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 unavoidable 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.
â 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 practical challenges. Greer's generosity of spirit and essential kindness are habits of mind and heart very much worth emulating.
â 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 civilization's mythology predisposes our imaginations to bypass reality altogether, 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.
â 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.
â Albert Bates,
author of
The Post-Petroleum
Survival Guide and Cookbook
“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 useful 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 sometimes harrowing, but potentially fascinating transition.
â 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 dynamics of societal collapse couldn't be more timely. Resource depletion 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.
â 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 falling off a cliff but rather “a slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history's dumpster.” Presenting the concept of “catabolic collapse”, Greer brilliantly assists the reader in deciphering an illusory intellectual polarity consisting 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.
â Carolyn Baker
author of
Speaking Truth to Power
www.carolynbaker.net
THE
LONG
DESCENT
NEW SOCIETY PUBLISHERS
C
ATALOGING IN
P
UBLICATION
D
ATA:
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)
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Contents
1 The End of the Industrial Age
2 The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Appendix: How Civilizations Fall:
A Theory of Catabolic Collapse
The difference between Europeans and Americans, some wag has suggested, is that Europeans think a hundred miles is a long distance, 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 maintained 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 snapshots of some panorama of human progress, but as Caernarfon unfolded its past to me that afternoon, the view I saw was a different 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 â we call it the Dark Ages today â still offers up a potent 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 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 suburban 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. In that setting, it was easy to believe the narrative of linear progress served up by the schools, the media, and the popular culture of the time. Even in the handful of Atlantic coast cities old enough to have a history worth mentioning in Old World terms, the marks of the past are buried deep enough beneath the detritus of the present that the same narrative seems to make sense. The energy crises of the 1970s shook this easy faith in progress, but the following decade saw that moment of uncertainty dismissed as an aberration, or rather a nightmare of sorts from which we had all thankfully awakened.