John
Michael Greer is prolific author, independent scholar, historian of ideas,
cultural critic, Druid leader, environmentalist/conservationist, blogger, novelist,
and occultist/esotericist.
BB
recently discussed with him the issues surrounding his latest work:
BB Thanks
for taking the time to talk to Beetroot today; we're very enthusiastic about
your work - particularly the weekly Archdruid Report.
JMG Thank
you!
BB You've
written much on the apparent decline of industrial society and provided many examples
that illustrate the shocking point that this process is now underway. Could you
summarize one or two of the ones you deem undeniable?
JMG Well,
"undeniable" is hardly the right word, as denial is one of the few growth
industries the industrial world has left. The ongoing frenzy in the US media,
insisting that the trickle of petroleum coming out of shale deposits marks the
beginning of a new age of US energy independence, is a case in point. Still, it
bears remembering that ten years ago, predictions
that the price of
crude oil would rise about US$100 a barrel and stay there, landing most of the
world's industrial nations in permanent economic crisis, were widely disparaged
in the media as ridiculous.
BB In Not
The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and The Myth of Progress, you
discuss our current paradigm as one underpinned by an unwavering belief in
progress. Could you talk a little about how we express that on a societal
scale?
JMG Literally
every plan for the future made in industrial societies, from the smallest to
the largest scale, presupposes growth. Pension funds assume that economic
growth will allow their assets to make money; local and national governments
plan for new housing, new roads, and increased population; business assumes
that a year-over-year increase in gross income and profits is normal -- well, I
could go on for pages. Nobody, anywhere, is making plans for a future of
long-term contraction, and yet as fossil fuels slide down their depletion
curves, long-term contraction is the future we're certain to get.
BB How
unaware do you think most people are of the predicament facing us? Certainly
it's not in general discussion in the media.
JMG "Unaware"
doesn't even begin to touch the depth of our collective blindness to the future
staring us in the face. The most basic assumptions we absorb from our culture
make it all but impossible for most people to think about the possibility of
decline, and I suspect that most people will continue to insist that prolonged
decline and contraction can't happen for decades after it's become an inescapable
fact.
BB Do you
think this notion of progress is disempowering, that perhaps we've been
deliberately encouraged to believe that someone else, some clever scientist or
whatever, will inevitably 'come up with something' to solve our myriad crises or might there be
something else behind our seeming inability to act?
JMG It's
certainly disempowering, but I think it's simplistic to assume that that comes
out of a deliberate decision by somebody or other. During the heyday of cheap
fossil fuel energy, it really did make sense to rely on technological progress
to solve collective problems, as a lot of collective problems did in fact get
solved that way. The difficulty is simply that we became dependent on that sort
of thinking, and remain dependent, even as the cheap energy that made such
thinking adaptive has begun to go away. As so often happens, overreliance on a
set of strategies that worked in the past has become the primary barrier to
finding new possibilities for a very different future.
BB Much of
your work has a spiritual element, and anyone who's familiar with it would also know that you've been
involved in many Western mystery traditions, do you believe that any possible
solution to these crises should recourse to spirituality in some form?
JMG I'm
going to take issue with the way this question is stated, because there are no
solutions to the present spiral of converging crises. Nothing, that is, can
make the crises go away, or keep our current lifestyles intact as we pass
through them. Adaptations, not solutions, are what's needed at this point --
that is, ways of adapting ourselves and our lives to the implacable changes
breaking over industrial civilization now and in the future. Spirituality can
play an important part in those adaptations, but it can't do the job alone; we
also have to change our lives on the most practical, nitty-gritty level. You
can meditate or pray to Gaia all you want, and if you still insist on driving
an SUV and living an SUV lifestyle, you're going to be on the wrong side of the
changes as they hit.
BB Finally,
are you personally optimistic or pessimistic about our immediate prospects - as
in do you see an easy transition as a possibility?
JMG We
tossed the prospect of an easy transition into history's dustbin at the time of
the Thatcher- Reagan counterrevolution, when all the hard work toward
sustainability that had been done in the 1970s was scrapped in the name of a
vacuous free-market ideology that put short term profit and political advantage
ahead of the long term survival of industrial civilization. As the Hirsch
Report pointed out in 2005, preparations for peak oil would have had to begin twenty
years before the peak of conventional petroleum production in order to prevent
massive discontinuities.
The peak of
conventional petroleum production, by an interesting irony, happened in 2005,
right as that report was being leaked to the press. Thus we're at least 27
years too late, and the massive discontinuities are already baked into the
cake. Individuals, families, and communities can still take constructive steps
to prepare for those discontinuities and get through them with as little
suffering as possible, but one way or another it's going to be a very rough
road down from the peak.
