Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

by John Michael Greer

After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion.

What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways.

Dark Age America, then, seeks to map out in advance the history of collapse, giving us an idea of what the next five hundred years or so might look like as globalization ends and North American civilization reaches the end of its lifecycle and enters the stages of decline and fall.

In many ways, this is Greer's most uncompromising work, though by no means without hope to offer. Knowing where we're headed collectively is a crucial step in responding constructively to the challenges of the future and doing what we can now to help our descendants make the most of the world we're leaving them.

John Michael Greer, historian of ideas and one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited weekly blog the Archdruid Report and has published more than thirty books including The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature, and After Progress. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.

Genres: Nonfiction, Climate Change, Politics, History, Ecology, Science, Social Science

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2016

About the author

John Michael Greer is an author of over thirty books and the blogger behind The Archdruid Report. He served as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His work addresses a range of subjects, including climate change, peak oil, the future of industrial society, and the occult. He also writes science fiction and fantasy. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife.

Reviews

[Antonomasia]

My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
oil Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (1912-1990)

That's my own selection. Quoted in the book, Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Ruin':
Bright were the halls then, many the bath-houses,
High the gables, loud the joyful clamor,
Many the meadhalls full of delights
Until mighty Fate overthrew it all.
Wide was the slaughter, the plague-time came,
Death took away all those brave men.
Broken their ramparts, fallen their halls,
The city decayed; those who built it
Fell to the earth. Thus these courts crumble,
And roof-tiles fall from this arch of stone.

-----

Collapse theories having apparently gone mainstream since the US election, it feels more zeitgeisty than risky-of-funny-looks to review this book now. Or, the theories have moved leftwards. I read that right wing American preppers have turned all optimistic since Trump won, and are buying way less stuff*. Meanwhile, people on the left - the ones who weren't already expecting a difficult future due to climate change - are adopting the preppers' cast-off mindset, although presumably with fewer guns and confederate flags, and more jargon about community organizing.

I usually stick to mainstream / academic /Guardian approved sources, so am cautious about getting into potentially sensationalist non-fiction blogs by authors with not-entirely-conventional credentials. (I wonder if I'd even listen to myself...) I'd looked briefly at the Archdruid Report years ago and not really got into it, though my residual (yet not quite enough to tick a form) paganism made me give it another go when I saw it mentioned in a years-old comment thread somewhere on GR. (Thanks Ted.) This time round, it stood out for its measured perspective (elsewhere online, there are all manner of speculations about imminent megadisaster, or illogical ideas of a utopian future; its subject is, instead, a decline, a slow collapse), being very well argued (which doesn't mean I agree everything on it), referencing of classic texts, and original(?) ideas of the sort that seem perfectly obvious once someone has actually said them. (This is one of the best recent ones, and a lovely piece of writing to boot.) It is resolutely free of overt spirituality, a choice I think very wise, but the undercurrent of paganism is surely part of why it's on my wavelength.
The blog has, over the last few months, become one of my online homes, although I've never felt the need to post a comment, because someone else said it already. It isn't just a blog, it's effectively a community; I feel "these are my people"; they're actually a very varied bunch - it's the only place where I've seen Americans who voted for many different presidential candidates (there are a lot of third party voters) talk amicably, remarkably so - albeit with moderation in place - but it's where I've found, for the first time, articulation of opinions I've always thought and felt but at which others shake their heads. Two recent examples; a commenter who, like me, evidently thinks that most demonstrations are futile, and felt that cutting fuel use to the bone was a better response to the Dakota Pipeline than using gallons of it to travel there and protest (the commenters being as they are, I'm sure he'd admit that he wasn't exactly right on this occasion) and someone who also recognises that the modern medical treatment and comfortable living conditions keeping him going are products of the resource over-reach of contemporary society, yet he doesn't let that stop him taking an interest in the issues.

I saw recently that Greer himself has contributed to Paul Kingsnorth's Dark Mountain journal; I keep discovering its writers singly (also, for example, Mark Boyle), and, much like the above blog community, it's [wisely] not expected that everyone will share the same views; I don't agree with everything, but in it I find sentiments that I have on some level always felt, many of which are almost absent among people I know; it's another spiritual home of a sort. (Even if I don't want to look at some of the art in case it's quite bad.) A publisher that starts one page asking "Does the world need more books?" and has distinct misgivings, or at least ambivalence, about their very production, is a thing after my own heart, far more than one that blithely justifies itself with blinkers on.

J.M. Greer has published a lot of books, but I wanted to read this as the most recent. Another GR reviewer is correct in saying that most of the content is from blog posts of 2015-early 2016 - but, heck, though it's indulgent, I wanted to read them with the computer off. Besides, just as I decided to read about Shakespearean England in the lead up to the EU referendum [Henrician Reformation as "first Brexit"; rampant nationalism and xenophobia], I needed something in preparation for the devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea US election; this book combined that and my renewed interest in environmental issues.

Dark Age America has cover problems like Elena Ferrante's novels; it looks like the contents will be tackier and less intelligent than they are, but at the same time, it isn't entirely unlike what it appears to be at first glance. I'm hoping - after the above preamble, and several months' percolating - to write the sort of long non-fiction review I enjoy reading, one that tells the reader a lot about what's in the book. (So, what does this dude think will happen?) I've lost one of my documents of pasted quotes, so I may have missed ideas I once hoped to include, but that feels appropriate; things get lost in dark ages. I've also realised in that time that much of Greer's work is an elaboration on The Limits to Growth, which he read at an early age, and with good reason still treats as an ur-text - but it was his writing that reintroduced me to the vital concepts of power generation, EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) and the more purely financial EROI- and the compelling summary that Those lifestyles, and nearly all of what goes with them, existed in the first place only because a handful of the world’s nations burned through half a billion years of fossil sunlight in a few short centuries. The sort of thing I read this guy for.

Dark Age America is not just a "widescreen book", it's an aerial view - of land changes and possible population movements; it's about what might be happening in 200 years, not 20; there's little here about the detail of every day life, or, unlike the survey macro-histories whose style it resembles, battles. Greer is a fan of Arnold Toynbee, among others, and he also draws many examples from the fall of Rome. (Those with a stronger grounding in Roman history - which I confess to finding a bit boring - may have more to say about those.)


carbon footprints will shrink willy-nilly as rapid downward mobility becomes the order of the day for most people. [You know the poorest people have lower carbon footprints because they just don't buy shit in the first place - better than special eco-version of thing you didn't really need - and don't travel much?]
From now until the end of the twenty-first century, perhaps longer, we can expect climate chaos, accelerating in its geographical spread and collective impact until a couple of decades after CO2 emissions begin to decline, due to the lag time between when greenhouse gases hit the atmosphere and when their effects finally peak. As the rate of emissions slows thereafter, the turbulence will gradually abate, and some time after that—exactly when is anybody’s guess, but 2300 is as good a guess as any—the global climate will have settled down into a “new normal” that won’t be normal by our standards at all He references Thomas Friedman's popular and on-point phrase, "not global warming, but global weirding": unpredictable change will be the main problem; climate stability is what made possible the civilisations of the last several thousand years. (You may have seen this xkcd illustrating that.)

