." In this piece, Greer develops a theory based on the division of society into four core elements: resources, capital, waste, and production. Perhaps the biggest Achilles' heel in Greer's overarching argument is his reduction of these broad categories to singularities, a fact which, no doubt, has given his academic adversaries plenty of fuel of their own. However, if we accept this breakdown of social elements at face value, his subsequent demonstration of how they interact to produce ascending, sustained, or decaying societies, and what form these take, is reasonably compelling. In short, when resources become scare, waste increases, the maintenance costs of capital becomes oppressive, and/or problems with production arise, a society starts to decline. This decline can take the form of contraction until a new stable state is reached, or it can become a feedback loop which ultimately results in the total collapse of the society. Even in this latter case, the decline occurs step-wise, typically over the course of several centuries. Thus, neither the myth of progress nor the myth of apocalypse is fulfilled, but a "long descent" takes place. It is into this latter category that Greer place the current fossil fuel-driven, global society of the developed world.

The best response to all of this, the author further asserts, is to invest the remaining energy-rich resources into preparing for a deindustrialized future. Granted, Greer largely ignores the related and exacerbating issue of rapid climate change, but his assertions (if you accept his initial propositions) are sound. He aptly notes that after the energy crisis of the 1970s, there was a huge push to develop alternative, renewable energy sources, and to establish energy conservation techniques and policies. When Ronald Reagan was sworn into office, his administration pushed hard for a massive increase in domestic oil production and subsidies to the oil industry, and the resulting (artificially-induced) drop in oil prices created the illusion that an interminable, cheap supply of oil would sustain us indefinitely. Consequently, all of the measures developed and adopted during the previous decade's energy crisis were rolled back, discarded, and largely forgotten about. If we had continued to develop them, however, our chances of enjoying a controlled and sustainable contraction would have been reasonably good. Now, however, as it finally becomes clear that we only forestalled the inevitable, we have lost nearly half a century of progress and we have scant little wiggle room left to develop an alternative plan: catabolic collapse (at least according to Greer) is now inevitable.

This is not to say, however, that cold panic is warranted. It is to say that it is incumbent upon each of us who agrees with Greer's assessment to do what we can, now, with the resources left at our disposal in order to prepare the ground for a deindustrialized future. He recommends, for example, the cultivation of hard skills, such as growing food, making clothes, studying alternative medical traditions, or learning how to work with metal, glass, or leather. He advocates for the preservation of a broad range of existing knowledge; for the re-establishment and reinvigoration of local social organizations; for the support of farmer's markets, bartering systems, and mutual aid networks. What he argues against is a more traditional survivalist mentality: instead of stockpiling guns, ammunition, and canned beans, Greer encourages the stockpiling of knowledge, skills, and community. And, of course, by default his argument rails against the laissez faire myth of progress which has dug us into the deep, dark hole we'll need to climb out of if our species expects to survive.

All of this needs to be taken with the simple caveat that readers must subscribe to the Greer's premises if they are to accept his conclusions. If so, his conclusions are compelling. But, naturally, you mileage may vary.

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The central thesis of this book is valid and well argued; we’re running out of oil and need to tackle this with urgency so that we can go through a managed decline of industrial society. Civilisations fail but they rarely collapse overnight, so we can expect a ‘long descent’ rather than an implosion of apocalyptic proportions.

But the author does ramble. Anecdotal repetition eventually led to cliché which undermined the flow of the argument.

Nor am I entirely convinced, as Greer argues, that the decline of oil will be a largely peaceful process, characterised by minor outbreaks of isolated violence. US/UK/Chinese/Russian foreign policy since the 1950s has shown that if a powerful country fears for its energy security it will strike out with (un)intended and predictable, consequences. On the one hand he vilifies the survivalist movement for its lack of hope, yet he is overly pessimistic when it comes to technology. Is there really no way that science and innovation will overcome at least some of the post oil problems that we will encounter?

A recommended read with an important central thesis, the Long Descent is an important addition to the peak oil debate, even if it is a little sociological in its methodology.

[Ali · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book presents some interesting perspectives and ideas, but overall I find the argument and rationale used to be a bit...crude and just not very well thought of.

The whole premise of the book is that, yes we are definitely going to have a collapse and here is what we should do to survive in a post industrial age, not listening many of the issues with this logic the most absurd thing this book covers is the author's conviction that we should re learn and document how every single piece of technology or invention, whatever its age or function, works - lest we lose this knowledge after the collapse. As an example he outlines the need that every person needs to re learn how a calculator works by relearning with an Abacus. This is just one example, but I just find the idea really bizzare and along with various other aspects of the book I just found it very hard to believe or trust.

