The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World

by John Michael Greer

How to survive and thrive in the post-industrial age In response to the coming impact of peak oil, John Michael Greer helps us envision the transition from an industrial society to a sustainable ecotechnic world-not returning to the past, but creating a society that supports relatively advanced technology on a sustainable resource base. Fusing human ecology and history, this book challenges assumptions held by mainstream and alternative thinkers about the evolution of human societies. Human societies, like ecosystems, evolve in complex and unpredictable ways, making it futile to try to impose rigid ideological forms on the patterns of evolutionary change. Instead, social change must explore many pathways over which we have no control. The troubling and exhilarating prospect of an open-ended future, he proposes, requires dissensus-a deliberate acceptance of radical diversity that widens the range of potential approaches to infinity.  Written in three parts, the book places the present crisis of the industrial world in its historical and ecological context in part one; part two explores the toolkit for Ecotechnic Age, and part three opens a door to the complexity of future visions. For anyone concerned about peak oil and the future of the industrial society, this book provides a solid analysis of how we got to where we are, and a practical toolkit to prepare for the future.

Genres: Nonfiction, Ecology, Philosophy, Science, Sustainability, History, Peak Oil

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2009

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

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hard book for me to review, so I'm going to put it off for awhile. The book is just full of ideas, many of them very unusual, that do force you to consider things from new perspectives.

I'm not talking here about the general idea of peak oil, which is the assumed basis for what Greer is "prophesying" here. I am convinced that we are heading into a post-peak world, and not because of anything Greer says in this book. (He doesn't argue much for the reality of peak oil, it is assumed - the subtitle of the book is Envisioning a Post-Peak World.)

And I am starting to get trapped into writing the essay on this book that I feel I need to, but NOT NOW! (As he slaps his wrist)

So, just a couple facts about John Michael Greer, then I leave this review for now. He blogs at thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/. This is primarily a blog on peak oil and what Greer believes it will mean to our civilization; but Archdruid? What's that about? Well, Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. You can look up the details on Wiki (and the blog site). Thus we have here a very unusual person, compared to the boring rest of us.

I should emphasize that whatever characteristics you might imagine a Grand Archdruid to have, they do not reveal themselves much in what he says in this book. Greer has written many books on things like natural magic, etc., topics which are related to the Druid tradition. But this book isn't one of them, nor is another previous book that he wrote on this topic, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age.

Enough!



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[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

If industrial society turns out to have been little more than finding the fastest way possible to turn raw materials into pollution, the status quo won't be maintained for much longer. We're running out of those raw materials at a rapid pace and the outputs threaten to bring everything down with just as much certainty. We see the possibility of business as usual slipping further and further away as the world falls deeper into a recession which shows no end in sight. In The Ecotechnic Future, John Michael Greer argues that the reason our globalized civilization faces this catastrophe is because our definition of technology is wholly misguided and counters with a realistic vision of the future.

Since the science fiction writers of the early 19th century, our dreams of advanced technology have been synonymous with "extravagant energy use". It is this redefinition of what the future and what future technology will look like that is the scope of Greer's most recent book. Our modern industrial society may be a primitive and vastly inefficient form of the coming ecotechnic society which maximizes the efficiency of its energy resources and obtains raw material inputs sustainably. Of course, at the cost of a more restricted access to goods and services when compared to the globalized supply chains of today.

It seems that Greer is the first to apply the ecological concept of succession to explain the rise and fall of societies. Perhaps our current civilization is just the fast-growing opportunist colonizers of the Earth which will then be replaced by a stable climax community. This is a powerful insight, one that views our many mistakes in the supply chain infrastructure not as immoral (as many environmental groups would have you think) but failed attempts at obtaining a future ecotechnic society. Greer's analogy breaks down to an extent because modern ecology tends to think climax communities are unattainable because the low probability of obtaining an equilibrium community is hampered, ironically because of climate change. Our species was once a climax community but was driven out of the African canopies as the continent slowly dried.

Greer offers an alternative to the current technological program of modernity which reaches a possible end state in a technological singularity, the development of a true artificial intelligence which imprints our minds on immortal silicon and blasts into space to colonize the universe. The absurdity of this vision is quickly revealed by examining the logic of authors and visionaries pushing this ideal, they've completely failed to consider energy inputs and the failure of past civilizations. Once we understand the limits placed on us by our rapid consumption of the very resources driving our goals, we realize that industrial society has been largely a "crackpot realist's" approach to the world, using rational means to reach irrational goals. Our view of nature is that of a helpless adorable bunny which we can easily transcend or a frontier for conquest on which to impose our will. Greer understands that nature is neither, he likens it to a bear which when roused can easily tear us to shreds. If technology saves us from this possibility, it will do so without historical precedence. Human innovation will clearly play a role, Greer quotes Koestler in that, "creativity arises from the collision of incommensurate realities" But to assume that human innovation will allow business as usual to continue is to cement the outcome of repeating the past all while thinking we're original.