Based on palaeoclimate findings, and noting that rainfall is more important than temperature in making a region habitable for humans, If the Hypsithermal’s a valid model, as seems most likely, most of North America from the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges east across the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains to the Great Plains and south through most of inland Mexico will be sun-scorched desert, as harsh as any on today’s Earth...
Climate isn’t the only factor governing human settlement, though. Two other crucial factors will also shape the future environments of North America—rising sea levels and the deadly legacies of today’s frankly brainless handling of nuclear and chemical wastes..
From the latter, there will be zones that are either uninhabited or where most people have chronic illness and/or die earlier than elsewhere. I can all too easily imagine fuel rods being hauled out of their pools by condemned criminals or political prisoners, loaded on flatbed rail cars, taken to some desolate corner of the expanding western deserts, and tipped one at a time into trenches dug in the desert soil, then covered over with a few meters of dirt and left to the elements. Sooner or later the radionuclides will leak out, and that desolate place will become even more desolate, a place of rumors and legends where those who go don’t come back.
Typical of Greer's conservatism and long term perspective is a suggested sea-level rise of 50ft in 500 years, delivered in a series of unpredictable bursts divided by long periods of relative stability or slow change - making decisions about re-siting ports unpredictable and expensive.

My working guess is that the Eastern and Western seaboards of dark age America will be much more sparsely populated than they are today, with communities concentrated in those areas where land well above sea level lies close to the sea...inland waterways with good navigable connections to the sea will take on an even greater importance than they have today...
St. Lawrence Seaway, the Hudson River-Erie Canal linkage to the Great Lakes, and whatever port further inland replaces New Orleans—Baton Rouge is a likely candidate, due to its location and elevation above sea level

Topsoil loss is a major problem little known beyond regular readers of environmental news. Most of the topsoil that made North America the breadbasket of the twentieth-century world is already gone, and at the current rate of loss, all of it will be gone by 2150. That would be bad enough if we could rely on artificial fertilizer to make up for the losses, but by 2150 that won’t be an option: the entire range of chemical fertilizers are made from nonrenewable resources—natural gas is the main feedstock for nitrate fertilizers, rock phosphate for phosphate fertilizers, and so on—and all of these are depleting fast...
Topsoil loss driven by bad agricultural practices is actually quite a common factor in the collapse of civilizations. Sea-floor cores in the waters around Greece, for example, show a spike in sediment deposition from rapidly eroding topsoil right around the end of the Mycenean civilization, and another from the latter years of the Roman Empire...
a very large part of today’s North American farm belt will likely be unable to support crops for centuries or millennia to come.
However, suburban gardens tend to have much better quality soil: a scenario in which old gardens and parks become increasingly used for crops is, IMO, a plausible part of the future.

a fairly limited set of regions in which field agriculture of something like the familiar sort will be viable in a post-fossil fuel age. Those regions cluster in the Eastern Seaboard from the new coast west to the Alleghenies and the Great Lakes and in river valleys in the eastern half of the Mississippi basin. The Midwestern grasslands will support pastoral grazing, and the jungle belts around the new Gulf Coast will be suitable for tropical horticulture once the soil has a chance to recover...

areas—for example, the Great Lakes region and the Gulf Coast from Mexico around to the shallow seas where Florida used to be—where population will be relatively dense by Dark Age standards, and towns of modest size may even thrive if they happen to be in defensible locations...

The nomadic herding folk of the Midwestern prairies, and the other human ecologies that will spring up in the varying ecosystems of deindustrial North America, will all gradually settle into a more or less stable population level, at which births and deaths balance each other and the consumption of resources stays at or below sustainable levels of production. That’s what happens in human societies that don’t have the dubious advantage of a torrent of non-renewable energy reserves to distract them temporarily from the hard necessities of survival...

[Having just come off a binge-watch of Jericho, I wonder if the above doesn't sound too idyllic, too free. Elsewhere in the book, Greer mentions warlord culture as a major feature of crumbling societies (in the modern US, that translates as domestic militias, drug gangs and other organised criminals gaining more power), but rogue fragments of corporations exercising authoritarian control are a possibility not mentioned.

Where these future people will get their energy isn't discussed here; presumably there will be makeshift wind farms, mills and the like, but I think there would inevitably be use of remaining coal and perhaps oil (harder not to waste the latter without specialist equipment), dug up by locals, and a lot of deforestation. There will be way too many people living hand to mouth during disintegration for trees (or wildlife) to survive in any number, and that will further diminish the carrying capacity for humans.

As a result, deindustrial North America will support many fewer people than it did in 1880 or so, before new agricultural technologies dependent on fossil fuels launched the population boom that is peaking in our time.
Not via the sort of sudden mass death seen in disaster movies, it's as if just one or two more people of your acquaintance died per year than tended to previously, but over a couple of hundred years, it all adds up - or rather subtracts - into a big change. (Unfortunately, although I'm terribly interested to see what happens, and would prefer to take all this as an adventure, I would be one of the early ones to go. As ever, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.)

I haven't been able to find many stats on post-Roman population of Europe, so am not sure what to think about the following:
In the twilight years of the Roman world, to cite an example we’ll be using repeatedly in the chapters ahead, a steady demographic contraction was overlaid by civil wars, barbarian invasions, economic crises, famines, and epidemics. The total population decline varied significantly from one region to another, but even the relatively stable parts of the Eastern Empire seem to have had around a fifty percent loss of population, while some areas of the Western Empire suffered far more drastic losses—Britain in particular was transformed from a rich, populous, and largely urbanized province to a land of silent urban ruins and small, scattered villages of subsistence farmers where even so simple a technology as wheel-thrown pottery became a lost art...

Hammered by climate change and topsoil loss, the Maya heartland went through a rolling collapse a century and a half in length that ended with population levels maybe five percent of what they’d been at the start of the Terminal Classic period...

20 to 25 million—might be a reasonable midrange estimate for the human population of the North American continent when the population implosion finally bottoms out a few centuries from now.

And on possible composition of that population:
Conflict between ethnic groups is quite often a major issue in the twilight years of a civilization ... but it’s also self-terminating, for an interesting reason: traditional ethnic divisions don’t survive dark ages...
new ethnicities emerge. It’s a commonplace of history that dark ages are the cauldron from which nations are born...
a stage of ethnic conflict, a stage of ethnic dissolution, and a stage of ethnogenesis...
One very common and very interesting feature of this process is that the increase in ethnic tensions tends to parallel a process of ethnic consolidation. [Look at how Black Lives Matter has emerged at the same time as there are more interracial relationships than ever.]

consider the way that the rights of Roman citizenship expanded step by step from the inhabitants of the city of Rome itself to larger and larger fractions of the people it dominated, until finally every free adult male in the Empire was a Roman citizen by definition. Parallel to that process came a hardening of the major divisions, between free persons and slaves on the one hand, between citizens of the Empire and the barbarians outside its borders, and between adherents of the major religious blocs into which the tolerant paganism of Rome’s heyday was divided...

Five centuries from now, as a result, it’s entirely possible that most people in the upper Mississippi valley will be of Brazilian ancestry, and that the inhabitants of the Hudson’s Bay region sing songs about their long-lost homes in drowned Florida, while languages descended from English may be spoken only in a region extending from New England to the isles of deglaciated Greenland.

