Summary: Peak oil is coming, here is how that will change things, and here is how we can be ready.
I had over the years run across The Kek Wars, How It Could Happen, and The Next Ten Billion Years, but only recently did I put 2+2 together and realize that these were all the ravings of the same mad genius, John Michael Greer. Intrigued, I sought out one of his more serious works, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World.
This book's message is not "environmentalism" as you may know it. It is not meant to save the planet from us—indeed, quite the opposite. At its heart is a view of humanity as part of nature, neither its saviors nor its conquerors, but subject to the same forces as the other animals, though perhaps more fortunate by dint of our ability to adapt through culture and learning rather than by evolution alone. The book seeks, in some small way, to speed that adaptation along.
Greer spells out his vision of the coming world with straightforward, understandable arguments not laden with heavy ideological burdens; but while his practical advice for living in such a world is sound, the premise at its base—that mankind will soon run into hard limits to its ambitions and enter a long, slow, and lasting decline—is argued only weakly. In asserting his predictions, Greer dismisses with a philosopher's handwave whole currents of scientific and political thought that would gainsay him, explaining them away as perennial human delusions; and although these critiques are certainly valid, they are not decisive. At some point one must actually look at what these opponents say.
Nevertheless, the book is deeply thought-provoking. For one like me who swims in transhumanist waters, I sometimes lose sight of how my imagination of the far future unconsciously informs my day-to-day priorities, and indeed my whole outlook on life. Greer's perspective is enlightening because it is so at odds with my own, and yet plausible enough to demand serious reflection.
Is peak oil happening? We should address this question up front, since the whole book rests upon it. Convincing you of this is not the central purpose of the book—in fairness to Greer, such an analysis would fill at least one lengthy tome, perhaps more—so for now it will suffice to summarize his arguments and what objections I could think of offhand.
Oil prices per barrel Feb. 1946 – Sep. 2021, in 2021 dollars. [source]
While recent swings in the price of energy make it hard to see the larger picture, the general trend in energy costs is still up... [chapter 8, section 3]
Most official estimates place the arrival of peak oil sometime between 2020 and 2030... [ch. 1, sec. 2]
[Note: The sections within each chapter are not numbered, but I will cite the text between the chapter heading and the first subheading as "section 1," that between the first and second subheadings as "section 2," etc.]
Greer is writing in 2009, after the global financial crisis and its attendant crash in oil prices, but before the rise of "unconventional" extraction (fracking, shale oil, tar sands, etc.) that began in roughly 2014. He does mention such sources in passing (along with biofuels, which seem to my lay impression to have since faded from the public debate), only to say that they cannot be a solution to the peak oil problem because the extraction of these reserves itself requires a large expenditure of energy, itself derived from oil. But, in retrospect, this argument is unconvincing—if it were true, how could unconventional extraction have made the price of oil fall as it did?
Nonetheless, surely those reserves will too diminish, and so our innovations may have only accomplished a delay of the inevitable. If we have bought ourselves some measure of time, what good does that do?
First, it will give us another chance to switch to renewables—solar, wind, hydroelectricity, and the like. Now, Greer argues that such sources cannot possibly replace fossil fuels in the sense of enabling today's industrial system to run forth unhindered—the quantity and concentration of energy they provide simply do not measure up to oil. But he acknowledges that the transition to renewables—a process involving a large up-front investment of energy to manufacture solar panels, build dams, etc.—can be more or less orderly depending on how much fossil fuel surplus is available for that use. Indeed, part of his case for the hardness of the coming times is that it is already too late. But if peak oil is not as close as he thought in 2009, then perhaps we now have one last opportunity to heed his warning? To his credit, Greer does not dismiss this possibility out of hand:
[T]he end of the Industrial Age will most likely trace out a stepwise decline, with periods of crisis and breakdown punctuated by periods of partial recovery. This offers the hope of breathing spaces in which the lessons of each time of crisis can be assessed and put to use in dealing with the next. Those who respond to the energy crisis of our own time might keep this in mind when preparing for the complex future ahead. [ch. 9, sec. 5]
Indeed, we may already have seen progress since 2009, with solar panels on more and more roofs and electric car chargers in more and more parking lots.
Second, more time implies more chances to find altogether new sources of energy. Fusion power is the elephant-in-the-room. Greer does not mention fusion as such, but he does sketch out a scenario whereby even hypothetical limitless energy might still fail to stave off the decline of industrialism:
It's not enough to come up with a new source of energy. Unless that new source can be used just like petroleum, the petroleum-powered machines we use today will have to be replaced by machines using the new energy source.... the costs of the new infrastructure will generally be much greater than the cost of bringing the new energy source online in the first place. [ch. 9, sec. 3]
[A] crash program to bring some new energy source online in a hurry could drain enough energy, raw materials, labor and money out of a fragile system to drive it over the edge into collapse. [ibid.]
In short, whatever new energy may be discovered, it will do us little good till we can refit our distribution infrastructure accordingly. Now, on the one hand, this argument omits to consider the possibility that a truly bottomless source of energy could synthesize hydrocarbons out of literal thin air, via CO₂ + 2H₂O → CH₄ + 2O₂ and the like, and undo global warming to boot. Fuels thus made could be piped into the existing infrastructure without much difficulty. On the other hand, the activation energy of a new solution is a real challenge. Imagine the future tragedy of the engineers on the promising SPARC) project who, having at last shown how a superparity reactor may be built and the path to the Singularity unlocked, find themselves unable to secure funding in a time when all remaining fossil fuels must be devoted towards heating homes and heading off the next peasant uprising.