I didn't expect Greer to provide the clearest description of science that I've yet to read, especially since he is a practicing druid. But it is hard to argue with the difference between Science as a product and science as a process. Everyone agrees on the power of the scientific method, unfortunately we're too infatuated with the products of current Science which have developed over a limited period of history and are subject to the same problems of energy scarcity as our economics and psychology. Science as a profession is also at risk, with its trained personnel and infrastructure. The scientific method will hopefully always be with us, it just won't be used in the ways of the present.

The Ecotechnic Future is refreshingly not a book which will neatly lay out the reasons for the possible demise of industrial civilization, this has been done many times before, and by Greer himself in The Long Descent. All that is dealt with in about 18 pages and covers everything from the likelihood of culture death (what we call the United States is disparate regions tied together by cheap fuel for travel and mass media) to the implications of the depopulation explosion (that the "world is round" and solutions to being human will take many different forms). Within this section is his most eloquent passage however, tying the faux culture designed by marketing experts and sold over mass media distribution in its supplanting of regional US cultures and its ability to demonstrate that that people can be bribed by propserity and convinced by advertising into doing the same thing.

While many seem to think that an end to the globalized economy will come in an Armaggedon-esque collapse scenario replete with hordes of the angry urban poor looting the countryside while heroic loners that foresaw the crash pump them full of ammo to defend their homestead, Greer is convincing that empires and societies do not collapse overnight, and in ways that aren't likely to grace plot-lines of blockbuster films. Our pre-disposition to biblical scale catastrophe pushes us towards the extreme. That the French Revolution appeared to occur so rapidly is mainly because our study of history focuses on key moments. Greer mentions that a teenager on the day of the Etats-General in 1788 would have been a grandmother after Waterloo in 1815. Put simply, we'll still have lives even if industrial society is unraveling, they'll just be different lives than we've expected. The failure to obtain a 9 to 5 job and a suburban mansion is not necessarily such a bad thing. None of the possible futures are unknown in human history, it is only the current members of our species that have been protected due to the shelter provided by inexpensive oil extraction. Although, I do take some exception with Greer's idea that were a sudden depopulation to occur, our skills and knowledge would be applicable to the future. Some of the training that prepares us for industrial jobs is completely useless in a post-carbon world. Although Greer must understand this, he just omits it from his illustration of what our transition will look like.

Greer provides the first coherent view I've read of a post-industrial future. Regardless of your thoughts on what the future may hold, John Michael Greer's The Ecotechnic Future will challenge you. He steps on everyone's toes eventually, and that's what makes his writing so valuable, but far from comfortable. This is the first book written by a member of the peak oil community that I would recommend to someone unfamiliar with its concepts, mainly because Greer is so convincing and eloquent but also because his vision is so well reasoned. The Ecotechnic Future leaves me optimistic about our future as a species, even if it will be a vastly different future than we all thought it would be.

[Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Say this for Greer: he makes you think. This is the first time I've come across the idea of applying the ecological theory of succession, including the concepts of R-adaptation and K-adaptation, to human societies... and yet it clearly works and leads to many further insights. And this is just one of many, many intriguing ideas in this book. Greer has thought long and deep about the implications of a post-fossil-fuel world and if that's a subject that interests you (and it should!) then you should read this book.

That being said, I think that there are a few logical holes in his arguments, and I'll discuss one of the largest of these because it opens up possibilities that could dramatically shorten our way to the ecotechnic future.

Greer argues that transitioning to an industrial society based on renewable energy is impossible given where we are on the oil depletion curve. To justify this he argues that cheap oil is required to economically make anything else (such as solar panels), and that any other energy source would need massive investment either in new machinery to use the new fuel, or in a distribution system for the new fuel, or both -- and he eviscerates the hydrogen strawman to prove his point.

But there is one energy source that does not suffer significantly from these drawbacks: electricity generated from renewables (in particular CSP -- concentrated solar power). CSP modules are primarily made of glass, a little steel and copper, and a tiny amount of semiconductor. Glass is not a problem -- we aren't going to run out of sand anytime soon -- and the amounts required of the other elements are trivial compared to current production and reserves. And the power required to melt the sand and drive the machines making the modules can come from electricity generated by CSP plants.

The investments required for a beefed up and smarter grid to distribute CSP-generated electricity are (relatively speaking) quite manageable. Much existing machinery already works with electricity... and as for cars and trucks, Greer himself in this book waxes lyrical over how easy it will be for a legion of retrofitters to turn their petroleum powered vehicles into electric ones.