Nor will these people necessarily think of themselves in any of the national and ethnic terms that come so readily to our minds today.

One of the sections where I lost notes - also the least interesting to read - was about the overcomplexity of bureaucracies, layered on top of core activities people really need: e.g. healthcare administrators, market researchers - jobs for the huge numbers of people to do at the moment. What David Graeber calls bullshit jobs. Had Greer been a British geek rather than an American one, I like to think he'd have called them Golgafrinchans. And the idea is that, as the social, economic and energy infrastructure becomes increasingly creaky and expensive to run, people will opt out of complex societies. If they are in a border or insurgent area that's hard to control, they join up with some warlord or other town - or they may try and vote it out, as people already thought they were doing with Trump. A precedent from late Roman society shows authorities forcing people to farm although it was financially untenable, taxing them till they starved, and they would try to run away to barbarian areas, until the whole place was overrun when the Roman military was no longer able to hold back the hordes.

Cont. in comments.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

18,000 years ago, the oceans were 400 feet lower. You could walk from Holland to Ireland following the reindeer herds. Greek astronomy knowledge was kept because the Church needed to know when Easter was. All Roman music has entirely disappeared except for a 25 second fragment (I’ll bet it sounds like Iron Butterfly’s In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida). Capitalism is a cancer; cancer is a disease of uncontrolled growth. Our great-grandchildren will think of our generations as monsters, ravaging the earth to live a life of excess. In our energy constrained future, waterways will return in importance. Baton Rouge will probably replace flooded New Orleans and the Erie Canal will make a comeback along with our rivers. Our obsession with extra-somatic energy use will soon end. Nuclear cannot exist without massive subsidies. Alternative energy will also require huge subsidies and don’t forget the fossil fuels lost in the making of alternative energy. No fracking company turned a profit. John sees the US population in a few centuries as being 20 to 25 million people but they won’t be scattered evenly because of uninhabitable areas. Soon we must find what we can do with our own labor. Buying farmland with no experience growing anything, at the front end of the learning curve, will end badly for many.

What will our ruling elites do about impeding collapse? 1. Ignore it, and pocket the savings. 2. Repress the people (but solves nothing too, and ups the costs of maintaining social hierarchy) 3. Elites sacrifice (as they did with FDR) to keep something still there just for them. John doesn’t think option 3 will happen again instead, he sees the “replacement of a ruling class that specializes in managing abstract power through institutions, with a ruling class expressing power up close and in person, using the business end of the nearest available weapon.”

John Ruskin used to call economic externalities “illth” (the opposite of wealth). Today more “illth” is being produced than wealth, which will at some point “force the industrial economy to his knees”. Wouldn’t that be great if that was ever on the news, along with showing how none of the world’s top 20 industries could even break even financially if they were forced to pay for all the damage they do annually to the planet. Put another way, the costs of our industrial society are growing faster than growth does. That’s why you see so many empty storefronts across the U.S. Ask residents of Detroit and Baltimore what’s it like now. In 2065, John says all will be living in third world conditions without constant power or running water. On medicine, John sees profit as ranked higher than the well-being of the patient with many doctors prescribing medications with side effects worse than the original malady. Doctors now should officially change their slogan from “First do no harm”, to “We prefer to medicate for that.”

Constantine cuts his deal legalizing Christianity, in the context of an alliance with the lower classes knowing they would support him against the elites. For John, that is the “political subtext” of the Edict of Nantes. Sharpened oyster shells were once the cheap pocketknives of the time and were used by a Christian mob to cut apart (while alive) a teacher named Hypatia in 415 CB. No doubt these dutiful Christians thought if Jesus were still alive, he would have “cut her good.” There was a “near-total absence of money in everyday Medieval life”. Back then a lender would be placed in Dante’s Inferno in a circle of hell BELOW mass murderers. Today’s leading cause of bankruptcy is medical bills. The world is at peak resources – for example today’s iron and steel is made from “low grade taconite ores with scarcely a trace of iron in them. Throw enough energy at it, and yes you still make more, but at some point, the resources are farmed out, the cheap energy gone, and you will have shift to a permanent recycle economy. Not to mention that energy needed to extract energy can’t be used again.

John wants you to understand the difference between tools and prosthetics – the first uses human potential, the second replaces human potential. We will be returning to a time of tools from a time of power tools - from modern Howard Roarks building skyscrapers back to that barn raising scene in the film Witness only this time coming there won’t be that lovely soundtrack from Maurice Jarre. Returning in time has advantages; if you’ve eaten Bread and Puppet’s Aioli with Bread made from 100-year-old starter, you know you don’t gain anything by buying a bread maker. I love this line of Johns: “What are you going to do with your time? Use another machine?” For John, when people are watching a lit screen, that’s a remarkably boring activity next to real life. Proof of that he says, is to put yourself on a media blackout for one week and see if you are more happily present in your own life once your “nervous system recovers far enough”.

Civilizations fail when they fail to achieve bonding of citizens to state through “admiration and affection”. Things are still okay, most Democrats loved putting a black face on empire with Obama, Hillary would have happily been the first women’s face on empire. But at some point, excitedly putting oppressed groups on the face of empire might be exactly the game elites would like us to play – we are drinking the Kool Aid by keeping the empire. What kind of person will do anything for money and power? That’s who you want as a role model? Funny how everyone on Facebook is still posting glowing pictures of Obama’s kids – you can be sure as sugar, none of them are posting pictures of Fred Hampton Jr. or Malcolm X’s six daughters saying how great they look and don’t you just love them? At some point the citizen bonding lovefest will break down, and idolatry of those who say yes to every war, drone strike and targeted assassination, will be the identification markings of a lemming in search of a cliff. Another great John line: “As industrial civilization heads out through history’s exit turnstile, most of the world is going with it.” Brilliantly said. I’m sorry, but John Michael Greer is simply a great writer and I have to admire his independent mind.

[Natasha Hurley-Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a regular reader of The Archdruid Report, so I was very familiar with the material presented in this book. Perhaps a little too familiar, as it has barely been modified from its original blog format, and there didn't appear to be any new content.

Still, I think anyone who is at all interested in what the future brings should give this a read. If you disagree with it, and it makes you angry, that's great too! Personally I find JMG's vision depressingly compelling, and his theory of catabolic collapse completely believable. Even if you think the book itself is so much doomer blogosphere nonsense (although it's really not!), there are references therein which are worth a read, notably William R. Catton's Overshoot, which I think is absolutely mandatory reading for everyone, and Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, which I keep meaning to get round to, when I can bear the bad news.

The TL;DR would be: we're already utterly and totally completely screwed thanks to the decisions of previous generations, and those of us who live in the next couple of centuries are going to have VERY different lives from what the people of the 20th and 21st centuries began to think of as normal. You can cushion the impact for yourself by getting used to LESS and building a reliable network of people who believe the same, and exiting the consumer economy as early as you can ("Collapse now and avoid the rush."). But at the end of it all, this isn't an apocalypse, just the inevitable turnover of Hubbert's curve. On anything but cosmic timescales, the Earth will still be here, and maybe even we as a species will hang on through the climate shifts we've instigated; if so, stories will be told about the legendary greed and stupidity of the people who burned through half a billion years of stored energy in a mere handful of generations, and wrecked the beautiful climate optimum in which we were evolved to flourish.