Of course, I would be remiss not to discuss AI. The longer our runway of fossil fuels, the more time we have to build an artificial intelligence that will solve all these problems for us. Throughout the book, Greer misses no opportunity to scoff at the notion that technology will "magically" bail us out of the predicament that we have created for ourselves. But in this respect, at least, I think AI deserves more credit. I, a mere amateur, have already mentioned one potential energy source, namely fusion, which is blocked not by any fundamental physics but only by the boundaries of our engineering skills. And an AI could very well identify others yet unknown—the only real limit is E=mc². How likely is it that the AI will fail in all its attempts?
At any rate, the question of peak oil ultimately comes down to a race against the clock. Will we run out of oil soon enough to put our salvation forever out of reach, or will we make it through this Great Filter in the nick of time? Greer at least makes me think that the matter is still open (enough to make the book worth reading, even if the value of enacting it is debatable). There does not seem to be any inexorable force one way or the other; what ends up happening may depend on individual human choices yet to be made, or just random luck. If one had faith in the unstoppable march of progress, that is a sobering thought.
With that out of the way, let us now take as given that what Greer says about peak oil will come true. What follows from that?
First and foremost, Greer warns us that much of our contemporary worldview is merely an outgrowth of the temporary age of indulgence enabled by fossil fuels, in no way to be regarded as universal or eternal. He characterizes modern thought as a way of coping with the thwarted hopes of our declining civilization and of shutting our eyes to the poverty of our prospects. Such circumstances, he says, throughout history give birth to manifold "revitalization movements" at whose core is
a faith that the troubles of the present will suddenly vanish, and a world of bright promise just as suddenly appear, if the faithful only devote themselves intensely enough to moral, ritual or cultural purity.... the belief... that the rising spiral of troubles facing industrial civilization herald an evolutionary leap that will give rise to a new world lacking most of the problems that beset the present one. [ch. 4, sec. 1]
Of this, Greer expressly calls out Extropianism and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity as an "egregious example" [ch. 1, footnote 10]. (The kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye and believe the gospel!) Concomitant is a proliferation of utopian ideas, whereby all the troubles of the present can be swept away if only some radical new ideology can take hold: "In the years ahead of us, every project for social change you care to imagine will likely try to redefine itself as the answer the world is waiting for" [ch. 5, sec. 1], but, "The fact that so many people today treat catastrophe as an inkblot onto which to project their fantasies of a better life is one of the most troubling signs of our times" [ch. 5, sec. 2].
Instead, Greer beseeches us to come back to earth and confront reality. The coming age of trouble will be no heroic struggle against impossible odds that prevails in the end by great virtue and sacrifice, nor a fulfillment of some divinely-ordained plan; it will rather be haphazard, pragmatic, and unglamorous. He cites Warren Johnson's Muddling Toward Frugality, which contrasts the "language of tragedy," in which so much high-minded idealism is cloaked, versus that of comedy, which is more what we need. "Comic heroes are usually muddlers, stumbling cluelessly through situations with no grander agenda than coming out the other side with a whole skin" [ch. 5, sec. 5].
Therefore, Greer brackets all of his advice within the framework of dissensus (a term due to Ewa Ziarek), which is not merely the lack of consensus, but an ethos of actively avoiding consensus. Our adaptation to the deindustrial age will be "an opportunity for social evolution, in which various populations will try out many different forms of technical, economic and social organization, some of which will turn out to be more successful than others" [ch. 2, sec. 5]. One who wishes for the long-term flourishing of humanity should therefore hope for a variety of different approaches from which we can gradually learn what works best, rather than putting all of our eggs into one basket (including that of this book!).
Another misleadingly alluring tragic narrative, according to Greer, is the great and sudden disaster, like the mythic fall of Atlantis. Such a tale may fit neatly between the commercial breaks of a made-for-TV movie, but reality need not. Rather, Greer expects that our decline will be slow and piecemeal, with various ups and downs along the way, and you may not even notice it if you are only watching out for a massive catastrophe. Indeed, he argues, a slow decline is more difficult to manage than a fast one, because in the latter case the people might at least remember what things were like in the Before Times, whereas in "a long decline ending in a dark age... much of the technology, knowledge and cultural heritage of today is at risk of being lost" [ch. 5, sec. 2].
Greer's charge, therefore, is twofold: first to "deal with the immediate impacts of the crisis of industrial civilization," and second to "preserve the useful legacies of the modern world for generations to come" [ch. 5, sec. 7].
For making predictions, Greer turns to ecological succession as a model—the natural process by which an ecosystem adapts to an environmental shock. He gives a simple example:
Imagine, then, an area of bare bulldozed soil... seeds blown in by the wind will send up a first crop of invasive weeds. Those will ready the ground for other weeds and grasses, which will eventually choke out the first-comers. After a few years, shrubs and pioneer trees will spout, becoming anchor species for a young woodland, which will shade out the last of the weeds and the grass. In the shade of the pioneer trees, saplings of other species will find homes... [T]he abandoned lot will pass through as many as a dozen distinct stages before it finally settles down as an old growth forest a few centuries in the future. [ch. 2, sec. 2]
These stages are called seres (or seral stages). They begin with a predominance of r-selected organisms (optimizing for rapid growth and control over resources, even at the cost of efficiency), but these are gradually outcompeted by more K-selected successors (slower-growing, but more efficient). The last sere is a so-called "climax community" which is well-adapted to long-term stability (at least until the next shock comes along).
Importantly, in Greer's model, the shock is not in our future, but in our past—the initial discovery of fossil fuels. We today are thus the invasive weeds of the first sere, using energy with massive inefficiency in the name of rapid growth. But when cheap energy subsides, we will then move to the next set of seres, which Greer collectively terms the deindustrial age.
What will this transition be like? It will not be pleasant, to put it mildly. Greer gives another example, which I found insightful because I had not previously understood why a reversal of growth might be so concerning. Surely we can simply go back to living the way our ancestors did?