This is an important logical weakness, since if it is possible to get a significant renewable electrical generation capacity up and running before everything breaks down then we have a much better chance of saving significant parts of our current technological infrastructure and making the transition to a sustainable future in decades rather than centuries. Not without a lot of suffering and disruption, but much less than Greer foresees.

Anyway, even when Greer is wrong, he's interesting... and, who knows, he might be right after all.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much better on description of the problem than prescription of solutions. Woo-woo stuff aside, Greer is right that in the face of the onrushing catastrophe, rather than worry like crazy, or frantically scramble for some technology that can save us, it is better to face the future with sober resignation, and prepare for the long dark night of the forever future. Anything else is, as he says, crackpot realism, or simple ignorance.

Other acute observations

* Since the very beginnings of the genre, "advanced technology" and "extravagant energy use" have been virtual synonyms.
* Mass migrations will be an all but inevitable result of the decline of fossil-fueled civilization
* "Evolution is a process of adjustment to circumstances, not a ticket to Utopia." (62)
* "What counts as a criminal enterprise today will likely be a growth enterprise in the deindustrial future" (73)
* It's always part of the narrative of apocalypse (and the fantasy of escape to other planets) that the die-off only happens to other people.
* Crises do not lead to total loss of heritage. Rather, they represent bottlenecks through which only a part of society's culture and knowledge can pass. (89)
* Adaptive responses to crisis have four features: scalable, resilient, modular, open
* Meaningful planning can only take place when the outlines of the solution are already known. Conversely, problems for which there is (socially agreed upon) outline of a solution cannot be planned for (we call these problems "wicked").
* Salvage trade will be one of the great industries of the post-industrial age
* Deep history is at bottom an ecological process, and cannot be understood from a purely anthropocentric perspective.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always with this author, this book was very informative and enlightening. I'll eventually read everything he's written.

[Dimitris Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read two of Mr. Greer's books,
The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World . This review is for both of them, as they made me feel and think more or less the same things. For your information, both share the same ideological and theoretical ideas, but they were different in some aspects: The Long Descent's explanation of what the myth of progress is and how and why it came about I enjoyed more, while it was the practical information, tips, guidelines, the rough sketches of the direction humanity should/will be taking in the next few decades or centuries and the different aspects and challenges of life in the future that I thought were exceptionally valuable in The Ecotechnic Future.

Some have expressed the problems of The Long Descent as in this review, especially related to the more practical aspects of recycling old technology. If you disregard these problems, or are willing to accept them for what they are or look into them for alternatives, these are tremendous books that serve as manuals on theoretical, philosophical and practical levels on how to perceive what's imperceptible for most people in the present, prepare for the future and predict what it might look like and understand history in a different way which would raise plenty of eyebrows.

Nevertheless, Greer's argument is incredibly solid. He presents the myth/religion of progress, the inevitability and unavoidable reality of the long peak-oik collapse and the fact that any suggested workaround that comes from the same "myth of progress" mental space as void of meaning and practicality, so convincingly, so eloquently, so overwhelmingly... I have few words left to express without exaggeration my level of admiration and approval I can show to this man.

He may be a druid (just adding it here because for some people it's a minus, for me it's a plus), he may have chosen to live without a cell phone or never tried playing video games, he may be "anti-science" or "anti-progress" (silly words coming from people who don't but superficially grasp the meaning of these concepts), but few times have a I read the work of a man more in line with what I understand the true scientific spirit to be and only rarely do I come across the writings of a person who's done his or her homework so deeply on what he or she's purportedly against.

I'm serious. This is a challenge for you, if you're up to it: persuade me that the points raised by these books and Greer's work are moot. I can tell you from now that if you try you won't be able to and will most likely resort to some variation of the typical "it will sort itself out/they will figure something out" or "it's the next generation's problem", that are the popular ways of handling the prospect of the decline of industrial civilization today.

Mr. Greer's work is not for everyone, but in my view it should be: almost every person living today, especially if their age marks them as young, would benefit from experiencing looking at industrial society and civilization through the prism future generations, who will live by scavenging iron off skyscrapers, to give one particularly memorable prediction off these books, will judge us by. It's quite a revealing, shocking but also strangely rewarding experience.

The matters laid out by The Ecotechnic Future and The Long Descent form a significant part of what has been bothering me lately and will most likely influence my future decisions. For that I'm grateful. Not happy, at least not yet, how can one be happy when he or she has realised the profundity of his or her own uselessness, but grateful nevertheless.