[Kieran Seán Fitzpatrick]

John needs a hug.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am both pessimist and optimist about our future. I expect our civilization, that of the West, to end entirely, and soon. Yet at the same time, I believe we can have an intensely bright future thereafter—not a return, certainly, but something wholly new, informed by the wisdom and knowledge of the past. Moreover, I think that technology, rightly ordered and used, will be a pillar of that future, if we reach it. John Michael Greer, a man hard to categorize politically, agrees with my pessimism, but not with my optimism, especially as regards the future use of technology. Today we will explore whether I should amend my beliefs, through the prism of Greer’s Dark Age America.

This book outlines what Greer expects to happen in the next five hundred years, in the lands that are now America. Most of his focus is the next one hundred years, and relates to collapse—after that, he sketches the expected future only in broad outline. Greer, whose fiction future history Retrotopia I discussed last year, has for years written prolifically on civilizational failure and related topics. Apparently this 2016 book is mostly stitched-together posts from Greer’s former blog, The Archdruid Report, where he blogged until 2017 (he now blogs at Ecosophia, which you will note combines the prefix for ecology with the Greek word for wisdom), but the book hangs together well, and seems to give a good overview of Greer’s thought. If you check out his sites, you will get a flavor of Greer’s areas of interest, which are heavily environmentally tinged, somewhat occult (he presents himself as a druid), and always interesting.

The author’s reason for writing this book is to shake people out of their complacence, such that they take necessary actions now to alleviate their personal difficulties that are likely to arise in the immediate future. It is not to encourage broader political action to change our civilizational future; that future is set, and it’s downhill for us, on rocket skis. Greer is perfectly well aware that most people, even people reading his book, will ignore him, because it is human nature to not make hard choices and not to do hard work if either can be delayed. This tendency has been greatly exacerbated by the ideology of endless upward progress, a core part of modernity, which Greer traces to the Industrial Revolution, what he calls our ���age of extravagance.” And our collapse will have a single ultimate cause—“the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet.” (In some ways, this book echoes Theodore Kaczynski, who castigated “industrial society” and is sometimes ironically called “Uncle Ted” by catastrophists, though he is not mentioned here.)

But all civilizations collapse. The bigger they come, the harder they fall, and we have been so very, very big. If there is a muse to Greer’s book, it is Arnold Toynbee, mid-century historian of civilizational cycles, someone not fashionable today, but who only a few decades ago was regarded as one of the great thinkers of the world. Just as Justin Timberlake brought sexy back, Greer is bringing Toynbee back. Joseph Tainter, who more recently wrote how complexity collapsed societies, also gets considerable play, as do the less recent Romans. In general, Greer bases much of his analysis on history, without viewing the past as deterministic. His knowledge of history is one reason why Greer’s analyses are far superior to those of lesser men such as Scott Alexander and Curtis Yarvin, who occasionally find a nut, like a blind squirrel, but whose ideas about our future are hobbled by their appalling ignorance of history. True, I think some of Greer’s history is not entirely accurate (the French and Russian revolutions were not caused by the middle classes disposing of a ruling class they regarded as inessential, for example). And “The industrial plant was abandoned in an orgy of offshoring motivated by short-term profit-seeking” not in the “Reagan era,” but in the Clinton era. (The real Decade of Greed was the 1990s; we are just told it was the 1980s because the people who dictate our cultural tropes are all Left, and hated Reagan. What the 1980s were was the last decade of uncynical American hope.) But you cannot predict the future without knowing a great deal about the past, and overall Greer passes this test.

Greer’s core point is that our apparent prosperity, of our industrial society, is a mirage, built on a small portion of mankind burning through half a billion years of stored sunlight. When a society relies on nonrenewable resources, as those disappear, the society must retrench by dropping maintenance costs. It is inevitable, but doesn’t fix the problem; it’s a spiral all the way down until equilibrium can be reached, as both Toynbee and Tainter discussed, analyzing many past civilizations. Greer calls this process “catabolic collapse.” Energy failure will be both the immediate trigger for our downward spiral and the reason the equilibrium reached will be a very much lower energy state. Along the way, and contributing, we will face environmental unravelling, political unravelling, and economic unravelling. There is no possible fallback position short of total reset; any safety net that used to be provided by science, technology, or culture, has long since rotted away. Nuclear power is not the answer; “it never pays for itself,” and is extremely dangerous, both in normal conditions and even more so as things fall apart. Renewable energy is “long on enthusiasm and cooked numbers and short on meaningful assessment.” No magic is coming to save us.

It may seem that we have reserves of fossil fuels for quite a few more decades, but Greer says we will have to stop burning fossil fuels soon, when extracting them takes more energy than the energy gained by extracting them, which is no doubt true (though he never mentions that we still have a huge amount of relatively easy-to-extract coal, which seems to cut against his analysis). He also makes the subtler point that as energy becomes more expensive to extract, even if it can be done at a net gain, more and more of society’s resources become devoted to extraction, “leaving less and less for all other uses.” This alone means apogee is past and we are heading downward. Energy failure will fully expose the fakeness of our economy. Most of so-called GDP really consists of worthless financialization and other forms of intermediations, all made possible by cheap energy. Real GDP is declining, as energy costs rise and ignored externalities come home to roost. More and more, we have to use more energy to obtain resources from lower quality raw materials, tightening the screw.

What will the lower-energy future look like? It’ll have to deal with the aftereffects of our blowing through the Earth’s fossil fuels, notably global warming. Now, as I’ve said before, I’m sympathetic to the idea it’s a bad choice to pump billions of tons of industrial byproducts into that atmosphere. It seems it’s likely to have deleterious effects. On the other hand, I am now living in my third decade of falsified predictions with respect to global warming, and even a moron can see that a huge percentage of the focus on global warming is a grift, a way for worthless people to obtain money and power, and to achieve their ideological ends. But Greer, no moron, can see some of this, and not other parts of it. He complains about money corrupting those opposed to global warming alarmism, without seeing that thousands of times more money flows to those who push global warming alarmism. He acknowledges that science is entirely corrupt, but he seems to think science is wholly reliable in the case of global warming, despite all the reasons he adduces for corruption in science being found there to a greater degree than anywhere else.

In any case, it doesn’t really matter. Greer is nothing but a realist, and he doesn’t think we’re going to stop burning fossil fuels and adding to global warming. He’s not adding his voice to those calling for action. He no doubt hates Greta Thunberg, who we can all agree is an annoying little toad. Global warming will fix itself, because we are running out of energy, so we will stop causing global warming, whether we want to or not. Greer’s point is rather that eventually global warming will radically reshape the physical landscape of what was the United States (this book is about America, not Europe or some other place), and our descendants will have to deal with the resulting problems, because we won’t be able to use cheap energy to stave off the inevitable damage. We will therefore revert to large areas of North America being desert or grassland, unable to support any large populations. Most of the coasts will be flooded. Moreover, other areas will be poisoned by chemical and nuclear wastes, made unproductive by topsoil loss, and otherwise damaged, until hundreds or thousands of years later, they recover.