Imagine how the lives of field mice would be transformed if a truck full of grain overturned on the nearby freeway and spilled its load in their meadow. The mice suddenly have more energy than they can use and their population soars far beyond the meadow's carrying capacity. As the number of mice in the meadow grows, though, the rate at which the grain is consumed also rises, until the grain begins to run short. At this point nothing the mice can do will spare them from dieoff; most of the mice will starve, and the survivors' struggle to keep themselves fed may damage the meadow badly enough to decrease its carrying capacity over the long term. Years later, the meadow may still not support as many mice as it did the day before the truck overturned. [ch. 1, sec. 1]
In other words, a short bout of prosperity may actually leave those who come after worse off than if it had never happened (a recurring theme throughout the book). For this and other reasons, we should not expect the deindustrial age to resemble a time-reversed replay of the past; it will be an altogether different sort of world.
Greer enumerates the following seres:
Peak oil will mark the beginning of scarcity industrialism; and this transition, though not pinpointable to a single moment, is something that will supposedly be noticeable within our lifetimes. Already, says Greer, "the American political debate has begun to shift slowly from the maintenance of empire to the raw necessities of national survival" [ch. 4, sec. 3]. The age of scarcity will put an end to frivolous energy expenditures—tourism being the first casualty, he says, and later our globalized, specialized economy where goods are shipped long distances from producer to consumer. Population densities may actually increase in certain areas as transportation costs rise and people need to live closer to where they work and shop.
As an aside, it is interesting to look back on this last prediction in light of the newfound popularity of remote work—while Greer foresees that the deindustrial age will spell the demise of the internet as we know it, it seems to be in no danger at this early stage. Whatever may be the energy costs of maintaining high-speed telecommunications, I expect it will still be cheaper than daily commuting, well into the age of scarcity.
This age will also bring political turmoil—some nations may survive, and others may not. Greer refrains from outright predicting the collapse of the United States, but gives it a greater risk than that of smaller or less powerful countries, due to how America has wedded itself to the expectation of perpetual growth.
As fossil fuel reserves peter out, we will move into the salvage society. Salvage becomes a way of life when, due to the cost of energy, it becomes cheaper to reuse existing products and materials rather than making them from scratch. The energy thus saved is what Greer (citing H.T. Odum) calls "emergy," short for "embodied energy," namely the energy that was put into the creation of some object. For example, metals take a great deal of energy to mine and refine, and so it may make more sense to "mine" the ruins of old buildings than to dig ore out of the ground. Not just raw materials, but other products of technology, such as machinery, computers, and hydroelectric plants, will continue to be used as long as possible, long after our ability to maintain or manufacture them has vanished.
To this I would only add that the definition of emergy is somewhat slippery in that it depends on the context of the surrounding civilization. For example, photovoltaic cells—which are conspicuously unmentioned in the later section on home improvements—take a certain amount of energy on the margin to produce, although most manufacturers claim that the power they generate over their lifetime makes up for that many times over. But suppose you are transported back to 4000 BC and tasked with creating the world's first solar panel. You will surely find the energy cost much greater.
Only when the reserves of salvageable goods are themselves depleted will we at last come to the ecotechnic age. This is the "climax community" of the succession—by no means a utopia, but a sere wherein energy efficiency is maximized. "In a world where the available energy resources are sun, wind, water, muscle and biomass, and all work must be accomplished by those means, societies that evolve efficient and sustainable technologies using those resources have major advantages against rival societies that use them unsustainably" [ch. 2, sec. 5]. Greer emphasizes that this will nevertheless still be a technic society, not a simple reversion to medieval feudalism, hunting-gathering, or some other pre-technic mode of living. Because our present industrial age is the first technic age we have seen, we may harbor the illusion that any society that uses technology must necessarily resemble our own; but this is not the case.
Greer uses this outline of three deindustrial seres—scarcity, salvage, and ecotechnic—to frame his advice for the future. The most important thing he cautions against is prematurely preparing for the salvage or ecotechnic age right now, even though scarcity is more pressing. Each sere will have different strategies optimized for it, and to plan for the wrong one would be a mistake.
But he also acknowledges that the succession of seres might not take place in the same way, or at the same time, throughout the world. The industrialized West may see things play out in the way described above, but the poorer parts of the world may enter the age of scarcity sooner, or skip directly to salvage.
The most fun part of this book is where Greer indulges in future worldbuilding. This is certainly what hooked me in; but the reader should approach this section with self-awareness, since entertainment and truth value are often at cross-purposes. That I find Greer's setting compelling perhaps says as much about me as about its reality.
The first theme of the near future is depopulation. As mentioned with the example of the field mice and their grain, the decline in energy availability will constrain the human population in an obvious physical way, as well as that "the barriers that prevented pandemics will likely fail" [ch. 3, sec. 2]. But the decline will also have ripple effects in the culture at large, leading to an increase in "alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and suicide" [ch. 3, sec. 3]—to wit, deaths of despair. We see this already in post-Soviet Russia, and certain parts of the U.S. "[W]hole regions of the American West are depopulating right now.... Sprawling Sun Belt cities with little water and no resources will shrivel and die as the energy that keeps them going sputters and goes out..." [ibid.], while "Rust Belt towns struggling for survival today will likely find a new lease on life when adequate rain, workable soil and access to waterborne transport become the key to prosperity..." [ibid.].