[Pacific Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greer distinguishes this book from his previous works in the intro:

“It is one thing to recognize that today’s industrial world is headed towards that difficult destiny. It is quite another to grasp what such a future implies, and to glimpse what the world will be like in the wake of our civilization’s fall” (p. xiii).

This is more in line with Dark Age America, but I found them to rarely overlap.

He analyzes our societal trajectory using an ecological perspective. In comparisons with ecologic “succession,” he explains how the reckless R-selected industrial civilizations will give way to K-selected ones that maximize sustainability (p.23). The “climax community toward which the sucecssional process of modern history is heading may be something that has never before existed on this planet” (p.25), something he calls the “ecotechnic society” (p.31).

Our current civilization is first in a long-line of unique “technic” societies. The current industrial system is a primitive R-selected one on its way to the climax, K-selected ecotechnic society. Such a world would get its “nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.” This is what a truly advanced civilization may look like to Greer, contrary to the modern techno-utopian conception.

It is impossible to jump straight to an ecotechnic society as the advantages of other systems will out-compete them in the short-run. We will most likely move through “seral stages” like in ecologic succession, the previous stage making the conditions for the next stage possible: first embracing “scarcity industrialism”, then “salvage societies”, before reaching the ecotechnic stage (p.35). Greer points out that “the transition must be made one hurdle at a time, adapting to changes as they happen.” This is why “lifeboat ecovillages” today that try to mimic subsistence farming will fail… they don’t make any economic sense for the near-term (p.182). In fact, looking farther into a future with increasing rural brigandry, new forms of urbanism may be much more feasible.

The basic guidelines Greer gives for adapting were very interesting. Solutions have to be scalable, resilient, modular, and open to different ways of thought. A good example he gives of this is composing. The section on the future home being designed not just for maximizing energy efficiency, but also having the right space for a home-economy was enlightening as well (p.138). Larger kitchens, good lighting, solar greenhouse, outdoor storage tools, etc. I enjoyed the “deindustrial want ads” portion about his predictions on future jobs, such as salvage trades which don’t exist yet (p.148). His discussion of the need for cultural conservers was also inspirational (p.202). Greer also suggests here, like in After Progress, that religious devotion will once again become the main mechanism of cultural conservation and transmission through the coming dark ages.

Overall, the book was very unique in its insights, and will likely influence my decision-making going forward. I highly recommend this book! Another stellar contribution by Greer.

[KMO · Rating 4 out of 5]

In all honesty, the books that John Michael Greer draws from his weekly blog posts on the Archdruid Report run together in my memory. This is the middle book in a sequence of three (The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, and The Wealth of Nature) which are not officially a series but which bring together in book form the themes that JMG has been developing in his blog over the last few years.

I really don't mind in the least when I'm reading along in one of his books and I suddenly realize that I'm reading something that I'd read on his blog a year or so back. He is a very good writer and his treatments of the topics of ecology, collapse, and appropriate technology are well worth re-visiting after an interval of a year or so. When I receive a new JMG book, it typically rises to the top of my reading list and frequently even muscles aside whatever book I had been reading when his new offering turned up in my mailbox.

[Misty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that can change your perspective. I love technology, think the internet is the best innovation that has ever happened in my lifetime, and as a life-long fan of science and science fiction have, like most of my ilk, been waiting for the space-faring uber tech future we've been expecting ever since Jules Verne.

Oops.

Whether Greer is correct that there is no other energy source that is sufficiently concentrated to replace petroleum in our industrial civilization is certainly debatable, but he makes a good case. This book relentlessly points out our joint psychological and political shortcomings when it comes to planning for the future of our species, but does so thoughtfully, avoiding the "doom is at our door" style that makes most ecological screeds so depressing.

If you care at all about the future of our technological-industrial culture, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The "deindustrial dark ages" to come

The underlying assumption of this book is that fossil fuels cannot be effectively replaced, neither cost-effectively nor in the gross amount of available energy. And once the fossil fuels are gone, they are gone forever, meaning that industrial civilization as we know it will collapse--or more to be hoped, industrial society will experience a slow decline into what Greer calls "The Ecotechnic Future." Along the way there will be "scarcity industrialism" and a "salvage society." Some bad times will be had by almost everybody, and for some it will be horrific.

The idea that renewable energy sources won't measure up to what we are wantonly consuming today is not new, but it is sobering. (And we do need to sober up.) Robert U. Ayres and Edward H. Ayres make a more modest point in their book, Crossing the Energy Divide: Moving from Fossil Fuel Dependence to a Clean-Energy Future (2010). They argue persuasively that regardless of how much money the government and private enterprise put into the development of green alternatives, those sources of energy will not be developed fast enough. Their prescription is more efficient use of fossils fuels until the green revolution catches up.