Could be an interesting read for someone wanting to spend a bit of time with some really 'out there' ideas, but I would not recommend this book nor do I think it's ideas are well researched or argued logically.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's definitely plenty of overlapping material in this book with many of Greer's posts from the past year at his blog: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/. But it was great to have his level thinking as applied to peak oil and the history of environmental and social changes all gathered in one place. He argues for the need to take action to build communities that can more easily transition through peak oil (and other upcoming resource 'peaks'), while breaking down many of the cultural myths that either prevent us from taking action, or (like many survivalist fantasies) lead us in unhelpful directions.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful, plausible theory of the trajectory of civilization as we know it. I would have preferred better documentation of his position, as much of it seems to be based on intuition, and comes across as a blind guess. Whether or not this is the case, the book was thought-provoking and well worth my time.

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nonsensical pagan trash, less scientific than the climate change deniers.

Kumbaya.

[Michaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was startling to read the author’s prognostications that so much paralleled my own but were more optimistic in other ways. As a hook, he compares our society to that of the Mayan, which didn’t disappear overnight but over a century and a half due to overconsumption of a nonrenewable resource base (corn for them.) Sound familiar? The Mayan knew of alternative crops but did not pursue them and instead went to war to seize the corn of others. Apparently, on average it takes about 250 years for a civilization to complete the process of decline and fall (For example, the Mycean Greece and Lowland Maya at 150 years each and the Minoan Crete and Western Roman Empire at 300 each.) The author then explains the two myths which we predominantly operate under: the progress myth and the apocalypse myth with the former comforting to those who have made their peace with society as it is and believe that their lives are part of a process that will lead to better things. And the latter who cannot accept society as it is and long for a catastrophe massive enough to topple it. There are multiple problem with only two prevailing myths compared to the multiple myths or stories formerly available. First we forget about the myth we are operating under. Second whenever a problem arises we always try to apply the same solution which doesn’t work well in complex systems (for example, the IMF.) Third, when it fails rather than accepting the learning opportunity refuge is taken in anger (when people disagree with our politics or religion we anger because they are reflecting back to us that our preferred story doesn’t fit the universe everywhere.) He points out that the comfort of a myth does not make it true and makes his case for a middle road of small shocks, declines, and rallies leading to a deindustrialized society. He also points out the danger of those desiring to immanentize the eschaton (hurry along the second coming if you will) and points out that many movements, such as Marxism, follow the same path as their religious counterparts. The author’s view is that the future will bring neither extreme but rather a world of “hard ecological limits, restricted opportunities, and lowered expectations.”
Much like the monkey with his hand “trapped” in a jar because it won’t release the food therein to save its life, we have framed the problem incorrectly. The question is not how to find alternative ways to keep our fuel tanks topped up but rather how do we “scale back our expectations and technology enough to make them work within the limits of the same renewable resources our ancestors had four hundred years ago.” He likens us to Faustus who became so dependent on his devils (read machines) that we forget we can live without them. He also compares the New Age Movement to Gnosticism, reflecting the attitudes and interests of its privileged classes too closely to survive the collapse of the society that gave them their status. He also knocks the movement’s commercialisms as dumbing down the “live as though you’re creating the reality you experience” to “you create the reality you experience.” Because in practice, beyond a certain point it just doesn’t work. This in turn leads to the popularity of conspiracy theories (hello David Icke and his evil alien lizards in power in every bastion of political, economic, and cultural power.) He explains why people are willing to believe such craziness: it’s not your fault (absolved from buying sweatshop clothing or environmental devastation), the world does what it’s told (by alien lizard lords but still controllable), you don’t have to change your life (just oppose the alien overlords.) To quote, “Criticism has its place in any healthy society. When it turns into a replacement for constructive action…it becomes wasted breath.” He describes a brief but illuminating tangent into Jungian theory of shadow (the sum total of everything we don’t accept about ourselves) projecting. Instead of owning up to the fact that we have characteristics we despise, we so those characteristics in Them. The more intense our hypocrisy, the more forcefully we project the more savagely we hate.
He doesn’t see the Myth of Progress keeping its faithful indefinitely as its hold over the last three centuries has been kept through delivery of technological marvels wondrous enough to distract us from their cost. He explains this in unlikely to continue as modern industrial civilizations rides on a geological lottery – fossilized solar energy. He projects declining energy availability, economic contraction, collapsing public health (unaffordable healthcare, global warming and ecological disruption resulting in spread of tropical and emerging diseases, malnutrition, death from formerly treatable diseases and declining live birth), and political turmoil. These will not immediately dissolve into Armageddon but rather a series of crises that are met and dealt with to some degree but with ever declining standard of living. For example, resources will most likely be concentrated on a network of critical freeway corridors and urban regions contracting over a period of several decades until resource availability is so critical that truck transport becomes unviable. Suburbs will become slum districts as people congregate in more urban areas. Lacking cheap transcontinental transport, the Canadian and U.S. are unlikely to maintain political unity. North American population may contract to the area around the Great Lakes, Mississippi valley, and Atlantic seaboard as those remain viable navigable waterways.
Again, emphasis is that this will take almost as much time as it took us to get here in the first place. Governments have a variety of tools to respond to economic crises (cheap credit, abandoning old currency, manipulate markets, nationalize industries, wage & price controls, punitive tariffs & embargoes, subsidize basic necessities, impose rationing, declare martial law) that will cushion or slow the decline but not ultimately prevent it.
