A book about peak oil and the possible future(s) resulting. Some ideas in here worth reading if you are interested in this kind of thing. Greer approaches things from a little different angle than many writers, based on his sort of quasi-mystical druid religion I would reckon -- he talks a lot about the stories or myths we (cultures) have and tell ourselves to make sense of the world. He manages to pull this off quite well, without making you think he is some guy who lives in the woods looking for elves and fairies (or is that faeries?). A good read. ( )

A book about peak oil and the possible future(s) resulting. Some ideas in here worth reading if you are interested in this kind of thing. Greer approaches things from a little different angle than many writers, based on his sort of quasi-mystical druid religion I would reckon -- he talks a lot about the stories or myths we (cultures) have and tell ourselves to make sense of the world. He manages to pull this off quite well, without making you think he is some guy who lives in the woods looking for elves and fairies (or is that faeries?). A good read. ( )

I am a long time reader of Greer's blog. This book is pretty close to a collection of his blog posts - or maybe the blog posts were sections of the book as it was being written. The book does read quite smoothly and coherently - it does not read at all like a bunch of blog posts.

The basic argument of the book is that the enormous expansion since the Industrial Revolution was driven primarily by the exploitation of fossil fuels. We are nearing the midpoint of the extraction process, so we are entering into a period of decline that will be of similar duration and magnitude as the expansion. Greer discusses several aspects of this transition, including the challenge of acknowledging it.

Just about every alive ought to read this book! It is not particularly brilliant or beautiful. But the perspective is of utmost importance. ( )

This review appears in the December 2009 Version of the SRRT (Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association) Newsletter
www.libr.org/srrt/news/current.html

by Mike Marlin, the blind librarian

Greer, John Michael. The long descent.

Peak oil is a topic rarely mentioned in the field of librarianship, and yet the repercussions for the future of libraries and librarians will likely be affected irreparably by the attrition and scarcity of fossil fuels. There are several books on the topic of peak oil – the point at which 50% of the world’s supply of oil has been tapped, thus leading to the downside of the bell curve slope of its discovery and excavation. I have read just a few, and was amazed and delighted to read such a clear and concise tome about humanity’s short 300 year dependence on fossil fuels and the implications of the gradual loss of those resources. The Long Descent is a compendium of Greer’s internet writings over the past several years which he has fleshed out with many new examples and analyses.

Citing the brief reality check first caused by the oil crisis/shortage of the 1970s and the reduction in use as well as urgency toward developing alternate energy sources to remedy that crisis and its subsequent abandonment, Greer begins by warning that we have lived so long in a “dream of economic and technological expansion that most people take it for granted that it’s the inevitable shape of the future.” Greer explores the limits of growth and provides an in-depth explication of the two polarized reactions generally found in modern criticism of peak oil, and by extrapolation the global warming/climate crisis: the myth of perpetual progress vs. the myth of imminent apocalypse. Carefully deconstructing these two myths, which I agree are quite prevalent, he posits a middle approach, an age of deindustrialization over the next several hundred years featuring times of crises punctuated by periods of stability and perceived improvement.

Greer believes the long descent will be defined by a catabolic collapse, in other words a decline in which society feeds upon itself or consumes more resources than it can produce. Alternate or renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc.) , though important to cultivate and utilize to a great extent, will never produce the net energy required to replace the energy of coal, gas, and oil - earth’s carbon core resulting from millions of years of organic plant decay compacted by shifting pressures and warmed by the sun. Technological innovations or new governments or the crash of industrial society replaced by some utopia are all ineffectual *solutions* that ignore a central tenet of this book; peak oil is a predicament, not a problem. There are no solutions, just responses and ultimately a shift in expectations needed as we move toward deindustrialization, an eventual social, intellectual, and spiritual predicament.

Greer examines historical civilizations and their declines, the aforementioned myths and their root causes, the arguments of both lifeboat community and survivalist proponents, and the trends in transportation, medicine, and leisure/work, that will occur over the next few hundred years of incremental change. Among those trends are a precipitous decline in health due to current reliance on fossil fuels in the health industry. A practical response would be for each of us to reclaim management of our own health.

Greer advises a paradigm shift away from the prosthetic society we have created in which we accept the slow demise of the industrial era, eschew the myths of progress or apocalypse, and begin to embrace a real notion of community, honing new skills such as organic farming and other practical skill sets. What does this mean for librarianship, especially when the electrical server farms have withered and we can no longer rely on computers? We’ll certainly have time to recreate all those decommissioned or destroyed card catalogs! The return to an agrarian age that Greer foresees will likely mean an increased role for libraries as providers of a different type of lifelong learning. There will probably be fewer libraries and librarians, however.

There will be hard choices for how our remaining finite resources are utilized. Greer wryly asks: “If it’s necessary to choose one or the other, is the capacity to print books more or less important than the capacity to treat illnesses that herbs won’t cure?” Information about organic farming, farmer’s markets, reforging tools, etc. will be indispensable and could be a vital part of library collections. AT one point Greer remarks that librarians are already struggling to preserve disintegrating collections of 19th century books,” so what will happen as CDs and DVDs begin to disintegrate in a low-tech future? His prediction is the serious winnowing of books and other library resources into smaller collections that may someday require hand copying. We could use our current industrial resources sparingly to cushion the transition to a future world of deindustrialized libraries, all the while planning our return to a reliance on human memory, thought, and preservation of materials, triaging existing technologies and bringing discarded ones back into the fold.

The Long Descent is thought provoking and, I believe, essential for its conceptual foundation and practical advice as we move further along the road toward the first phase of deindustrialization, the initial resource depletion crisis we will probably experience in our lifetime. There are several other good reviews of this book, including rebukes for its failure to focus more on the implications of climate change and endangered species, but general unanimity abounds about the importance of the themes discussed in The Long Descent.

. Our librarian descendents will inherit a slowly adjusting world. Our and their decisions for how to cope with energy resource scarcity must be discussed and injected into the communication within ALA and other professional outlets. – Mike Marlin

John Michael Greer’s web site, The Archdruid Report, can be found at http:// thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com

Full review located at http://paganbookreviews.com/2008/08/27/the-long-descent-john-michael-greer/