Greer doesn't see any catching up. He writes that the world's annual energy consumption equals about one-fourth of the total solar energy absorbed by green plants annually with 86% of that coming from fossil fuels. (p. 247) Instead of energy conservation helping us to a sustainable future, he sees four "sweeping impacts on human life" to come. They are

(1) Depopulation. Quite simply, "the population bubble of the last few centuries is just as much a product of the exploitation of fossil fuels as the industrial age itself." And without fossil fuels to help grow and cheaply move food around the globe, "food surpluses that support toady's population levels will be impossible to maintain." (p. 39)

(2) Migration. People will move as they have done in the past from areas of relative poverty to areas of relative wealth, and the "wealth" will mainly be in food stuffs. Much of the world is already experiencing these migrations, Latin Americans into the US for example, Muslims into Europe; but in the future the migration directions may change and people from further away may land on more distant shores.

(3) Political and cultural disintegration. Greer does not dwell or make vividly scary what this can mean--but it would not be surprising to see that when things get scarce those with power will use that power to get what they want by any means necessary.

(4) Ecological change. Greer speaks of ecology a lot in this book, comparing the rise and fall of civilizations with the successions of natural ecologies from grasslands to climax forests.

What I think is most sobering (an apt usage worth repeating since we have been guzzling oil and are addicted to it) is Greer's point that "by the time actual shortages began, all existing resources would already be committed to meet existing needs." (p. 13) One of the consequences of this is that the transformation of our economies from fossil-based energy to renewal-based energy will be impossible to implement because the energy required for the transformation will be unavailable. It takes oil energy to build a nuclear power plant for example, and oil energy to build wind turbines and transport them.

Greer laments: "the fossil fuels that might have powered the transition to a sustainable future were wasted on a quarter century of extravagant living." (p. 13)

Some bon mots and sharp insights:

"…[G]overnment and business leaders in the world's industrial nations, which have even more to lose from the twilight of cheap abundant energy than their poorer neighbors, are still treating the twilight of the age of oil as a public relations problem." (p. 19)

"As it exists today, industrial society can best be described as a scheme for turning resources into pollution as fast as possible." (p. 28)

"…[F]rom the tumbrils of the French Revolution to the killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, it has always been those radical movements that promised heaven on earth that yield the closest approximation to hell." (p. 187)

"It's vanishingly rare for a society to collapse at the peak of its wealth and power, for the simple reason that wealth and power are two of the most effective means of staving off collapse." (p. 192) This suggests that the US is not yet in its dotage--although things might get a little rough for our grandchildren.

Central to Greer's argument is the idea that we will pass through successions such as a landscape passes from R-stage invasive plants like weeds to shrubs and bushes to K-stage plants like oaks and pines in ecological sequence, which typically ends in what ecologists call a climax forest. Greer emphasizes that "succession moves toward stability, not toward Utopia." (p. 240)

He sees history (and I would say that Greer is primarily a historian working here as a futurist) as an ecological phenomenon with "processes that appear across the range of ecosystems in the nonhuman world." The equivalents that in sees in history are (1) a rhythm in the rise and fall of civilizations; (2) the succession mentioned above "ending in the social equivalent of a climax community that remains stable until changes in the environment disrupt it; and (3) cultural evolution. (pp. 241-242)

As much as I admire Greer's erudition and insight I think the main strength of this book is in Greer's eminently readable prose. As Yogi Berra might have said, "prophecy is hard, especially about the future"; but Greer 's vision is one that I think is well worth paying attention to.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[Dawne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One of the great gifts of crisis is that it points out what is essential and what is not."

It took me forever to read this book, but it was well worth it. It is dense and rich in every way, and I found that I really needed to live with it a little at a time both because it offers so much to chew on and because at times it kept me awake at night. That is due to my own personal place in the world, though, and while it will no doubt shake everyone who reads it up at some point or other, that is neither a good nor wise reason to pass on it. If you ever have a chance to hear the author speak, don't pass on that either. he gives the old-fashioned kind of talk that can cause an audience to jump to its feet at the end and applaud the sheer beauty of his argument.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best book I've read on the subject since Sharon Astyk. "Work" chapter was especially useful.

[Erick Njenga · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great logical and factual explanation of the state of affairs currently, the not so cozy future and the steps that can be taken to 'cushion' the fall.

[Egle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unexpectedly excellent!

If you looked at the author's bio and some of his other titles, you would have a reason to believe this would be bat shit crazy. I entertained a similar thought, but decided I might at least get some entertainment value from this. Boy, was I wrong!

My error was not about the entertainment - the author definitely has a way with words that made me chuckle time and time again. I loved how me described Hegel as someone "who managed the rare feat of becoming both the most influential and the most unreadable philosopher of the modern times". I was, however, wrong about the intellectual rigour and the strength of arguments.

