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The Long Descent

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The Long Descent Advance praise for The Long Descent Candidates for public office,and the voters who elect them, should be required to read John Michael Greer’s accurate diagnosis of the terminal illness our fossil-energy subsidized industrial civilization has too long denied. He shows how stubborn belief in perpetual progress blinded us to the abyss toward which we were speeding and thus impeded wise preparation for our unavoid- able descent into a deindustrial age. We must hope that the array of mitigating tools he prescribes may yet render that descent down the back side of Hub- bert’s peak less devastating than it will be if we insistently claim a right to be prodigal in using this finite Earth. — William R. Catton, Jr. author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change This is a very wise and timely message for a nation facing enormous practi- cal challenges. Greer’s generosity of spirit and essential kindness are habits of mind and heart very much worth emulating. — James Howard Kunstler author of World Made by Hand and The Long Emergency When we find ourselves falling off the lofty peak of infinite progress, our civ- ilization’s mythology predisposes our imaginations to bypass reality alto- gether, and to roll straight for the equally profound abyss of the Apocalypse. Greer breaks this spell, and instead offers us a view on our deindustrial future that is both carefully reasoned and grounded in spirituality. — Dmitry Orlov author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects If, as Greer suggests, our “prolonged brush with ecological reality” is not a slide or a free-fall, but a stair-step, then we have time to see this book made required reading in every U.S. high school. This is both a past and future history book, written from a perspective that is rare now, but will soon be widely shared. — Albert Bates, author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. “Sweeping historical vision” is not generally a term applied to books about peak oil, which tend to imagine the coming crisis in terms as a culmination and a single event. John Michael Greer offers a use- ful corrective to this narrow vision in a book that is both pragmatic and visionary. In this deeply engaging book, Greer places us not at the end of our historical narrative, but at the beginning of a some- times harrowing, but potentially fascinating transition. — Sharon Astyk author of Depletion & Abundance: Life on the New Home Front and blogger, SharonAstyk.com At once erudite and entertaining, Greer’s exploration of the dy- namics of societal collapse couldn’t be more timely. Resource de- pletion and climate change guarantee that industrial societies will contract in the decades ahead. Do we face a universally destructive calamity, or a long transition to a sustainable future? That’s one of the most important questions facing us, and this book is one of the very few to address it on the basis of clear reasoning and historical precedents. — Richard Heinberg Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, and author of The Party’s Over and Peak Everything The fall of civilization, according to Greer, does not look like fall- ing off a cliff but rather “a slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history’s dumpster.” Pre- senting the concept of “catabolic collapse”, Greer brilliantly assists the reader in deciphering an illusory intellectual polarity consist- ing on one side of the infinite progress of civilization and on the other, apocalypse. Not unlike the journey through the mythical Scylla and Charybdis, Greer appropriately names this odyssey the Long Descent, and for it, he offers us not only an excellent read, but tangible tools for navigating the transition. — Carolyn Baker author of Speaking Truth to Power www.carolynbaker.net This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. New Society Publishers This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this publication is available from the National Library of Canada. Copyright © 2008 by John Michael Greer. All rights reserved. Cover design by Diane McIntosh. Images: iStock/Dan Tero Printed in Canada. First printing July 2008. Paperback isbn: 978-0-86571-609-4 Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of The Long Descent should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below. To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to: New Society Publishers P.O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada (250) 247-9737 New Society Publishers’ mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision. We are committed to doing this not just through education, but through action. This book is one step toward ending global deforestation and climate change. It is printed on Forest Stewardship Council-certified acid-free paper that is 100% post-consumer recycled (100% old growth forest-free), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetable-based, low- VOC inks, with covers produced using FSC-certified stock. Additionally, New Society purchases carbon offsets based on an annual audit, operating with a carbon-neutral footprint. For further information, or to browse our full list of books and purchase securely, visit our website at: www.newsociety.com 100% New Society Publishers SW-C0C-1271 www.newsociety.com This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. Contents Preface . ix 1 The End of the Industrial Age ...................... 1 2 The Stories We Tell Ourselves...................... 35 3 Briefing for the Descent . 73 4 Facing the Deindustrial Age . 113 5 Tools for the Transition . 157 6 The Spiritual Dimension .......................... 191 Afterword . 221 Appendix: How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse . 225 Bibliography . 241 Notes . 249 Index........................................... 255 About the Author ................................ 259 vii This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. Preface The difference between Europeans and Americans, some wag has suggested, is that Europeans think a hundred miles is a long dis- tance, and Americans think a hundred years is a long time. I had a cogent reminder of that witticism in the summer of 2003 when my wife and I climbed a rocky hill in the Welsh town of Caernarfon. Spread out below us in an unexpected glory of sunlight was the whole recorded history of that little corner of the world. The ground beneath us still rippled with earthworks from the Celtic hill fort that guarded the Menai Strait more than two and a half millennia ago. The Roman fort that replaced it was now the dim brown mark of an old archeological site on low hills off to the left. Edward I’s great gray castle rose up in the middle foreground, and the high contrails of RAF jets on a training exercise out over the Irish Sea showed that the town’s current overlords still main- tained the old watch. Houses and shops from more than half a dozen centuries spread eastward as they rose through the waters of time, from the cramped medieval buildings of the old castle town straight ahead to the gaudy sign and sprawling parking lot of the supermarket back behind us. It’s been popular in recent centuries to take such sights as snap- shots of some panorama of human progress, but as Caernarfon unfolded its past to me that afternoon, the view I saw was a dif- ferent one. The green traces of the hill fort showed the highwater mark of a wave of Celtic expansion that flooded most of Europe in its day. The Roman fort marked the crest of another wave whose long ebbing — we call it the Dark Ages today — still offers up a po- tent reminder that history doesn’t always lead to better things. The castle rose as medieval England’s Plantagenet empire neared its own peak, only to break on the battlefields of Scotland and France and fall back into the long ordeal of the Wars of the Roses. The comfortable brick houses of the Victorian era marked the zenith ix This ebook sold by New Society Publishers. All Rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be copied or sold. x The Long Descent of another vanished empire, and it didn’t take too much effort just then to see, in the brash American architecture of the supermarket, the imprint of a fifth empire headed for the same fate as the others. Views like this are hard to find in North America. The subur- ban houses and schools where I spent my childhood were all built after the Second World War, on land that had been unbroken old growth forest three quarters of a century before that.
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