Part of the problem is the “hallucination of wealth” built on a system of IOUs resulting in economic indicators that in no way reflect everyday reality. Each recession will push more people into poverty and each recovery will lift fewer out of it. Rising costs and sinking incomes will implode global trade until shortages and ad hoc distribution networks are common, and currency gyrations could make local barter worth more.
Although economic collapse will be slower than projected, declining public health will be faster as sanitation, pest control, food safety regulations, infectious disease control for the masses and the like are abandoned. It will be exacerbated by the end of the antibiotic age and the impact of ecological disruption on patterns of disease (hello HIV and Ebola.)
To balance the “tree-hugger” viewpoint, the author points out that there is always an imperial power and the U.S. may have been a more benign one than Nazi Germany or Communist Russia. The downside of imperial power is that it requires resources that are more and more expensive to obtain and ultimately lead to its downfall (compare Britain’s strategy of release and realign to that of Colonial Spain.) “No empire, even in its prime, can afford to pursue policies that estrange its allies, increase its commitment overseas, make its enemies (ally), and destabilize political world order, all at the same time. American foreign policy in recent years has accomplished every one of these things….”
So, what to do? Political reform tends to respond to disaster, not prevent it. We are facing decline, not apocalypse. The survivalist strategy doesn’t work because the rural areas descend into chaos fastest, you and your stockpiles are a target, and you only have so much ammunition. Also, unless you’ve already mastered it, trying to get by in isolation is a one-way ticket to starvation, exposure, and death. Europe will do better with its rail and cities and lower energy use than the U.S., at least initially. Our prior habit of valuing things over skill will change. “Those whose value consists of things they can do and teach…give everyone a reason to leave them unharmed…Even in the pirate havens of the 16th century Caribbean, among the most brutal and lawless societies in recorded history physicians, shipwrights, and other skilled craftspeople led charmed lives….”
The monastic tradition from medieval times is also unlikely to succeed as it requires the voluntary embrace of a lifestyle more impoverished and restricted than the peasants among which they live. Utopian communities? Also unlikely to succeed (see 1960s and even earlier Transcendentalist attempts.) There is a fundamental lack of recognition that rural life involves a great deal of very hard work. Lifeboat communities require the costs to be paid up front by the people involved, while the benefits only come along later to be shared by all.
The author advises the current day reader to reduce their energy use by half (especially get rid of the car commute), choose a viable profession (craft that requires modest energy inputs, produces something people need or want badly – think gardening, sewing, repair, brewing), take charge of their own health (learn preventive medicine and sanitation, first aid), and create community networking (here the author is a big proponent of old-fashioned fraternal organizations and ultimately sees these as the groundwork for future political stability and the only salvation of democracy.) It will help to have a back-up heat source for the home (increased asthma deaths but beats hypothermia and infectious disease), back up cooking method (hay boxes) and mechanical appliance substitutes (slide ruler, handheld mixer.) The author claims that organic gardening can provide a spare but adequate vegetarian diet for one person on a 20’ x 50’ patch of soil. He also predicts that cities of half a million or less close to agricultural land could fare better than very large cities lacking the capacity to bring in enough food to feed its populace.
Why bother you ask? Well every gallon of gas saved will allow trains to bring grain from farms to cities, factories to build wind turbine and solar panel substitutes while they still can, and so on. Until the 18th century, more than half of all goods and services in Western world were produced within the household and community economies. Cash served only for those things produced so far away that transport costs and spoilage made barter unworkable.
The author makes a claim that medical care has been the leading cause of death in the U.S. from iatrogenic (physician-caused) illnesses, nosocomial (hospital-transmitted) infections, drug side effects, risky elective surgeries, and simple malpractice. I suppose this is supposed to provide some comfort in trying to treat ourselves although the cold hard fact is we are going to die from things that didn’t use to kill us and we are likely to die younger. No medicine can take the place of adequate sanitation, clean water, and the right food. The author also states that we will have to do without, including without as much leisure as we’ve come to believe we are entitled. His Libertarian-slip was definitely showing in these pages as the evil “entitlement” monster was lashed and executed.
Further chapters explores a salvage economy and what can be made from things lying around like alternators and rebar in cement. Photovocaic solar power is deemed DOA as requiring amorphous silicon monomolecular layers of rare earth metals, and nanoparticle-free factories to build. Part of the problem of substitutes is than none can live up to the net energy of fossil fuels with its 200 to 1 ratio. Net energy in single digits which is the best renewable energy technologies manage, won’t produce enough spare energy to support an industrial society. (Windmills at 6 to 1 won’t do it but they can grind grain and existing solar won’t do it but it beats no heat at all.) Look for old “machines” the author advises that meet the tests of durability, independence, replicability, and transparency (ergo the slide rule.)
Lastly the author addresses the need to preserve our cultural heritage of the last six thousand years. Our books are on acidic paper destined to decay with CDs and DVDs having even shorter life spans and unable to be played without technology. They will be needed to balance the grim realities of a declining society.
To summarize, regardless of the Enlightenment human being are not entirely rational creatures and our thought is mythic by nature. Thus, any attempts to bring about significant social change must start at the mythic level with emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative or it will go nowhere. Two of our greatest storytellers have been Mohandas Ghandi and Adolph Hitler. The Progress Myth has its own Creation story rooted in popular distortion of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. The downslopes of civilization of form great incubators for religious movements so who knows what we may see going forward.

[blaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book with a novel (to me) argument. Greer argues that the occurrence of peak oil will cause industrial civilisation to decline over a century or two, never to return again. Our civilisation is completely dependent on oil as a resource, not just for transport but also for production and resource extraction. Oil is also the most efficient source of energy in terms of energy expended vs energy gained. You might respond that renewables are more efficient in that they continue to provide energy over time, but the ratio of energy expended producing, storing and transporting renewable energy versus energy gained isn’t anywhere near the energy surplus gained through oil. Also, renewables gain a ‘subsidy’ in production because of how much oil is used in the process, from mining minerals, transporting them, producing the renewable device, transporting that, etc. An all renewable society wouldn’t have anything like the energy surplus that an oil-based society has, necessitating a devolution in production and all things that come with it, from public health to political structures.

All of this isn’t to say that Greer is anti-renewable and pro-oil. On the contrary, he views our oil-based civilisation as a mistake that was doomed to failure, both because it’s a finite resource and because it destroys the environment, thus causing mounting crises that will exacerbate collapse through economic, social and political instability. Peak oil has been a subject of discussion since at least the 70s, and estimates for its dating vary, but Greer argued we were at or near it at the time of writing in 2008. One might respond that recent developments in fracking and tar sands oil extraction have pushed back the date, but Greer would counter that the very fact that we have to resort to such energy intensive extraction methods means we’re unable to find as much as we need in more easily accessible areas, which means we’re reaching peak oil. He advocates renewables inasmuch as they provide a sort of ‘parachute’ down from industrial civilisation. Some energy is a lot better than what we can accrue from human and animal muscles, but it just can’t match the productivity of oil, and can’t maintain all the things that come with that.

As part of his argument, Greer takes a look at the decline and collapse of previous civilisations and shows that they always occur at some point, and tend to happen over at least a century. The model he puts forward for civilisational collapse is more of a staircase than a drop off a cliff. This is because each sharp drop in a society’s economic production and political stability contracts economic consumption and energy needs, which reduces economic and political complexity to a level more suitable to the lower resource base, ushering in a new period of stability and even partial recovery. In turn, this leads to a new series of crises, a new decline in complexity, a new period of stability, and so on until the civilisation has declined to the point of non-existence. What awaits at the end? A mostly agricultural-based society, low-complexity societies, and the eventual emergence of small and simple polities that will follow their own trajectory of growth and decline, onward forever. The catch after this current one is that we’ve used all the reasonably accessible oil, so we’re destined to never reach this level of production or complexity again.

There’s also a good few chapters about religion, ideology and the myth of progress, but I read half the book on two hours sleep so I’ll end my scatterbrained notes here. I pray Greer is wrong and we find a technological fix, but he makes a compelling case that even if we do, it’ll be too little too late. Bring on the new Dark Ages and the resurgence of Steppe Horde Economics, folks.

