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…

June 2026 Open Post

John Michael Greer443 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)…

A Game of Musical Chairs

John Michael Greer333 Comments

Some turning points in history are impossible to miss. They involve battle-cries and the clash of weapons, gatherings making decisions that can never be undone, and equally obvious events. Then there are the turning points that slip past unnoticed by most of the people whose lives they will overturn. I’ve come to think that one…

A Vision: The Final Quarter

John Michael Greer134 Comments

In this post we will complete our first pass around the wheel of the lunar phases, the central symbolic mandala of William Butler Yeats’s occult teaching. It’s been a long journey from the first stirrings of consciousness, three quarters of the way around the great arc of spiritual unfoldment Yeats traces out. Now the journey…

Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz

John Michael Greer263 Comments

I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another…

May 2026 Open Post

John Michael Greer459 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)…

Situationism: The Creation of Situations

John Michael Greer187 Comments

Some of my readers may be surprised that with everything else happening in the world, I’m returning to the ongoing discussion of Situationism, that bizarre mixed breed that came about when European artists who hadn’t lost their creative gonads ended up digging their way into a pen full of Marxists in heat. Still, there’s a…

A Vision: The Third Quarter

John Michael Greer107 Comments

With this post we have left behind the halfway mark on our journey around the Great Wheel of the lunar phases, the primary symbol of Yeats’s symbolic system. The soul making this journey—your soul, dear reader, and mine, and everyone else’s, in the cosmology of A Vision—has completed the long journey from a purely collective…

Companions on the Road: A Retrospective

John Michael Greer387 Comments

“This year’s Earth Day in Ashland, Oregon, where I live, featured an interfaith service at the local Unitarian church, and I wasn’t too surprised to get a call inviting me to be one of the presenters.” That was the first sentence in the first blog post I ever posted, and it crept tentatively onto the…

War In Heaven?

John Michael Greer287 Comments

As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, the topic of the fifth Wednesday post here gets decided by the readership via a flurry of nominations and votes. Since I have the weirdest as well as the best commentariat on the internet, fifth Wednesday topics so far…