I greatly enjoyed the author's analysis of our civilisation's obsession with progress and technology and the accompanying disregard for nature and its finite resources. Interestingly, he made a number of similar observations to other titles I have read, such as The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. Greer makes a very convincing argument about how a lot of people have conflated progress and evolution and have come to believe that the way we organise our society right now is more advanced than the way people organised themselves in the past. As if the way the society is organised right now is a fair price to pay for avoiding the imagined squalor of pre-industrial past.

The author examines humanity's self-centred belief we freed ourselves from the dependence on nature through technology. Sadly, it will all come crashing down once the oil runs out. Or rather we'll have a long hard slog to oil-free future, as it gets rationed for many years to come. It is highly unlikely we'll see a sudden collapse, the idea of which is a product of our inability to reckon with the long term consequences of our actions.

You would be forgiven for thinking the author would suggest we all build eco-communes as a response to the decline. On the contrary, he proposes that the best place to be will be small or medium sized cities. The lack of prescriptiveness was also a pleasant surprise. He seems to be a proponent of dissensus - a deliberate avoidance of consensus as a way of maximising the possibility on someone stumbling upon an answer that works.

It is worth mentioning that even though the book focuses on the decline of industrialism and a shortage of resources, it doesn't shy away from talking about social justice aspects of the whole endeavour. It is, however, not the focus of the book. The author does write from the Western/USA perspective, but majority of his arguments encompass most of the world.

All in all, a great book that gave me a lot of food for thought, expanded my To Read list (oh no!), and inspired me in unexpected ways. Thoroughly recommend!

[Dameon Launert · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Michael Greer is one of my favorite authors on the topic of collapse. This book is best read in succession after reading The Long Descent.

Here he explains patterns of history in an ecological perspective. For instamce, according to the author, cultures go through succession from R-selected to K-selected, seres he sees, largely because of peak oil, leading to scarcity industrialism, salvage society, and finally ecotechnic.

Another example is how history spans cycles of birth, death, and rebirth evaluated within each society's own contexts rather than a linear trajectory with objective purpose and meaning. He also explains how many paths--dissensus--individuals, species, and cultures explore as they seek to expand niches and adaptively.

I will definitely re-read this and his other books on the topic over again. I have only two slight criticisms regarding The Ecotechnic Future.

First, he spent a few pages bashing ecovillages somewhat unfairly. Most, in my opinion, are integrated with the wider community and serve as innovation incubators, demonstration sites, and teaching through lived experience. This contrasts with his claim that they are merely lifeboats attempting to survive through collapse. They also clearly do not cost the billions of dollars he estimated, as there are many affordable projects in existence. See Foundation for Intentional Communities and Global Ecovillage Network.

My second criticism regards his handling of the topic of science. His analyses and criticisms were all sound, but he seems to be subtly proposing NOMA (nonoverlapping magisteria) or something like that. I accept that there are many mysteries yet to be discovered and that science as an institution has many flaws. Two such flaws are ideological capture by corporate and military funding interests and the mechanistic, reductionist Cartesian model that values machines and power over life and wisdom. But I don't see any value in faith as a means of acquiring knowledge, or insofar as it might be useful, the harms greatly outweigh the benefits. John Michael Greer also writes about druidism and the occult. I haven't read any of these works yet, but I suspect I might disagree with him more there.

[Josh Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compounding and expanding on ideas proposed in The Long Descent, I appreciated Greer's ecological and evolutionary lens applied to history and "future history", and his critique that the technological and social progress we all consider to be inexorable and right can neither be objectively characterised as "better" than other theories of history or inevitable. Much of this conclusion relies on citations to other thinkers over the past millenia, including Oswald Spengler. Commenting on Spengler's analysis, Greer writes:

"history can have no overall meaning because it's impossible to talk of meaning at all except within the worldview of a given culture. Each culture evolves its own way of experiencing human life in the universe, and the only meaning humans can know is embodied in these distinctive worldviews. No culture's worldview is more or less true than any other, nor are the worldviews of cultures that arise later on in history an improvement in any sense on the ones that came before; each culture defines reality uniquely through its own dialogue with the inscrutable patterns of nature and human experience."

The subjectivity of value is something I find myself pondering. Whether there are universals that can be declared to transcend circumstance and context is still a mystery to me, but my Buddhist affinities help me appreciate the emptiness and co-dependent arising of any set of virtues and vices. That being said, even the Buddhists declare there to be three noble truths which seem to apply universally and without exception.

