John Michael Greer

The tyranny of the temporary

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Generals are particularly famous for planning for the last war rather than the next one, but it’s a common failing; most of today’s industrial civilization, for example, is busily planning its future on the basis of the energy supplies it had available in the recent past, rather than those much sparser supplies it will have to make do with in the recent future. Outside the myopic conviction that temporary conditions will last forever, there are plenty of options that can make the Long Descent ahead of us less grueling than it will otherwise be.

Review: A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

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User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

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And that means you have to try adapting in place, as though you really needed to. Try for a week to give up the car. Try for a weekend to turn off the breakers and the gas and live without fossil fuels. Set a limit on your kilowatt hours or you consumption of gasoline for the month, and stick to it. Don’t make it an easy one – push your limits. Cut your budget to the bone and then cut some more, as though you had no choice – and see how you do. Even your mistakes will teach you something about what you need.

Transition Themes Week #5 – High Speed Broadband Connection

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A bio-diverse culture needs us to be diverse, which is to say we need to be intrinsically ourselves – rooted in place and within our skills – and working as part of the whole. Coming from a broad frequency band, rather from a narrow, seperated point of view. This is a new way of working in the world: one that combines a modern city intelligence with an ancestral knowledge of the land.

New briefing: Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people’s health

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The steady stream of scandals, outbreaks of disease and regulatory crack-downs that is part and parcel of the industrial food system has made food safety a major global issue. Our growing reliance on corporate food and farming concentrates and amplifies risk in new and unprecedented ways, at scales never seen before, making intervention more necessary than ever to ensure that food does not make people sick. But behind all of the talk and action lies another agenda.

Book review: Edible Front Yard

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Ivette Soler’s new book The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-less, Grow-more Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden is lush with pictures and full of design advice, color combinations, attractive edibles, and hardscaping ideas. Ivette (a.k.a. The Germinatrix), a garden designer and writer, insists on beauty and style in her front-yard edible landscapes and gardens. She advises “Beauty matters…your front yard is a greeting to the world.”

Debunking the ‘shale gale’

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The implications of the Hughes report are disturbing. Without dramatic reductions in consumption of fossil fuels from outright conservation to energy efficiency (he strongly recommends more co-generation and targeting fuels to their highest-value applications), the rapid exploitation of shale gas will only confirm Eric Sevareid’s law: “the chief cause of problems are solutions.”