The Long Descent by John Michael Greer

Another present from the Energy Bulletin for pre-publication review. I've been reading John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report for a few months now and I thought his book would be pretty esoteric, but it's actually brilliant in its simplicity and a much-needed wise and reasonable voice for the peak oil community. He covers all the usual information about what peak oil is and how it will impact society and create a descent into a pre-industrial state of affairs, but here he departs from the brethren to discuss why the peak oil community is failing to lead society towards helpful approaches to dealing with this predicament (emphasis on predicament as opposed to problem to be solved implying with technology.)

This collective failure of the imagination he attributes to Western society having provided only two stories—The Myth of Progress and The Myth of the Apocalypse. And these stories run deep. The Myth of Progress came out of the Enlightenment and sold everyone on the idea that if we simply acted rationally in our own interest the world would progress linearly to a golden age of everything. The other is the Myth of the Apocalypse, which says that we did live a golden age of harmony with each other and the planet, but we took a wrong turn and it's been one blind alley of misguided depravity after another. Classic Greek tragedy vs. comedy looks like.

The brilliance of Greer is that he takes the trouble to explain these social mindsets from the beginning so by the end of it you are like "yeah how obvious". What actually made the myth of progress work was abundant cheap energy making possible all these fabulous visions of opulence for all and now that it's not going to continue we are all like doomsday is coming, we bad. This was popular thinking in the '70s too, but then we cut back on oil consumption by 15% and the world did not end giving us a new opportunity to continue our myth of progress. Here he explains how short term political policies of the Reagan years and the manipulation of oil prices brought us to where we are now, when we could have done something about it when Carter was telling us to cut back.

He describes various coping strategies these dual myths have prompted, in response to peak oil, including the lone cabin in the woods survival-ism to the creation of lifeboat communities or earnestly campaigning for a political leader who will install policies that will save us, (but no one in their right mind would vote for because it interferes with our myth of progress). He then proceeds to describe very basic skills that we would do well to cultivate having to do with growing food, making things for ourselves, low energy transportation and reviving community governance and self reliance. He points out that it doesn't have to be all back to pioneer living and using hand tools, we can use advanced technology too if we set it up beforehand to cover basic tasks and not attempt to float this bloated high energy lifestyle that we think of as normal, because we just aren't going to have time or enough fuel to do that. That normal was an aberration of having stumbled on the energy dense, dead dinosaur deposits of oil. We had that opportunity to transit more slowly, but just because we missed it doesn't mean instant catastrophe. Due to adjustment factors he describes as part of his catabolic collapse theory, this deindustrialization will take several generations. So don't sweat it just get your mind around it and proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest practical skill building class. Quite affirming, I would say, for all us appropriate technology flickerati. I sure hope this book becomes the peak oil spiritual bible, because if Kunstler continues to hold sway it's just going to make it more difficult.

Dominion

Interesting perspective in the eco-disaster genre from 1995. Establishes that humans are the only species to have separated from local ecosystems through culture, defined as the ability to use our brains to make tools and to leverage the odds of our survival by taking control of our food supply thus separating us from the limits of biology and the ecosystem. Having made this separation we then went on to create stories about how glorious we were and how God told us we were to have dominion over the earth. Asks the question "can nature and culture co-exist?"

Presents the conclusion that we will not escape the limitations of the ecosystem, it's just not going to be a local catastrophe, but a global one. Due to the global nature of our economic system we have to exploit all the corners of the earth before we will know that there's nothing left to feed us.

Joins the chorus of authors urging us to tell new stories of cooperation with nature and stewardship of the earth. Is this a job for the bigger brain?