Overall this book was thought-provoking, and the evolutionary/ecological model of civilizations progressing through seres to a climax community is a fascinating framing. I agree with him that hubris and ego have warped the lens through which we view history as primarily pivoting on the axis of human action rather than a process just as subject to evolutionary pressures as any other living process on this planet. Those adaptations that promote fitness to environmental conditions are naturally adopted by civilizations and people that thrive, or vis versa.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read, highly recommended. The first ~half is a very compelling perspective on the coming post-peak (slow) collapse, and brought some thought-provoking new ways of looking at things; Greer is certainly an original thinker. While he speaks in broad strokes about how the post-peak future is likely to look, he gives enough concrete examples of what type of scenarios might be likely to play out that make it visceral.

The second half gets a bit more into philosophical discussion, and while also very interesting, was not the same level.

I'll certainly be reading Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America and Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead in the coming months.

[Andy T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greer has a knack for writing books with consistent themes but from multiple, necessary angles. You will find some overlap here with his other books like Decline and Fall and Not the Future We Ordered, but this time the topic of decline and collapse is given a rigorous treatment from an ecological perspective and explained in ecological terms, which I found somewhat freeing and cathartic this time around. Truly, human society is not above the laws of nature.
It should be clear that the possibilities laid out here all depend on humanity failing to find a renewable energy source that will come even close to the efficiency of oil. There is an incisive chapter explaining how unlikely that is to happen, along with the exorbitant costs, in oil, of switching to new energy sources.
As sobering and bleak as these topics can be, there is also a lot of encouraging food for thought about what to do in our own lifetimes, how to conserve and choose what to preserve. The topic of "dissensus," having many people work on a problem in varying ways rather than requiring uniformity, was new to me and very valuable. I also particularly liked the chapter on the suppression and revival of the home economy.

[Scott Waldyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's very well written, and there are parts of this book I genuinely found interesting. Greer's mapping of the post-peak world we're entering is thought provoking, but beyond that, the discussion is merely musings.

I do appreciate that Greer starts off looking at our ages of evolution from an ecological standpoint. Before this book, I hadn't quite looked at humanity through that lens, which seems silly in retrospect.

But really... that's about it. I suppose I was looking for something a little more concrete.

[Meghann Kenkel · Rating 3 out of 5]

2/3 of the way through the book was easily a 5/5 but I think he got a bit off track in the third section. Still lots of things to think about and consider in the first two sections that make it a Worthwhile read

[Marcus Goncalves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite being a fairly old book by now (2009), it is an interesting explanation of the myths most people believe in today, such as the myth of progress, which differs from reality and the hard ecological limits of our planet. Great read.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skip this one and go for Green Wizardry.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sober, clear look at what the decline of industrial society might look like over the next few generations.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a such a refreshing read, to hear new ideas, new critiques and certainly left me with much to think about.

[Teo · Rating 4 out of 5]

2016.08.06–2016.08.07

This was my first introduction to Greer's work and somewhat to peak/collapse thinking generally as well. The structure of the book was enjoyable and there's a certain romanticism to envisioning an Age of Salvage that rewards the prepared, ecological, and retrofitting-minded conservers who are able to adapt and think long-term. It makes sense to learn about the fates of past cultures, civilizations, and (more or less failed) attempts at conservation, because otherwise we are bound to repeat history's mistakes. What this book lacks is detailed explanations of why no proposed technological (etc.) solutions could prevent this vision from coming true, so I'm left wondering if there are any ways to overcome our addiction to fossil fuels without dramatic winding down of society and business as usual. But for that there's of course all the Peak Oil (etc.) discussion to delve into. This was a good intro. I also enjoyed the concepts of dissensus (not having all our eggs in one basket) and ecosophy: the wisdom of the home (as opposed to ecology, speaking of the home).

Contents

Greer JM (2009) (09:32) Ecotechnic Future, The - Envisioning a Post-Peak World

Introduction

Part I: Orientations

01. Beyond the Limits
• Human Ecologies
• Tomorrow Comes Anyway
• The Illusion of Independence

02. The Way of Succession
• Succession in Action
• Succession and Agriculture
• Succession and Technic Societies
• The Long Road to Sustainability

03. A Short History of the Future
• Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age
• • 1. Depopulation
• • 2. Migration
• • 3. Political and cultural disintegration
• • 4. Ecological change
• The Depopulation Explosion
• Völkerwanderung
• Culture Death
• A Different Planet
• The World Is Round

04. Toward the Ecotechnic Age
• What Evolution Means
• The End of Affluence
• The Age of Scarcity Industrialism
• The Age of Salvage
• The Coming of the Ecotechnic Age

Part II: Resources

05. Preparations
• Projecting the Shadow
• The Effects of Homeostasis
• The Twilight of Technology
• Adaptive Responses
• A Time for Dissensus
• The Mariner's Two Hands

06. Food
• The Next Agriculture
• Compost as Template
• In the Dark with Both Hands
• Pieces of the Puzzle

07. Home
• Tomorrow's Homes
• Retrofitting the Future
• The Household Economy
• The Decline and Fall of Home Economics
• The Specialization Trap

08. Work
• A Hundred Energy Slaves
• The Deindustrial Want Ads
• The Twilight of Automation
• Trailing-Edge Technologies

09. Energy
• The Innovation Fallacy
• The Paradox of Production
• Jevons' Alternative
• Master Conservers

10. Community
• Lifeboat Ecovillages
• Cities in the Deindustrial Future
• The Ecology of Social Change

11. Culture
• A Failure of Mimesis
• The Twilight of Culture
• Cultural Conservers
• Religion and the Survival of Culture

12. Science
• Saving Science
• Appropriate Ecology
• Toward Ecosophy

Part III: Possibilities

13. The Ecotechnic Promise
• History's Arrow
• History's Wheel
• History, Meaning, and Choice
• The Eyes of Nature

Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

[Iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books that I have read in a long time--Greer provides a cogent and clear background for the way in which declines tend to go based on a lot of historical evidence, compares it to find much in common with our situation, and then proceeds to consider what is distinctive about our situation. From there, he makes a persuasive case for his own best-case scenario through what he sees as an inevitable decline (spoiler: it's rough but not hopeless) and the sorts of things that would need to happen for it to occur.

He's keenly aware about the limits of forecasting the future, so he sticks to the broadest outlines. He doesn't give us a sweeping vision of the future, just a rough sketch of the terrain. He's upfront about not having all the answers, making clear that the future will be made by action and not speculation. That said, he shares the strategy he is betting on and isn't bashful about explaining why he thinks it is a good one.

His emphasis on incremental and small changes that can be scaled up to larger scale changes appeals to me, as does his conviction that we begin the process in the world we already occupy--in the cities, towns, neighborhoods, and communities, that already exist. While this path through 'scavenge industrialism' isn't pretty, it seems sensible.

Is it right? Well, we don't live in the future, so we just don't know. He accepts that there is probably more than one strategy through the crisis, and he encourages others to be explored. Some will surely fail (maybe even his own!), but hopefully others won't. Regardless, it's challenging in a way that seems awfully important right now.

Perhaps peevishly, I'm a little horrified at his, albeit brief, summary of Hegel's historicism and his dismissal of it, but that is an aside to the book's argument, so I won't belabor it in a review.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Greer writes with a mild humor, and a strong sense of opportunity lost. He brings together in this book a broad ranging knowledge of history, philosophy and human behavior. The book acts both as a prediction of what the future might bring, and a rough outline of how we can act now to make the future a little better. The future Greer predicts is not a 'next year' or 'next decade' view however. The actions he recommends are for preserving a world for our children's children's children, and on to the next civilization that might take the place of our own.

One foible I felt in Greer's writing was a constant sniping about the chance that was lost during the Reagan era energy glut. Greer explains how this period of excess, experienced around the world but especially in the US, has now eliminated many options we may have had for building a strong future. I felt this story became tiresome, continually appearing in abbreviated form through most parts of the book, usually in the tone of regret, scorn, or anger.

The long view of this book is well considered, and carefully constructed. The advice is gently given, and backed by examples from historical declines of earlier civilizations. Greer is a fan of 'dissensus', so this book does not give a strong prescription, just guidance on one of many ways we can help the future children of our world.

[Pupsi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book for me was very mixed, I like the writing style the fact the author was saying that there will not be a massive end of the world scenarios and the solution to the post peak world will be develop over the upcoming generations.

I didn't agree with his main theme that the only like scenario will be that eventually society will model itself closely to the pre-industrial agrarian societies. This maybe more my optimistic nature that says that technology will find alternative. Just over the last few years I have seen Solar panels for homes becoming more prevalent, much more economically cars and an increase in public transport. These are for me also trends which could provide solutions to the current fossil fuels.

However that also may be because I have read too much Sci Fi

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, inspiring read for those that are willing to see further than the end of one's nose. J.M. Greer is extremely convicting in his argumentation and conclusions. The way he derives his predictions from historic analysis makes so much sense, that it leaves you wondering how we can be so blind and short-sighted as a society, wasting our time & money in discussions and investments that will turn out obsolete very soon anyways. He also excells in putting things back into perspective, mitigating the fear of an "apocalyptic" crisis that is often provoked in the peak oil discussion, while proposing tangible steps to transition into a more sustainable way of living, reaffirming me in my own decisions, convictions and projects for the near future.