Sooner or later, the result of this decline will be a sparsely populated North America. Greer is fine with this, not because he’s anti-human (quite the contrary), but because, he says, the globe simply lacks the resources to support billions of people in the style they desire. He doesn’t press to limit population artificially; he merely points out it will be limited, like it or not, when the energy subsidy of fossil fuels disappears, and food production craters. (He explicitly endorses 1972’s The Limits to Growth as an accurate analysis.) We’ll get, and already are getting, a population bust. But, interestingly, he points out that massive population decline does not necessarily mean mountains of famine-caused corpses. If the annual death rate increases a mere one percent, and the birth rate doesn’t change, a population drops by ninety-five percent in three centuries—and if it’s a three percent increase, it’s one century. (I do note these numbers don’t seem entirely right. If the birth rate is high enough, relative to the death rate, it would seem population would keep growing.) This is depressing, but Greer manages to add some levity (this book is often funny), while pointing out that population drops will probably be more sudden than this smooth decline. “[P]opulation declines are rarely anything like so even as [this] thought experiment suggests. [The] other three horsemen, in particular, tend to get bored of their poker game at intervals and go riding out to give the guy with the scythe some help with the harvest.”

But the people who are alive won’t care that much. Greer appears to agree with James C. Scott that most people are often better off in a society that drops from a more complex to a less complex level. After all, “In terms of the distribution of labor, capital, and production, the latest offerings of today’s job market are indistinguishable from the arrangements of an ancient Egyptian landowner and the peasants who planted and harvested his fields.” Our elites (not just the government, but the entire complex of the professional-managerial elite) have created a self-perpetuating system that selects for stability and not rocking the boat; that type of system fares very poorly in crises. Our rotten ruling classes will, if history is any guide, not take any necessary action, and mostly die.

The downward slide will be further greased with political collapse, as it always is with failing civilizations. Greer, like me, sees that what is claimed to be a rock-solid system, with an “illusion of invincibility,” is in fact extremely fragile, which means not that it will collapse of its own weight, but will collapse when it faces the least real crisis. The elites are completely disconnected from the internal proletariat, in Toynbee’s term. “Once the crisis hits, the unraveling of the institutional structures of authority can happen with blinding speed, and the former ruling elite is rarely in a position to do anything about it.” As with all late-stage societies, sclerosis is the order of the day, and vast portions of our resources are “consumed by institutions that no longer have any real function beyond perpetuating their own existence and the salaries and prestige of their upper-level functionaries.” (While Greer doesn’t mention it, this is a manifestation of Peter Turchin’s analysis of elite over-production.) We will get disintermediation—which will destroy the ruling class, after it destroys the upper-middle layer of parasites. We may get it slow; we may get it fast. The skills now in demand in the elite will be shown to be worthless in the new world order. We will see new, more decentralized, political systems, all the way down to warlordism.

Which makes me think. I sometimes believe that I am fated to become a warlord myself, by which I do not mean some kind of predator, but rather the head of an armed patronage network. The key function of a warlord is the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest. The classic example is early medieval feudalism, although naturally there are many variations throughout history and different cultures. A warlord doesn’t need to be raiding his neighbors all the time (though that’s possible, for example, the Vikings); he just has to prevent his neighbors from successfully raiding him and his people, because that’s the number one rule of patronage—make sure those who recognize you as patron feel secure.

We should also remember that Road Warrior-type societies don’t exist, and never have, in the West at least. People will do almost anything to avoid anarchy. Thus, if society falls completely apart, it will rebuild itself immediately, though starting at the lowest level. This is where I come in. At this moment I preside over what amounts to a extended, quite sizeable, compound, which when complete I like to say, accurately, will be impervious to anything but direct organized military attack. Yet it requires a group of men to make it work; the fantasy that one family can garrison a large area, or any area, and be left alone, is just that. You have to sleep sometime, and as a friend of mine once, many years ago, stated my view on the world, “Bad people are everywhere, and they must be put down.” Thus, I need what I call “shooters”—say fifteen able-bodied, and adequately trained, men. Together, such a group can operate my compound, both defensively and administratively. And I have the personality, and skills, to lead such a group. I am nothing if not decisive, the core competency of a leader in any field, and I am adequately charismatic.

Once you take on such men, however, whether extended family or friends, you are responsible for them and their families. You are their patron. You are the source of authority, and you must deliver the goods. From there, in any societal collapse or fracture, there is only one way forward—taking responsibility for more people, because of the gravitational force exerted by any successful mini-society. Shrinking your patronage is probably fatal; it’s certainly dangerous. All the incentives are to build your patronage network. Moreover, trade of many types develops naturally, and a patron is incentivized to work with other patrons to benefit everyone involved, by encouraging and protecting beneficial trade, further expanding patronage. Of such ferment are warlords born—not just to protect their people, but to ensure they are fed, to administer justice, and to provide relaxation, entertainment, social intercourse, and all the benefits people crave, especially in uncertain times. A good warlord makes it so his people can sleep soundly at night. Someone has to do it, and I’m logically positioned, both materially and psychologically, to do it in my little area of the world.

This isn’t like the movies. I don’t think a warlord, in most cases, will have to spend a lot of time fighting. In most of America, in a total governmental collapse, organized predation isn’t nearly as likely as some think. As I like to point out, if you are a bad man who decides to live by predation, you may collect a hundred hard men and go around rolling up suburban homes, for the food and women. But in a place such as where I live, suburban Indiana, and in most of America, for every Pulte home you take down, you will probably lose five or ten men, because the amount of weapons held by the average citizen is considerable, and attacking fixed defenses is always a crapshoot. Even in a best case scenario for him, the leader of a predatory warband is going to have a short shelf life. And that’s ignoring that for some targets, such as my compound, and others you might not expect, you’ll lose a lot more men than ten percent—closer to a hundred percent, and then I will impale survivors out front as a warning to others.

Do I like this future for myself? Not really. I like relaxing, keeping my bees, and watching the sun rise and set in peace. I do not really want Christ, at my judgment, to opine on whether it was acceptable that I impaled bad men. But if social collapse happens, nobody is going to ask me if I like it; it will happen organically, because all other choices are worse. And if Greer is right, some variation on this is likely to be how I spend the later decades of my life. You can take to calling me Baron Haywood now, if you’d like.

Anyway, in the here and now, Greer says that science, and more broadly technology, isn’t going to save us. Even if there were scientific solutions, we are in the civilizational phase where rising costs and enormous parasitism mean declining returns to scientific inputs. I think we actually have negative returns, for the most part. I call this the Yas Kween Shaniqua problem—for example, it took us twenty years to make the James Webb space telescope, with far more expenditure of time and money that it should have taken, but we could never create such an instrument again, or anything like it, because the ideological demands to give both money and honors to those who contribute nothing, or rather who are enormously destructive of accomplishment, would mean it would never advance beyond the vague planning stages, but still absorb enormous resources.

“Science” continuously engages in overt falsifications . . . [Review completes as first comment.]