The second theme is migration. Here he cites the post-Roman "völkerwanderung," a period when "whole nations took to the road" [ch. 3, sec. 4]. There are already plenty of people around the world who want to move, but are prevented from doing so by the present political order; when that breaks down, migration will begin with a vengeance. Taking another shot at the American West, Greer provocatively characterizes the influx of Mexican immigrants to the region as "the failure of the American settlement of the West.... Like the Mongol conquest of Russia or the Arab conquest of Spain, the American conquest of the West is proving to be temporary, and as the wave of American settlement recedes, the vacuum is being filled by the nearest society with the population and cultural vitality to take its place" [ibid.]. The same, he says, is true of the Chinese in the Russian Far East (which I am not sure holds up today, as China faces depopulation of its own). Meanwhile, Japan will become unable to support its huge and dense population, and with nowhere else to go, the Japanese will take to the seas and wander across the Pacific.
The third theme is disintegration. As far-flung travel and communication become harder, so too will the maintenance of any kind of political or cultural unity across large areas. America, he says, will be hit particularly hard, not only because of the past scrapping of its railways and canals in favor of highways, but also because of the artificiality of present American "culture," which is really just an outgrowth of consumerism that has displaced whatever authentic American culture may once have existed:
[A] people that has come to see itself as a passive consumer of culture, rather than its active maker and transmitter, may have very few options left when the supply of manufactured culture runs out.... We are already seeing people in contemporary American society turn to any imaginable resource in the search for some group identity less transient than the whims of marketers. [ch. 3, sec. 5]
Right now the manufacture of mass culture imposes a thin shell of cultural similarity across English-speaking North America, but even that is under strain as subcultures use the decentralizing power of today's communications and move more boldly in their own directions. [ch. 3, sec. 2]
How can we square this observation with the re-centralization of media we have seen over the last decade? This book came out during a time when you could find a dedicated forum or blog for the most niche of interests, but now we are left with just Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. On the other hand, if you are plugged into today's subcultures, you might get the sense—reinforcing Greer—that they are now so alienated from the wider culture that they do not even bother appearing in public any more.
The D&D quests write themselves, when "[w]arlords of the future may well claim the title of President of the United States..." [ibid.] (a favorite trope of post-apocalyptic stories, I might add), and "there may be long centuries ahead when the only news about the doings of other lands will take the form of traveler's stories and tall tales in seaport bars" [ch. 3, sec. 7]. Now, this latter point may be going too far, because, as Greer explains later, long-distance communication will likely persist into the ecotechnic age, albeit at a lower bandwidth than modern Netflix streaming, since its energy requirements are not that great. But it is true that an empire cannot be held by tweets alone.
The last theme is environmental change. Greer views climate change as a fait accompli, not even worth fighting, but he considers the IPCC predictions overblown for assuming unfettered growth and not accounting for peak oil. The world will be warmer and wetter, "climate belts will shift poleward," and "coastal regions within fifty feet or so of sea level will drown beneath rising seas" [ch. 3, sec 6]—all key considerations when buying real estate. Additionally, future societies will need to deal with ecosystem change due to the spread and extinction of species—farms and forests may never again be the same.
Again, Greer repeatedly stresses that while the coming decline will be gradual, we will nonetheless see its impact on our own lives, if we are paying attention. Such is the world we should come to expect:
To volatile energy prices and wrenching economic change, add the breakdown of public health and the likelihood that the end of the American empire will result in wars as bloody as those that followed the decline of every other empire in history, and the result is a recipe for massive change. [ch. 3, sec. 7]
We will all be attending more funerals than most of us do nowadays, and our appearance as the guest of honor at one of them will likely come sooner than we expect. Most of us will learn what it means to go hungry, to work at many jobs, to watch paper wealth become worthless and to see established institutions go to pieces around us. [ibid.]
Now we come to the practical tips. Greer defines four criteria by which to assess the viability of any strategy: First it should be scalable, able to work on a small or large scale and not requiring society-wide buy-in; second it should be resilient, suitable to a variety of conditions; third it should be modular, separable into replaceable components; and fourth it should be open, not requiring ideological conformity.
For Greer, organic and local farming is no mere luxury for health nuts, but a necessity for the deindustrial age. He points out how modern agriculture is embedded in the industrial system: first, that many of the fertilizers and pesticides used are produced either directly from fossil fuels or by means of their energy; and second, that cheap transportation is what enables such extreme specialization, both in that we have vast swathes of remote land devoted solely to agriculture, and that these farms produce only a handful of crops and rely on faraway imports for the rest.
According to Greer, as we move into the age of scarcity, the business interests behind large industrial agriculture will likely prevail upon the government to keep propping up their enterprise long after they "should" have failed, but in the near term the facts on the ground will come to resemble the role of gray-market farms in Soviet Russia, "with vast industrial farms that had become almost irrelevant to the national food supply and an underground economy of backyard market gardens that produced most of the food people actually ate" [ch. 6, sec. 2]. Since we as individuals may be powerless to change these political realities, the best we can do is to start setting up the gray-market now.
These sorts of farms should orient themselves around simple, low-tech tools (none of that big-city nonsense like hydroponics) and reduced usage of fossil fuels. In some places, farmers might want to switch out their tractors for good old-fashioned draft animals; in others, mechanized equipment may still be useful if the farm can devote some of its land to growing biofuels. Greer calculates that machines are more efficient than animals in terms of the amount of land needed for their upkeep, but against that we should also weigh the cost of producing and maintaining them, which will increase as the age of salvage begins.
Greer does not mention genetically-modified organisms, so I will at least raise the topic here. For one, the new strains of crops that enabled the Green Revolution are unlikely to go away anytime soon, even if the means for making them anew may be lost. Second, it is not even clear that we will indeed lose these capabilities. As far as I can tell, creating new GMOs (via CRISPR and the like) does not actually require that much energy; it can be done with a fairly low-tech setup as long as you know exactly what you are doing. Now perhaps the survival of this knowledge is itself a dicey proposition, but there may be a significant incentive to preserve it, in that through genetic engineering one can more quickly make plants and animals better-adapted to a rapidly changing environment than through the long and arduous process of selective breeding.
