The Long Descent Quotes

“One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.”
― John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

“One feature of succession true of many different environments is a difference in resource use between earlier and later seres. Species characteristic of earlier seral stages tend to maximize control of resources and production of biomass, even at the cost of inefficiency; thus, such species tend to maximize production and distribution of offspring even when this means the great majority of offspring fail to reach reproductive maturity. Species typical of later seres, by contrast, tend to maximize the efficiency of their resource use, even at the cost of limits to biomass production and the distribution of individual organisms; thus, these species tend to maximize energy investment in individual offspring even when this means that offspring are few and the species fails to occupy all available niche spaces. Species of the first type, termed “R-selected” species in the ecological literature, have specialized to flourish opportunistically in disturbed environments, while those of the second type, or “K-selected” species, have specialized to form stable biotic communities that change only with shifts in the broader environment.”
― John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age