[Elan Garfias · Rating 5 out of 5]

My god this must be one of the best books I've ever come across. Inasmuch as it's possible to enjoy reading about "catabolic collapse," this book delivers, covering everything from demography to technology to food systems. While the title would definitely indicate a fair deal of fear-mongering, the tone of the book is even-handed, normalizing the recurring trend of dark ages and renaissances, with the caveat this our current era predicated on massive fossil fuel expenditure also gives us so much more distance to fall. The demographic and political implications of collapse are rather more obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of world history, but his treatment of how science and technology fare in a dark age is worth mentioning: diminishing returns from scientific investigation (he gives the example of the technology required in early quantum research vs the massive outlays required for particle accelerators) in turn receive less and less funding from state authorities, to the effect that applied sciences may be preserved to some extent while more theoretical sciences functionally cease to exist. In effect, when such exotic research comes to depend entirely on state largesse, it may survive for a time as a more philosophical or ideological mode. For this he uses the example of Alexandria: a retreating rational world rendered more and more the preserve of the elite until it was finally finished off my mobs as the Christian dark ages took hold. Also worth noting is the distinction between "technological suites" in and of themselves and those which go toward servicing other technologies. For example, a civilization may retain the technical capacity to make cars while slowly losing the ability to maintain roads, ensure a supply of parts, etc. The books coverage of the internet was also very eye-opening, and the irony was not lost that I downloaded the audiobook to a phone and uploaded a review on Goodreads. The author contends that while the internet may be faster, it doesn't fundamentally do anything new. (Gasp) Further, the array of hardware supporting it is fueled by debt and bubbles from companies that will never be profitable, and Greer posits that service will be scaled down to be more expensive for higher prices as happened with television. Chillingly, he points to examples of collapse already happening within the country as indicators the the future. Residents in Baltimore and Detroit get their water suspended for non-repayment. Routine and economically unsurprising, but why were they unable to pay, and how soon before others can't as well. The poorest among us always experience the effects of collapse first, though I suspect that in a digitized era it may be precisely that army of laborers, from tenant farmers to savvy favelados, that retain the hard skills necessary to survive as the laptop class blinks offline. Lastly, the book's note on culture proved surprisingly metaphysical, and I hope it gets more space in further books. Though it condemns screens on sensory grounds (I like Succession as much as anybody but it makes sense), books, and particularly novels, receive quite a plaudit as vehicles to return us to a sensory present, and ultimately as the most useful artifacts of civilizations past. Anyone using this site would be hard-pressed to refute that last point.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Michael Greer provides a condensed overview of the last few millennia of human history to show how civilizations in collapse follow similar trajectories as they fall. The book's prose is lucid and compelling, and refrains from outright fearmongering. Highly recommended.

[AudioBookReviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

My original Dark Age America audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

Dark Age American by John Michael Greer is a dark book to say the least. Very clearly and concisely he takes history and based on our present and projected future determines that we will collapse economically, politically, cultural, and ecologically thus slamming closed the door to fixing the situations through sustainability and action.

He has researched past cultures revealing the close mirroring of their fall to our own impending fall. He foresees the collapse of the industrial revolution citing numerous instances of our steady decline and inevitable fall. Knowing there is no avoiding the fall or collapse, he suggests we prepare for the unavoidable.

While Greer appears to be very knowledgeable and his facts are well supported, one would hope that humanity learns from the mistakes and from history. Greer does not believe this. It has happened before; it will happen again. Although the book is mostly doom and gloom, there is some hope. Resources will regrow, the climate will improve and we will recover if we make changes NOW.

Michael Dowd does an excellent job of reading the book. His voice is strong and clear, urging people to hear what Greer is saying. His passion about the situation is clear as he states early on his desire to see this book done in audiobook format and thus does it pro-bono. Although the subject matter is doom and gloom for the most part, Dowd’s voice is comforting.

Between Greer’s writing and Dowd’s narration, the book flows smoothly capturing the listener’s attention. At first one could almost say Greer is a doomsayer but his predictions are such that they are founded in fact and reality. After all, one only needs to listen to a small bit before it is evident that the fall is already occurring.

This is a wonderful book for those interested in saving the ecology, building the economy, and reclaiming the political and cultural future of this world. The book, for me, was not my favorite only because when I listen to books I want something light and cheery or so frightening that I cannot sleep at night… on second thought, I haven’t slept well since finishing this book …

There were no issues with the audio quality or production of this book.

Audiobook was provided for review by the publisher.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly realized scenario for the decline and fall of carbon-based industrial civilization, with a focus on how it will play out in North America. Relentlessly anti-nostalgic for our current energy-intensive way of life, Greer's attitude toward industrial civilization is that of an undertaker reflecting in sorrow rather than in anger on the wasted possibilities of a misspent life. Writing within a broadly Toynbean historiographical tradition, he wears lightly an erudition regarding the decline and fall of many anterior civilizational complexes, from the Romans, to the Maya, to the medieval Japanese. Where many readers are likely to part company with him is in his relentless dismissiveness toward the possibility of alternative energy sources coming to backfill carbon fuels at scale—a belief rooted by his Druidism and personal investment in post-carbon sustainable technologies. If there is a critique of this as a piece of scenario work, it is only concerning the rapidity with which he passes over the likelihood of mass violence, perhaps wishing to avoid the charge of indifference to what will surely be great inhumanity, and the extremely vexing consideration of what the likely demographic divisions will be for this violence.

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the analysis in Dark Age America to be somewhat shallow. There is little extrapolation from hard science to what we might expect for the future, and more general musings based on historic collapses. The fact that he even addresses climate skepticism is a good indication how far behind the science the book is. This would be forgivable in an earlier work, but this was published in 2016 as far as I can tell. There are many tangents which stray into religion and philosophy which I didn't find particularly well constructed or at least well edited. JMG makes mostly reasonable assumptions about the future, but there are some areas where he seems a bit out of his depth; particularly when discussing the internet and things like cell phones. Having read over 30 books in this field it's getting pretty hard to find new or interesting material, while that is not really Dark Age America's fault, it also didn't stand out as well constructed. I think he has some very valuable things to say about technology and catabolic collapse, but there's just too much bad in there mixed with the good for me to recommend this book.

[Morten Greve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable book! Greer takes his machete to all the favourite fantasies of the callous right as well as the hypocritical left. It's a blood bath. No consolation.

I thought I had penetrated these issues quite well already, but he has changed my perspective in countless ways.

His wry humour is a lovely bonus on top of what is otherwise, in many ways, the mother of all shit sandwiches... :-)

[Johnny Worthen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unsustainable system, cannot be sustained forever: the basic idea behind this book is unquestionably correct. Greer looks at the current state of Western Civilization, particularly North America and applies what history has shown us to expect from a falling civilization. From climate uncertainty to technological collapse to new economies and the inevitable social unrest, Greer puts it all down and gives the reader something to mull over and hopefully prepare for.

[Jan Bloxham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another easy 5-star book from Greer (along with Descent).

His birdseye view makes things clear as day, and I personally enjoy his prose. He avoids getting into the details, ut this just means there’s nothing to dispute. Collapse cometh; only the details remain.

Few people are ready to read this kimda stuff yet. If you think you are, read it.

[blaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads app crashed as I was writing my review. Here’s a short one: Toynbee’s cyclical model of history applied to the contemporary USA, plus peak oil. Very clear-minded and well-argued for such a dramatic title.

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Michael Greer repeats himself. Often in general, but sometimes verbatim. As a big fan, I´ve read half a dozen of his books before this one, and I recognized several passages in this book that were lifted word for word from one or another of them. This is my main criticism.

On the other hand, as always, he treats many new topics -- such as "The Suicide of Science", "The Twilight of Technology" (two chapter titles), the shifting racial and ethnic divisions in the US, the senility of the elite class in declining civilisations and the illusion of invincibility that prevents both them and everybody else from taking effective action to rescue themselves while they have the chance -- with penetrating insight, wry humour, and deft turns of phrase reminiscent of H.L. Mencken at his best, offering surprising historical comparisons to contemporary phenomenon and an overarching perspective steeped in the bird´s eye view of big-picture patterns first pioneered by the likes of Arnold Toynbee (whose ghost looms particularly large in this book0) and Oswald Spengler.

There is a particularly interesting examination of the internet as a historically specific economic phenomenon that offers insightful observations I have not seen raised anywhere before.

His basic argument is that the writing´s on the wall for US (and by extension, global industrial) civilisation, and the signs he points to are convincing. It strikes me that for many of even the most radically critical minds, such news is difficult to swallow because it contradicts their narratives which either a) find someone or something to blame that is standing in the way of changes that would otherwise make everything alright or b) optimistically point towards alternative (and to be frank, rather paltry) signs that this civilisation is in fact on the cusp of a voluntary "great turning" from the darkness of the dominant "old story" into the light of a brave new world -- in other words, a total revolution (violent or peaceful depending on the tastes of the individual) in human values and social relations -- is in the offing. Until recently, I myself subscribed to both narratives simultaneously. I owe Greer, among others such as William Catton, Walter Youngquist, William Ophuls, and John Perlman, a great debt for disabusing me of such misguided beliefs. Such comforting bed-time stories might help one sleep at night, but they are not helpful in any other way. A key sentence in the book, with which I will end my review, is this:

"History may be a source of moral lessons, but it’s not a moral phenomenon. A glance back over our past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause but by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power. No doubt most of us would rather live in a world that didn’t work that way, but here we are, and morality remains a matter of individual choices—yours and mine—in the face of a cosmos that’s sublimely unconcerned with our moral beliefs.

Thus we can take it for granted that just as the borders that currently divide North America were put there by force or the threat of force, the dissolution of those borders and their replacement with new lines of division will happen the same way. For that matter, it’s a safe bet that the social divisions, ethnic and otherwise, of the successor cultures that emerge in the aftermath of our downfall will be established and enforced by means no more just or fair than the ones that distribute wealth and privilege to the different social and ethnic strata in today’s North American nations. Again, it would be pleasant to live in a world where that isn’t true, but we don’t.

I apologize to any of my readers who are offended or upset by these points. In order to make any kind of sense of the way that civilizations fall—and more to the point, the way that ours is falling—it’s essential to get past the belief that history is under any obligation to hand out rewards for good behavior and punishments for the opposite, or for that matter, the other way around."

Amen and -- as the great poet Kenneth Patchen would say -- Halleluja anyway!

[Pacific Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The models that we have of the world will influence how we make decisions. It is important now more than ever to see things clearly as they are, even as the facts run counter to our values and expectations. The decline of industrial society is already underway, and with the recent pandemic the collapse only seems to be accelerating.

Dark Age America gives us the beginnings of a map that we can use to chart our course. Greer cuts through the noise, and systematically goes through the decline in many different facets of society: ecologic, demographic, political, economic, etc.

I found his clear descriptions of what might happen to be especially illuminating. For example, he points out that “most of North America from the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges east across the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains to the Great Plains and south through most of inland Mexico will be sun-scorched desert” (p.22). Sea-level rise along the coast of some 50 feet will render the port cities unusable, making the inland waterways more important for maritime trade (p.30). Toxic chemicals along heavily populated coastal regions will likely get left behind, and destroy huge swaths of the marine ecosystem (p.33).

Another interesting commentary was on how ethnic divisions will be redefined completely in ways we won’t recognize. Initially during the collapse, tensions between classes will rise to a boil, but eventually the war-bands that succeed will be led by charismatic leaders able to unite multiple diverse tribes (like Attila). Greer muses that “five centuries from now […] most people in the upper Mississippi valley will be of Brazilian ancestry, and that the inhabitants of the Hudson’s Bay region sing songs about their long-lost homes in drowned Florida […] Somebody may claim to be the President of the United States (though it may be pronounced Presden of Meriga by that time)” (p.56). This makes complete sense if you look at how the current Spanish are descendants of peoples from Poland, and how ethnicities in America even during the 20th century collapsed from dozens of categories to “white, black, hispanic, and asian.”

The great simplification ahead includes economics as well. Greer predicts that the market economy will largely disappear, along with many other forms of exchange that involve intermediaries and added complexity. People will return to bartering for goods and services, or producing it themselves in a household economy. His example of a feudal arrangement with the various roles and responsibilities of the lord and peasant was especially illuminating (p.111). Productive property like land will be among the few things that retain value, and there will be a general “replacement of temporary economic transactions with enduring personal relationships” (p.113).

What particularly touched me was his thoughts on how our descendants might view us. We who “gave them the barren soil and ravaged fisheries, the chaotic weather and rising oceans, the poisoned land, and water, the birth defects and cancers that embitter their lives […] I think we will be the orcs and Nazgul of their legends, the collective Satan of their mythology, the ancient race who ravaged the Earth and everything on it so [we] could enjoy lives of wretched excess at the future’s expense” (p.38). I think this contemplation really drove home the message for me.

If you have read Greer before, some of the territory will be familiar, such as the loss of faith in science and the diminishing returns in technology (see After Progress). But, I found a lot of the analysis to be new, and it was an extraordinarily rewarding read. Despite the topic of decline, I feel motivated to answer a question he asks towards the end: “in the wreck of industrial civilization, what are you willing to make an effort to accomplish, to defend, or to preserve?” (p.213). There is a lot of work to be done, and the storm is coming!

[William Yip · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author spoke in generalities which is acceptable since it's difficult to predict specific events. He was repetitive in the last couple of chapters. I would have liked statistics on his claims that involved numbers or trends. He was wrong about several trends: users on the internet are increasing instead of decreasing, malls and retailers are closing down because people are shopping online usually with Amazon instead of people not shopping at all, peasants had less leisure time and activities than humans do today even if they worked less hours than we do. I also disagree with his negative statements on fast food, some of it does taste relatively good.

That said, he made plenty of astute observations about modern day society and the cracks within it. Oppressed people do flee to better opportunities or at least to the least bad option when things get bad enough with the status quo such as at declining companies or Central America. There are core elite members and hierarchy in any social group: businesses, schools, any regular social activities. Nature provides many services for humans that would be hard to replicate ourselves even with technology such as pollination and mangroves. Racism and discrimination occur even during an era of abundance and which will worsen if a society deteriorates. Strong nations (i.e. the US) set up puppet leaders in weaker nations (i.e. Latin America) with drug cartels forming in the latter which cause trouble for the former when the former weakens. Negative externalities in industry make things much more expensive even if the financial statements say otherwise and contribute to pollution and climate change. As a society becomes more complex, excessive intermediation arises and makes transactions more tedious and expensive; for example, health care and advanced education. There has been a decline in Christianity in the west as the elite from a previous generation fades away or makes public missteps. Over time, political classes become more concerned about maintaining power than actually helping society: Donald Trump using the military and Christianity to bolster his image and Democrats and Republicans sniping at each other rather than making meaningful changes.

