Month: July 2026

A Tome of Forbidden Technologies

John Michael Greer561 Comments

Once again we’re near the end of a month with five Wednesdays, and as regular readers of this blog know well, that means that readers got to nominate and vote on the subject of the fifth Wednesday post. This time the theme that won the contest was a glance back over the landscape of rejected…

July 2026 Open Post

John Michael Greer464 Comments

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered)…

Briefing for the Descent, Revisited

John Michael Greer414 Comments

It’s long been a source of wry amusement to me that some of my critics like to insist that I never admit it when I’m wrong. What makes that amusing to me is partly that it’s not true—I’ve discussed my mistakes tolerably often in these online essays—and partly that it’s very clear that what actually…

A Vision: Examination of the Wheel, Concluded

John Michael Greer145 Comments

The last six posts in this sequence have set out all but one of the twenty-eight phases of the Great Wheel, the grand mandala of Yeats’s system. The remaining phase is Phase 1, the beginning and end of the cycle. Now of course in a circle every point is at once the beginning and end,…

Peak Oil: Specter and Substance

John Michael Greer485 Comments

It’s been a long time now since peak oil dropped off the radar screens of public consciousness. Mention it these days and the reaction you’ll get from the few people who remember it at all amounts to “Yeah, that’s right, weren’t people scared back in the day that we were going to run out of…