Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
John Michael Greer acknowledges that his aim with Dark Age America is an ambitious one. The book is his attempt to sketch out the likely course of industrial society over the next 500 years, with a particular emphasis on the United States. These days, the word progress has come to mean deterioration far more often than improvement. This is the central tenet of The Retro Future,…
So what if, to the extent we live in a place where we can, we turn disappointment and bitterness into deep, perhaps sad, reflection?
We are at the point, now, where we can replace the usual definition of wealth as having lots of money, with a definition based on surplus.
Recently a friend asked me what I thought about Bernie Sanders, especially with issues of sustainability in mind. This is my answer.
Capital of every kind has to be maintained, and as a civilization adds to its stock of capital, the costs of maintenance rise steadily, until the burden they place on the civilization’s available resources can’t be supported any longer.
Very few people will read this book without bristling at least once at things Greer says…which I regard as one of its virtues.
For the last few weeks, the south of England has been flooded, to a degree that hasn’t been seen for years – even though ‘the floods’ have become, quietly unacknowledged, an annual event now.
For those of us who’ve been watching the course of industrial civilization’s decline and fall, the last few weeks have been a bit of a wild ride.
Last weeks C-Realm podcast features an interview with Kevin Carson, following up on themes of ephemeralization and freedom which Carson has recently written on.
I’m pleased to note that the conversation about ephemeralization and catabolic collapse launched a few weeks back by futurist Kevin Carson, and continued in several blogs since then, has taken a promising new turn.
John Michael Greer (“The Flight to the Ephemeral,” The Archdruid Report, Oct. 2) was kind enough to address an earlier post of mine on this blog a few weeks back (“When Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell From Catabolic Collapse,” P2P Foundation Blog, Sept. 19). Here are my responses, in no particular order of importance.
The unavoidable tradeoff between efficiency and resilience can be understood easily enough by considering an ordinary bridge. All bridges these days have vastly more structural strength than they need in order to support their ordinary load of traffic. This is inefficient, to be sure, but it makes the bridges resilient; they can withstand high winds, unusually heavy loads, deferred maintenance, and other challenges without collapsing.