Nowadays you can find organic and local produce—prominently labeled as such—at any upscale urban grocery store, despite the fact that Greer's foreseen economic constraints have not yet arrived. Why are shoppers so willing to pay a premium even now? One suspects that "organic and local" has become something of an applause-light in our time. There is an unavoidably moralistic tone to its appeal, a combination of Jonathan Haidt's sanctity/degradation axis, plus the halo effect whereby something that is good for the planet must also be good for your health and for your palate. Charitably, we might suppose that this "bias" is in fact a valid heuristic, in that we should not expect evolution to have well-equipped us for ingesting substances that did not exist before the last hundred years, nor should we presume that our engineering can do better. (Greer does touch on this suite of ideas with his concept of "ecosophy," discussed later.)
Indeed, Greer labels detractors with an opposite bias, namely biophobia: "a pathological fear of the realities of biological life, coupled with an obsessive fascination with the sterile, the mechanical and the lifeless" [ch. 6, sec. 4]. If you bristle at the accusation, consider one of Greer's proposed replacements for artificial fertilizer: human feces! Lovingly dubbed "humanure," this abundant resource is rich in nutrients and has been used by farmers for thousands of years. Any harmful bacteria that may be present are quickly eliminated in the "fiercely Darwinian" [ibid.] environment of the compost pile. Are you sold yet? This closure of the circle of life has a certain charm to it, though perhaps the Whole Foods marketing department would disagree.
Incidentally, according to some brief Wikipedia research, the main concern about humanure is not bacteria, but the eggs of parasitic helminths, which survive for much longer and bedevil many efforts to set up human composting in the developing world. But we in the industrialized world may have overshot the mark to the other side, where "many currently widespread illnesses may be caused by excessive cleanliness" [ibid.]. Greer here is alluding to the "hygiene hypothesis" which blames the rise of autoimmune disorders (food allergies, most saliently) on the lack of pathogens towards which the human immune system may direct its energies. And, as it turns out, the intentional introduction of helminths into the body is a promising avenue for treating such disorders. The humanurists may yet have their day.
Less provocatively, Greer discusses other methods of composting, such as the familiar recycling of food scraps, sheet mulching (spreading dead leaves or other matter in a thin layer and letting it rot), and green manure ("planting a cover crop of clover or some other nitrogen-fixing plant in the fall, letting it grow all winter, and then turning it under in the spring" [ch. 6, sec. 5]). The material benefit of all of this reuse of waste is in lessening one's reliance on artificial fertilizers and moving towards a more K-selected lifestyle, but Greer also ventures to wax lyrical about its virtues:
The contrast between the monumental absurdity of industrial society's linear transformation of resource to waste, on the one hand, and the elegant cycle of resource to resource manifested in the humble compost bin on the other, makes it hard to avoid challenging questions about the nature of human existence, the shape of history, the meaning of the cycles of life and death and the relation of humanity to the source of its existence, however that may be defined. [ch. 6, sec. 3]
Now, while you and I may be moved to awe by great works of art, or the sight of the Milky Way, for Greer it is the heap of trash in his backyard that does it. Truly the comic hero we need!
Homes will need improvement in two ways: first, to become a great deal more energy-efficient, relying less on grid resources; and second, to become a place for production, not just consumption.
While Greer's vision of homes and neighborhoods in the ecotechnic age is markedly different from the way most Americans live at present—"the detached single-family house will likely become a great deal less common than it is today" [ch. 7, sec. 1]—he acknowledges that this is a far-off fantasy, and most people will need to focus on retrofitting their existing homes. The easiest win is adding better insulation, and simply being content to wear sweaters or shorts rather than trying to maintain a constant indoor climate year-round. Another possible improvement is passive solar heating, such as space heating (he does not elaborate on how this would work, but I imagine it involves leveraging the greenhouse effect) and water heating (not mediated by electricity, but rather working by direct application of sunlight to water; even if this cannot supply all of the home's needs, it can at least supplement the powered heater and save energy that way).
Nonetheless, if you are in a position to build a new home, a focus on efficiency may well be worth the investment. Some of the more elaborate measures that Greer suggests are: building houses out of cob (a mixture of clay and straw, an easily-produced material with good insulation properties), solar greenhouses for growing food, composting toilets, wood stoves (being so scrupulous as to require that the wood itself be grown sustainably, that is by coppicing) and on-site energy production via wind turbines and "micro-hydro" (hydroelectricity built on a small stream or river). Again, Greer conspicuously does not mention solar panels here, likely because their production relies upon an industrial infrastructure that is itself in jeopardy, as mentioned in section 3 above.
Additionally, Greer expects the household economy to gain new life as the loss of automation and cheap shipping make at-home production a necessity. A direct implication is therefore that homes should be built with space for such activities. (Our COVID-era work-from-home setups are likely not what Greer has in mind—remote work is another luxury of industrialism.) Greer now goes on a long tangent about his homemade raspberry jam, made with organically-grown raspberries purchased from a farmer's market within walking distance of home: "Our homemade jam costs us only about two-thirds as much as a commercial jam made of the same ingredients," but "in terms of its impact on the gross domestic product... our homemade jam is an economic disaster" [ch. 7, sec. 4].
