Green Wizardry Quotes

“Like all supposedly classless societies, America makes up for its lack of formal caste barriers by raising class prejudice to a fine art; the cheap shots at small town America so common among the urban middle classes who dominate today’s green scene are an expression of that, and so is the peer pressure that keeps most Americans from doing the sensible thing and buying cheap and sturdy used products in place of increasingly overpriced and slipshod new ones.”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“The concept of using less of anything is about as popular in the contemporary industrial world as garlic aioli at a convention of vampires. Nobody wants to be reminded that using less, so that our grandchildren would have enough, was the road we didn’t take at the end of the seventies. Still, the road we did take was always destined to be a dead end, and, as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the end of that road is starting to come into sight.”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“The lie at the heart of that bad faith was the desperate attempt to avoid facing the implications of the plain and utterly unwelcome fact that there is no way to make a middle-class lifestyle sustainable”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“When people set aside an obvious impossibility, they don’t remain brittle and angry about it for decades afterward; it’s only when the road not taken was a real option, and the goal at the end of it noticeably better than the endpoint looming up ahead, that those who chose otherwise get shrill in defense of their decision. That shrill tone is hard to miss these days, and it’s grown in volume and intensity over the course of the thirty year vacation from reality the industrial world took in the aftermath of the Seventies.”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“In an age of scarcity, that easy option no longer exists, and social conflicts heat up rapidly. That’s the unmentioned subtext for much of what’s going on in politics on both sides of the Atlantic just now. The”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“The kind of SUV environmentalism that waxes rhapsodic about all the things everybody else ought to do for the environment, while doing few or none of them, is not a viable response to the crisis of our time.”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“Notice how our economists still act as though replacing human labor with fossil fuel-derived energy is always a good idea, even at a time when unemployment is pandemic and the cost of energy is a rising burden on economies around the world.”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“Both beliefs take the temporary habits of an age of excess and treat them as necessities, and both of them box our collective imagination into a futile quest to sustain the unsustainable instead of looking at the real alternative to the extravagant use of fossil fuels.”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit

“Hardin, Garrett, Filters Against Folly (New York: Penguin, 1985).”
― John Michael Greer, Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit