The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age

273 Pages·2008·10.06 MB·English

by  John Michael Greer

Advance praise for
The Long Descent
Candidates for public office, and the voters who elect them, should be required
to read John Michael Greer’s accurate diagnosis of the terminal illness our
fossil-energy subsidized industrial civilization has too long denied. He shows
how stubborn belief in perpetual progress blinded us to the abyss toward
which we were speeding and thus impeded wise preparation for our unavoid-
able descent into a deindustrial age. We must hope that the array of mitigating
tools he prescribes may yet render that descent down the back side of Hub-
bert’s peak less devastating than it will be if we insistently claim a right to be
prodigal in using this finite Earth.
— William R. Catton, Jr.
author of Overshoot: The Ecological
Basis of Revolutionary Change
This is a very wise and timely message for a nation facing enormous practi-
cal challenges. Greer’s generosity of spirit and essential kindness are habits of
mind and heart very much worth emulating.
— James Howard Kunstler
author of World Made by Hand
and The Long Emergency
When we find ourselves falling off the lofty peak of infinite progress, our civ-
ilization’s mythology predisposes our imaginations to bypass reality alto-
gether, and to roll straight for the equally profound abyss of the Apocalypse.
Greer breaks this spell, and instead offers us a view on our deindustrial future
that is both carefully reasoned and grounded in spirituality.
— Dmitry Orlov
author of Reinventing Collapse:
The Soviet Experience and American Prospects
If, as Greer suggests, our “prolonged brush with ecological reality” is not a slide
or a free-fall, but a stair-step, then we have time to see this book made required
reading in every U.S. high school. This is both a past and future history book,
written from a perspective that is rare now, but will soon be widely shared.
— Albert Bates,
author of The Post-Petroleum
Survival Guide and Cookbook
“Sweeping historical vision” is not generally a term applied to books
about peak oil, which tend to imagine the coming crisis in terms as
a culmination and a single event. John Michael Greer offers a use-
ful corrective to this narrow vision in a book that is both pragmatic
and visionary. In this deeply engaging book, Greer places us not at
the end of our historical narrative, but at the beginning of a some-
times harrowing, but potentially fascinating transition.
— Sharon Astyk
author of Depletion & Abundance: Life on the
New Home Front and blogger, SharonAstyk.com
At once erudite and entertaining, Greer’s exploration of the dy-
namics of societal collapse couldn’t be more timely. Resource de-
pletion and climate change guarantee that industrial societies will
contract in the decades ahead. Do we face a universally destructive
calamity, or a long transition to a sustainable future? That’s one of
the most important questions facing us, and this book is one of the
very few to address it on the basis of clear reasoning and historical
precedents.
— Richard Heinberg
Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute,
and author of The Party’s Over and Peak Everything
The fall of civilization, according to Greer, does not look like fall-
ing off a cliff but rather “a slide down statistical curves that will
ease modern industrial civilization into history’s dumpster.” Pre-
senting the concept of “catabolic collapse”, Greer brilliantly assists
the reader in deciphering an illusory intellectual polarity consist-
ing on one side of the infinite progress of civilization and on the
other, apocalypse. Not unlike the journey through the mythical
Scylla and Charybdis, Greer appropriately names this odyssey the
Long Descent, and for it, he offers us not only an excellent read,
but tangible tools for navigating the transition.
— Carolyn Baker
author of Speaking Truth to Power
www.carolynbaker.net

New Society Publishers
Cataloging in Publication Data:
A catalog record for this publication is available from
the National Library of Canada.
Copyright © 2008 by John Michael Greer.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Diane McIntosh.
Images: iStock/Dan Tero
Printed in Canada.
First printing July 2008.
Paperback isbn: 978-0-86571-609-4
Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of The Long Descent
should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.
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Contents
Preface ......................................... ix
1 The End of the Industrial Age...................... 1
2 The Stories We Tell Ourselves...................... 35
3 Briefing for the Descent ........................... 73
4 Facing the Deindustrial Age ....................... 113
5 Tools for the Transition ........................... 157
6 The Spiritual Dimension.......................... 191
Afterword ...................................... 221
Appendix: How Civilizations Fall:
A Theory of Catabolic Collapse ................. 225
Bibliography .................................... 241
Notes .......................................... 249
Index........................................... 255
About the Author................................ 259
vii

Preface
The difference between Europeans and Americans, some wag has
suggested, is that Europeans think a hundred miles is a long dis-
tance, and Americans think a hundred years is a long time. I had a
cogent reminder of that witticism in the summer of 2003 when my
wife and I climbed a rocky hill in the Welsh town of Caernarfon.
Spread out below us in an unexpected glory of sunlight was the
whole recorded history of that little corner of the world.
The ground beneath us still rippled with earthworks from the
Celtic hill fort that guarded the Menai Strait more than two and
a half millennia ago. The Roman fort that replaced it was now the
dim brown mark of an old archeological site on low hills off to the
left. Edward I’s great gray castle rose up in the middle foreground,
and the high contrails of RAF jets on a training exercise out over
the Irish Sea showed that the town’s current overlords still main-
tained the old watch. Houses and shops from more than half a
dozen centuries spread eastward as they rose through the waters
of time, from the cramped medieval buildings of the old castle
town straight ahead to the gaudy sign and sprawling parking lot of
the supermarket back behind us.
It’s been popular in recent centuries to take such sights as snap-
shots of some panorama of human progress, but as Caernarfon
unfolded its past to me that afternoon, the view I saw was a dif-
ferent one. The green traces of the hill fort showed the highwater
mark of a wave of Celtic expansion that flooded most of Europe in
its day. The Roman fort marked the crest of another wave whose
long ebbing — we call it the Dark Ages today — still offers up a po-
tent reminder that history doesn’t always lead to better things. The
castle rose as medieval England’s Plantagenet empire neared its
own peak, only to break on the battlefields of Scotland and France
and fall back into the long ordeal of the Wars of the Roses. The
comfortable brick houses of the Victorian era marked the zenith
ix