This then leads into a whole discourse about market versus non-market economics; how our society's obsession with numbers and profits (in a word, legibility) has led to a devaluation of all economic activity that does not involve money changing hands; and how this devaluation has taken root in the second-wave feminism that tells women their work is meaningless unless it gets them a paycheck. As so often happens, says Greer, a movement that set out for justice and liberation has been co-opted by the forces of industrial capitalism—"the market is America's pinup girl" [ch. 7, sec. 5]. He seeks to deflect accusations of sexism by mentioning that the gender roles are flipped in his own marriage—it is he that does the housework while his wife makes the money—but that however much flak he may get for this arrangement is much less than that heaped upon women who do the same.
Greer now revisits the theme raised earlier with the example of the mice and the grain—of how prosperity can lead to poverty in the long run. The problem here is the so-called curse of specialization: when far-reaching transport networks and economies of scale induce a person or community to become hyper-specialized in producing just a handful of products, they risk losing the generalist skills that they will once again need.
Accordingly, we today should keep practicing these currently-useless skills in order to keep the know-how alive (since, as Greer will later explain, knowledge stored in books—or, still less, YouTube tutorials—will not survive without active practice). Those who do so can be in a better position to prosper in the times ahead. What sorts of skills are these?
First, from the age of scarcity onward, it will no longer make sense to simply discard and replace broken items; we will need to learn how to repair them, or at least salvage their parts, and to do so with simple hand tools that are themselves easy to make and repair.
Second—and Greer devotes the bulk of this section to this—we should learn how to use "trailing-edge" technology, i.e. technology that was widely used before energy became so cheap. Examples of these include pedal-powered sewing machines, Civil War-era black powder firearms, vacuum tube computers (Greer refers to Pete Friedrichs's Instruments of Amplification as a guide for those interested in building such machines), and shortwave radios (all, again, maintained by hand tools).
The radio gets special emphasis, since the continuation of instantaneous messaging is one of the important ways in which Greer's ecotechnic age will differ from any pre-technic society. He writes glowingly of today's community of amateur radio operators, with their "decentralized web of self-supporting and self-managing stations, sharing common technical standards and operating procedures" and "lively internal subculture to encourage technical skill and practical expertise in new members and to foster the sort of camaraderie that helps keep a far-flung technical network operating through difficult times" [ch. 8, sec. 5]. Since the modern internet with its massive server farms and high-bandwidth channels will be an early casualty of deindustrialization, maintaining this radio network will become essential for people to stay in touch over long distances.
The third kind of skill is simply the sorts of labor and handicrafts for which we presently rely on machines. Greer says "in the United States today, the amount of energy used each year works out to around 1,000 megajoules per capita, or the rough equivalent of 100 human laborers working 24-hour days for each man, woman and child in the country" [ch. 8, sec. 2]—and the depletion of fossil fuels will be akin to all of these "laborers" vanishing, leaving much more manual labor that will need to be done by the people of the future. Without computers, routine clerical work such as accounting and filing will again need to be done by hand. And knowing how to make luxury goods like soap and alcoholic beverages will be highly in demand—the latter "even (in fact, especially) in the most difficult of times" [ch. 8, sec. 3].
Last is a set of skills which Greer calls the "ecotechnic trades." There is not much to say about these, because we have not collectively figured them out yet. These are "trades that work at the interface between human society and the natural world" [ibid.], using knowledge of ecology to solve environmental problems in a less "brute force" and energy-extravagant way. He gives the examples of "solving flood problems with plantings and swales that absorb runoff" and "curing insect infestations by making the local habitat less inviting to pests and more attractive to predators" [ibid.]. Greer sees this whole family of trades as a significant area for growth.
At this point I note that much of the advice so far aligns closely with that of classic preppers and DIYers, even those for whom Greer's peak oil story is not even on the radar. One might find common cause with Greer if one anticipates supply-chain disruptions in faraway China, or civil disorder at home, or extreme weather made worse by inept government response, or a Wall Street bank collapse that spirals into a new Great Depression. Or you might grow your own food for fear of the latest cocktail of chemicals being pumped into industrial farms, give birth at home rather than risk the horrors of the modern hospital, or dust off your old Polaroid camera because you can no longer find a digital one without a built-in NSA uplink.
While these scenarios superficially resemble Greer's in supposing a breakdown in one's ability to rely upon centralized institutions, the underlying narrative is different—in literary terms, the conflict is man-versus-man as opposed to Greer's man-versus-nature. The classic prepper's approach therefore takes on an unavoidably political character—that one will pay any price, suffer any inconvenience, so long as one can be rid of all these evil/greedy/stupid people. Greer by contrast, while no wide-eyed preacher of the universal brotherhood of man, does not see the tribes of today as particularly relevant to the coming struggles. His advice on the subject of community may therefore seem odd or naïve to those of that bent.
He begins by criticizing the idea of "lifeboat ecovillages," which are proposals to move 5,000 to 10,000 people to an undeveloped countryside to build the ideal village of the future, where everything is produced locally and nobody needs a car (and all the children are above-average). This flagrantly violates Greer's principles for sensible preparations—it is optimized for the ecotechnic age, which is still centuries away; it is unscalable and unmodular in the extreme, since it would cost nearly a billion dollars to set up even one such village; and it is not ideologically open, since it requires everyone to uproot their lives and devote themselves single-mindedly to the project.
For my own part, I have never heard anybody advocating for such a thing, though perhaps it was more common a few decades ago. If I were starting a village from scratch, I would regard even 100 recruits as a smashing success. Furthermore, remote work is again a game-changer; it may make it an easier sell for those not ideologically bought in.
Either way, however, Greer identifies at least one problem with such arrangements, namely defense—a small isolated village would be a sitting duck for roving gangs of bandits. It would be better all around, he says, to adopt the ancient city-state model—find a smallish city (population 20,000 – 200,000) with surrounding fertile land, which will be much easier to defend collectively, as well as having the ability to produce a variety of goods locally. The worst places to live are cities that are so massive as to have crowded out all nearby farmland (Manhattan, Chicago) or situated in the middle of the desert (Phoenix, Las Vegas); the best are places where the climate is favorable to agriculture ("east of the Mississippi and west of the Cascade and Sierra crests" [ch. 10, sec. 3]). It is within these already-existing cities that Greer wishes to build the resilience and the capacity to weather the coming storm.
