Richard Heinberg was a great sentinel, but he was never shrill. He had the intellectual and moral courage, underlain by common sense, to take radical stances—recently calling for the abolition of AI, early on for weaning civilization from oil. Anything but a technocrat, he always championed mutual aid and relocalization, never abandoning humanity. His books and essays, always clear and insightful, parsed matters systemically and with wide awareness. His death is a terrible loss.
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Chellis Glendinning first brought Richard’s work to my attention, mailing some early issues of the MuseLetter whose graphic design was an homage to Henry Geiger’s similarly profound letterpress newsletter, MANAS. Both sages shared some characteristics, being independent, literate, philosophical; casting a compassionate gaze on our world and offering deep wisdom. Neither Heinberg nor Geiger were academics, nor conditioned by institutions. Theirs was good, salient writing, sober and always illuminating. These were good minds to meet, noble company
Richard Heinberg was a great public intellectual, reckoning with specialist and technical information, rendering it sensible to the common reader, calmly and substantively arguing that our species must—imperatively—find a way to flourish within the Earth’s biophysical limits.
As a longtime bioregionalist, not in denial about the limits to growth, I valued Richard’s exposition of Peak Oil and its stark implications for overdeveloped economies and consumerist lifeways; I became a fan and an apostle, adding a new portent of doom to my arsenal of dire predictions. Would that I could have shared his equable temperament and restraint!
When Richard had some speaking gigs in Michigan, friends and I brought him to Traverse City to speak to our business folk on Peak Oil. Transition Town did not ensue, but the growth-addicted burghers can’t say they weren’t cautioned.
Then I got to be Richard’s roadie, driving him down to Kalamazoo to speak at the Tillers International Annual Fair, aptly. The Tillers teach and promote traditional agricultural skills, including the use of animal traction in farming. Very pre- and post-Peak. On that trip I witnessed and admired his ability courteously to secure just enough space and solitude to stay centered. Tillers put us up overnight, and Richard consecrated his morning to playing violin.
Occasionally, in the decade-plus since that trip, I’d exchange thoughts with him, or just drop him some e-fanmail. I read his books and circulated his essays, touted Resilience every chance I got, ever grateful to Richard for his genius–the ability to scout, winnow and synthesize global and national issues and sociopolitical developments, and for his realism: his steady engagement with the imminence of civilizational collapse and his thoughtful consideration of practices or initiatives that offered genuine avenues to community resilience. None of it was empty talk. He and his wife Janet lived the change they wished to see in the world, exerting themselves to create a permacultural solar suburban homestead.
His was a fine and generous mind. He offered his work with respect for the reader’s intelligence, and hope for our better understanding of the terms of the Earth. As I knew him, he was gracious, kind, wryly humorous, always straightforward. His legacy of books and other writings will continue to matter, but the absence of his analysis and commentary—his wisdom and goodwill—will be hard, hard to bear.