The author is right that numerous arrogant societies have risen and fallen throughout human existence and all the abundance in this era derives from the use of fossil fuels which are finite and non-renewable. Fracking has not added substantially to oil reserves and the activity causes a lot of environmental harm. Non-renewable resources are involved in creating and transporting solar panels and wind turbines. The situation doesn't look good and if the author is correct in his predictions, there will be a lot of suffering and misery awaiting not just us but also future generations. I did like his thoughts on books and how they can preserve knowledge; they offer hope for the future.

[Robert Christie · Rating 4 out of 5]

John MIchael Greer is a very interesting writer with an unusual take on the human condition at the end of the industrial era. His book, Dark Age America, predicts just that over the next few centuries -- a dark age in which "progress" has halted because of resource exhaustion, global warming with attendant climate chaos, and an inevitable shrinkage of the human population follows as human groups try to reorganize themselves to face a non-industrial reality in a biosphere we have nearly ruined.

And, that's not all, folks. Greer's ascerbic wit carried this reader through some pretty dark predictions. His stark historical realism takes no prisoners among the delusional believers in the inevitability of progress through technology and economic growth. Greer argues that after several decades of unheeded warnings, we have now missed our opportunity to deindustrialize our society softly before it collapses of its own weight. The present course of industrial-consumer society is just not sustainable, even without the crises that are converging with climate destabilization, each amplifying the others. It is leading directly to the collapse of our civilization, along with ecosystems, species, and stable climate.

Greer argues that we will follow the same path that numerous examples of great civilizations have gone down in history, each leading to a dark age before gradually new forms of adaptation, innovation, and technology begin to build a new civilization much different from what went before.

Greer's grasp of history stands above many writers who take this position or that regarding the future of America. He takes the broad view of history, that is in terms of hundreds and thousands of years.

I can't say I agree with Greer on everything, particularly his insistance that deindustrialization will closely follow past scenarios. Too many factors are unknown. One of his strong beliefs is that we must/will revert to old human-scale low-energy-input (human and animal labor) technologies in order to muddle through in a post fossil-fuel era. I suspect that there is more to it than that. Despite my agreement that most people, elites and workers and unemploiyed alike, hold to naive faith in the inevitability of progress through technological innovation and industrial production of ever new ever more complex and better products (which he and I agree are often not better for their complexity), I suspect that we have a significant chance to adapt more recent scientific knowedge to make older more appropriate technologies even better than the originals.

In any case, Dark Age America is sure to provide much food for thought among those willing to think what is deemed unthinkable in the industrial-consumer culture. The high energy ride is just about over and we are going to have to come up with avery different ways of living than simply buying more stuff.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hauntingly prescient...

Given that we have already missed many of the climate and resources use tipping points, this book examines the fallacies of the late-capitalist extractive economy and how it reflects very similar circumstances that prefaced the fall of past empires and subsequent dark age periods of regression that follow.

The book does not try to conjure the particulars of collapse, but instead examines the historical consequences of similar over-exploitation of resources. Choosing to focus instead on the structural roots and societal consequences of a future collapse on the (everything) we interact with as givens in the present, post-peak milieu.

While I appreciate the author's position is a marginal one, generally ignored for sanity's sake by the masses, it does logically and methodically reference historical collapses to identify how the modern boom/bust era of dwindling resources will end no differently with time. This book is very much like a forward-looking version of Jared Diamond's Collapse, likewise well-researched and alarming.

I'll put it this way, this is the first book since History of Seven Killings, I think is interesting enough and immediately relevant enough to give to friends and family for reflection...even though, most people I know want to look the other way and ignore this reality.

[Nick John · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an excellent and entertaining read this was. I love the authors writing style but most importantly the research and overall narrative put forth in the book was both eye opening and educating to say the least. As a Third Positionist whenever I get into Deep Ecology books such as this I always go into it with a grain of salt simply because I don't really agree with any solutions that involved simple individualism and "regression". I believe in collective solutions and using political power to see those solutions through.

That being said some of the best philosophers around today come from these circles and John Michael Greer is a heavy hitter to be sure. The concepts discussed in this book are very mind opening to issues I didn't even fully consider. His views on culture, technology and science in the post industrial revolution are super in point aswell.

I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to have a well balanced understanding of what honest climate change discussion is really about aswell as what else is causing the west to experience a slow but disastrous collapse.

[Catana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that an early chapter dealt with climate change, there was no discussion of the actual effects on humans of future changes. Greer insists, at the end, that there will be a renaissance, just as has happened in the past. But no previous civilization had to deal with seriously depleted and unavailable resources, or the effects of pollution and the demise of whole species of living things that are a necessary part of the world's web of life. The book came out in 2017, so all that was very prominent in the news and public discussion. I still consider it a thought-provoking read.

[Radoje · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear, cogent, and frighteningly plausible account of where industrial civilization is heading. Whether you agree with him or not, John Michael Greer presents and analysis of history and current events that is thoughtful and worth listening to.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book - John Michael Greer is one of the most original and independent thinkers writing about collapse; he can be overly pessimistic and alarmist at times, but we need the antidote to the mainstream mouthpieces who are still claiming that the current economic system can continue indefinitely.

[Avery]

This book mostly recycles Archdruid Report posts from 2015. I am a big fan of the blog and enjoyed reading the posts the first time around, but I was surprised to pay $13 to read them again.

[Logan Streondj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this is one of best overviews of the period we are starting to go through and its reasons.

[TCM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook read by Michael Dowd. The audiobook is well formatted for the information presented in the text and Michael Dowd does a good job reading the text. I felt the information was well organized and, it appears, well researched. It's definitely a book I plan to read again, expecting to learn and understand more the second time. The book's content focuses primarily on how we got where we are and where things will ultimately end up. If you're looking to answer the question, "How do I deal with collapse right now as it's in my community/backyard?" this might not be the first book on the list. That said, I think it's more than a satisfactory introduction to climate change and collapse.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

A map on what the next ~500 years might look like in the land that is now the United States. I think Greer is little too pessimistic on solar PV (Tom Murphy who actually runs a home PV system seems to think that it's the best future energy source we have for electricity), but I really appreciated the perspectives he offered in this book about scientism (tying of science to social beliefs that are destructive/may not last), the role of technology in the future and the best way to prep (lowering energy requirements, cultivating useful skills).

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like anything written on Sept 10, 2001, Dark Age America, written in 2016, before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, feels strangely dated. But, at the same time it feels dated, it also reads prophetic.

Greer, no doubt, is a doomsdayer and a little weird, but he's not dumb. Intelligent folks shouldn't scoff.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

JMG has taught me that I need to learn how to farm ASAP.

Seriously though, a must read for anyone who sees our current system of consumption as entirely unsustainable. The last chapter really tied it all together. Those who may disagree with JMG's predictions will still benefit from his historical analysis of civilizational rise and fall.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

JM Greer is a fantastic writer, thinker, and explainer. Love everything of his I've read - not because I love the coming (spoiler alert) collapse, but because it helps to make sense of it all. This one is his most specific book to date about what is in store in America in particular (at least of those of his I've read).