Similarly, Greer defends representative democracy against those who would replace it with some radical new scheme: "The caution, compromise and room for necessary change that run through the American and Canadian constitutions and their equivalents elsewhere are there because their creators knew the power of political passions and the fallibility of institutions" [ch. 10, sec. 4]. This is in keeping with Greer's ethos of trial-and-error and skepticism of grand centralized plans—although one might object that the alien wearing the skinsuit of today's American republic is hardly any friend of experimentation and compromise. On the other hand, as Greer points out, the age of scarcity will itself put an end to the current level of top-down planning; for all that commentators may demean the Constitution as a relic of the bygone world of yeoman farmers and horse-and-buggy travel, the future may well end up looking like 1789 in those respects.
At the core, Greer wants us to make our peace with the communities we already have, rather than imagining we can strike out on our own with our cult followers, or use our newfound local autonomy to finally run the outgroup out of town. Again, his solution may seem intolerable to the more conflict-oriented—what good is a well-defended city if the enemy is within the gates?
Greer thinks this tendency is short-sighted: "it is common in many circles that speak of community in reverent tones... to neglect the actual communities in which they live, on the grounds that the towns and neighborhoods most Americans inhabit are not 'real communities'" [ch. 10, sec. 1]. Many such people, he says, are the children or grandchildren of a generation that specifically fled the oppressive environment of small towns; and they themselves, were they to move back there, would soon miss the anonymity and freedom of the city.
I think in this regard there may be a cultural or generational divide between Greer and his readers. Greer writes fondly of his engagement with the local community, from his ongoing relationship with the raspberry grower mentioned previously, to the "Master Conserver" seminars he tells of attending in the '70s—and of which he urgently hopes for a revival—for training laypeople in how to save energy and how to teach others to do the same. But is there anyone among urban Millennials-or-younger who would trust their neighbors or their local government to look out for them in a time of crisis?
Now, in some extremes, the blame lies at home—think of the caricatured Twitter addict who spends their days outraged at the latest national culture-war atrocity while neglecting ever to say hello to the neighbors—but at the same time, the facts on the ground give a real sense of the hollowing out of American civic life. Do any institutions in the modern American city truly embrace the whole community, rather than defining themselves in opposition to one outgroup or another?
It is perhaps another analogue, in a certain abstract way, to Greer's field mice, where an erstwhile outpouring of altruism and idealism has been ruthlessly strip-mined in an increasingly frantic scramble for social clout among an overextended cohort who were promised a cause to fight for but found only products to consume, leaving a cultural landscape more barren with cynicism and selfishness than anything before. All social life then becomes a minefield where you are always one step away from learning that your interlocutor hates you and wants you dead. Where does one go to find friends in such a world, let alone allies? There is no easy answer.
We may nonetheless think that there are things worth preserving in today's culture, and yet, Greer says, this is a formidable problem. Books will fade and crumble away, to say nothing of digital media, much of which is already unreadable after only a few decades. Rather, experience has shown that cultural heritage can only be preserved over the long term by an active ongoing effort of generation after generation who have some reason to think it worthwhile.
But Greer is pessimistic that our society is in any way up to that task. Having earlier expressed his low opinion of modern mass-manufactured culture (see section 5 above), he now goes into the point further, citing Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, on culture in times of decline. Toynbee observes that there is always a "dominant minority" of culture-makers whom the rest of society follows. But "a civilization enters decline, in turn, when its dominant minority loses the ability to inspire and settles for the power to coerce" [ch. 11, sec. 2]. This, says Greer, may explain the "revolt of many working-class Americans against the concept of culture altogether" [ch. 11, sec. 1]. Additionally, "today's faith in progress devalues the legacy of the past" [ch. 11, sec. 2]. Overall, the implication is: if hardly anybody today cares about preserving our culture, what chance is there that the people of the future will either?
Greer does not offer much in the way of solutions here, thinking it a lost cause, but focuses mainly on debunking proposals one by one, and predicting in vague terms how it will turn out.
First, it is common to look to religion as a bearer of culture. Greer gives Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each their due credit for giving their followers a transcendent motivation to preserve the works of antiquity. This is crucial, since copying manuscripts or performing rituals often serves no immediate needs and will be among the first things to fall by the wayside in times of material hardship, unless there is some supramundane impulsion to keep them going.
But Greer does not think any current religious movement will serve this role. He sees in America a religious landscape divided into two camps, one on the Left that simply parrots the values and worldview of the upper class and has no cultural power of its own, and another on the Right that promotes fundamentalist values but is constantly being co-opted by amoral grifters eager for a taste of mainstream acceptance. Because (again citing Toynbee) "the fading years of a civilization form a seedbed for new religious movements" [ch. 11, sec. 5], Greer thinks it possible that the great religions of the deindustrial age do not yet exist, or exist now only as unknown cults with many more centuries of obscurity ahead. (He leaves it at that, but I note in this connection that Greer is the former Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America).
What about scientific knowledge? There is not much chance that today's large research institutions with their rockets and supercomputers and particle accelerators will survive long into the age of scarcity. But certainly there are many today who view modern science as the crowning achievement of our civilization, worth passing on even if all else is forgotten, even verging upon "scientism" whereby people "make science carry their cravings for transcendence" [ch. 12, sec. 2].
Could this be the otherworldly motive we need? Greer thinks not. First, he does not think science-worship is likely to last, since it is bound up with the religion-of-progress mentioned earlier, and when people lose hope that science will bring immortality or interstellar travel, they will accordingly lose interest in it.