[Alex Furst · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book #6 of 2022. "The Long Descent" by John Michael Greer. 2/5 rating.

This book was a really boring, oft topic, and just weird look at the likely consequences of Peak Oil.

I should've been the perfect audience for a book like this. I am always interested in environmental issues, peak oil, and discussion of how to improve our chances for a better future, but not even I thought this thing was worth my time. John ends up mired in discussions about magic and weird history, along with the other on-topic ideas that could have been summed up in about a page and a half.

I did appreciate his talk about our society's blind belief in progress and how it can be as counterproductive as the other extreme of apocalyptic expectations for our future. His idea of the long descent is a slow backslide of the next many centuries - that will mirror in reverse our progress since the enlightenment - as we run out of fossil fuels. I personally don't exactly think this will happen, but it's worthwhile to think about how we can work to cushion and prevent things like this from happening.

The only other worthwhile part of the book was his discussion of myth. This reminded me a lot of Yuval Noah Harari's discussion in "Sapiens" (which you should read and is actually an enjoyable way to explore this topic).
John says: "The crux of the problem, as I've suggested throughout this book, is that human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus, any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere."

In short, don't waste your time with this book.

[Joshua Hillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book serves as a reminder that the high energy, industrial base of our civilization is not permanent.

Those who think the future is one of perpetual "progress", automation, AI and the colonization of Mars might be disappointed to learn of this. Its hard to say what the future will look like exactly, but the author suggests things might unwind slowly; periods of crisis followed by periods of stability. Imagine a hundred years from now, most of our food will be produced regionally again instead of internationally (global freight costs will be too high for common cargo). Farms will use muscle power again instead of industrial machines. A large portion of the population will have to return to the fields and resume the ancient legacy of farming / food production. In the short term (for the timeline that is relevant to those who are living now), a smart strategy might be prepare for a way of life that is less fossil fuel dependent, though not completely independent yet. Indeed, live life in the present world like anyone else, but observing a strategy that prepares for the slow, pervading scarcity of oil, upon which the industrial infrastructure of modern civilizations rest.

[Tony Smyth · Rating 4 out of 5]

In general a good book. In general the theme is that we will enter a long economic descent, as you might have gathered from the title. Basically, like Joseph Tainter, the argument is that we will not be able to sustain our current level of complexity and material wealth, our current tale of endless prosperity based on cheap energy. Some of this book is about the series of crises will will have to deal with as our industrial world collapses. Its not all doom and gloom though, as Greer describes what we can do as we avert the worst and move to a shared local economy.
Greer writes really well yet the book is very much aimed at the layman. If you have read JMG blogs you have noticed that he can be overly long-winded - not so here. Maybe he had a good editor?

[Chris Fernandez-Packham · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating and entertaining book on the impact of climate change and energy boundaries on industrial civilisation. Many interesting ideas, facts and opinions.

I suspect it has more right, than wrong. I would say that it doesn't fully engage with how resilient societies can be especially as technology advances, and there's a lack of fully consideration of the causes of other societies collapses. I think more pure academic research with historians and anthropologists would have strengthened this. That said, it is a general work that is clearly written and intelligent, not an academic textbook. Depending on your view, this work is either sobering, depressing, or liberating; but it is certainly stimulating.

Worth picking up and reading.

[Logan Streondj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book with many quotable passages, giving great context on historical change explaining the high probability of gradual change and atrophy of institution and de urbanization.

Though not sure where raiding and bandits are on the gradual descent timeline. It is interesting how he said that rural remote places are likely to fall first, and will need to provide all their own needs. Wheras small rural towns will be able to last longer due to seperation of concerns.

Certainly worth archiving.

[Joseph Torregrossa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Head's up to the Future.

Everything spot on EXCEPT we keep finding more fossil fuel. And ways to extract it.
The descent will be hardest on the youngest Americans. Hope I'll be around to see their faces when the smart phones stop working.
The more intelligent will stock up on knowledge, skills, and tools. Networking with the like minded will also help.

Hope anyone reading this makes it to the other side of the descent in one piece.

[Jackson Cutsor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author has dated views on the outlook of the future due to technological and social changes. Overall, peak oil is something not discussed enough and this commentary changed how I view the future. Not a book for those who are perpetual optimists. The author successfully convinced me that the world will not end quickly or continue on a curve towards utopia, but rather quality of life on average will decrease as fossil fuels deplete and climate issues wreck havoc on our society.