Second, the idea of compiling a gigantic "bible-of-science," listing all scientific information we wish to bequeath to the future (Greer refers to James Lovelock's proposal to this effect), is at its core inimical to the very nature of science. Science is a process, not a product, and if there is anything worth preserving in it, it is the scientific method itself, not any particular piece of knowledge. Indeed, Greer believes that Lovelock's bible would in the end become a hindrance to scientific progress, since it would teach people that the way to truth lies in old books, rather than in experiment and observation.
Therefore, according to Greer, what will remain is the kind of science that has immediate practical use in the deindustrial age. Farmers will need to learn how to manage ecosystems and recycle waste, the aforementioned amateur radio operators will need to study the dynamics of the upper atmosphere, and so forth. Furthermore, the overall attitude towards science will be reshaped accordingly, away from our fetishization of numbers and spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum models (and the accompanying view that knowledge gained in such a way is the only knowledge worth having), and towards a humbler, more holistic view that takes ecology as its paradigm. Greer calls this way of thinking ecosophy.
You may already have come across ecosophy in the wild, though perhaps not by that name: think of black swans, antifragility, Chesterton's fence, "lindy," Goodhart's Law, iatrogenesis, ancestral environment, the seen versus the unseen. While Greer does not go into that level of detail, I think all of these concepts would fit his label, all being based on looking at a subject as a complex, organic whole and acknowledging the difficulty in engineering its behavior.
But Greer may go too far in supposing that all modern science—what we may, antiparallel to Greer, call astrosophy, science conceived in the paradigm of astronomy—will give way to ecosophy. The scientific revolution long predates the industrial, culminating with Newton's Principia (1687), and the astrosophers' obsession with equations arose from that period; it is not some recent phenomenon. Indeed, for the triumph of precision and quantitative methods, there could be no better proving ground than the literal study of spheres moving in a vacuum. And there is no denying that astronomy will continue to be useful—taking astrosophic thinking along for the ride—in a time when an almanac of lunar distances and Jovian eclipses will once again be every sailor's dearest friend.
So, have you filled out your character sheet yet? Are you the radio operator, transcribing the output of your bespoke electromechanical calculator to complete a Diffie-Hellman handshake with your counterpart across the steppe? The warrior, charging forth upon your trusty steed in defense of your city-state, bow slung over one shoulder and homemade musket over the other? Or the organic farmer, passing on to your children your forebears' folk wisdom of Mendelian ratios and linkage disequilibria as you all harvest your hard-won bounty, together under the clearest of blue skies...?
My main criticism of this book is that, in all points concerning the future of technology, Greer is heavy on the psychology and light on the science. It is not enough to say "[t]here are plenty of claims nowadays that the universe is obliged to give us another vast windfall of cheap abundant energy... but these are statements of faith, not of fact" [ch. 8, sec. 2]; we must examine the latest advances in fusion reactors and consider what obstacles remain. We cannot simply write off the Extropians as yet another religious revival movement; we must get into the weeds with the cutting edge of AI research.
The problem with psychologizing is that it cuts both ways. I could just as well portray Greer as the one whose thinking is wishful, despite his insistence that the coming decline will be a messy and unpleasant affair for all involved. It is easy for me to make this argument, because I am on his side—I found myself rooting for Greer's predictions the whole way through. It is not that this book offers a utopia, but rather that it promises relief from a dystopia that otherwise seems inevitable.
In Greer's story The Next Ten Billion Years, linked above, he imagines that humanity will fade into the dust and eventually be succeeded by another sentient species, and another, and so on until the reddening sun swallows the planet. While the thought that the offspring of today's raccoons and ravens may someday build their own civilizations is perhaps fanciful, I think this picture of humanity's end—not with a bang, but with a whimper—is an accurate window into Greer's world. He brooks no fantasies of galactic conquest or of super-AI (paperclip-maximizing or otherwise), and seems to have made his peace with that.
But it is a tough pill to swallow. Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1903, not having heard the good news of our Lord and Singularity:
that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins... Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. [source]
Russell, like me and unlike our Archdruid, is still fundamentally Abrahamic in outlook, to say, albeit by omission, that we on this earth are mere pilgrims and sojourners, whose true home lies in the kingdom of heaven, the olam haba. As such, for all my sympathies with Greer, my transhumanist priors are still too strong for me to follow him to the dusty end. I hang onto a hope, thin but still abiding, that even in the ecotechnic age some may yet reach for eternity, with a thousand more years of wisdom to guide them.
That, indeed, is the best world of which I can still dream. If I may dissent from transhumanist orthodoxy—though I think many here will join me in this—it is to say that the humanity of today is not yet morally or philosophically ready to entrench its values into the cosmos for all the rest of time. That the Singularity may come within my own lifetime troubles me deeply. I have seen what passes for "morality" among our tech-elite and the hangers-on who do their dirty work, and I shudder at the first rumblings of their robotic boots stamping forever upon the face of mankind. To ask them—or for that matter anyone alive today, bleary-eyed as we are amidst our wild orgy of modernity and all the attendant misthinking of which Greer writes—to craft the utility function of the future lightcone is akin, writ unspeakably large, to making a drunken college freshman at a 2 a.m. rager choose his career then and there. "Please," he will protest, if he has any remaining wits about him, "let me have my hangover first!"
O egregore of mankind, O dialectic of history, O whatever be thy name, grant us a millennium or two to come to our senses. Grant that we may find concord with mother earth and fellow man before we lift our folly to heaven. Grant that we may in the fullness of time truly know for what end these sacks of flesh and bone came to be. O give us life everlasting, but not yet!
