Tag: limits

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…

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…

On the Education of Desire

John Michael Greer335 Comments

As I mentioned a little over a month ago, the competition over which theme would get the fifth Wednesday post in December was almost unparalleled in the enthusiasm it generated and the number of votes the top three themes generated. All three of the themes are worth a post, and I decided well before cognitive…

The Fall and Rise of Peak Oil

John Michael Greer279 Comments

It’s now been close to fifteen years since the Peak Oil movement collapsed and lost whatever temporary grip it had on public awareness. We could doubtless have an interesting conversation along the lines of “did it fall or was it pushed,” and there may be a point to that conversation a little further down the…

Running On Empty

John Michael Greer389 Comments

Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.  Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count…

The Future is a Landscape

John Michael Greer307 Comments

I’ve been reflecting of late about the way that our habitual expectations about change blind us to the way that change actually happens. One of the most important of these is the frankly weird but pervasive notion that the future is a single place, where only one kind of thing happens. It’s always “The Future,”…

Conversation as Commons

John Michael Greer354 Comments

A little while back I fielded yet another attempt to bully me into censoring my comments pages.  It was the same schtick as always. One of my commenters had expressed a point of view to which the would-be censor objected, and rather than being satisfied with presenting an opposing point of view on the forum…

The Last Years of Progress

John Michael Greer540 Comments

No, I’m not going to put much time here into discussing the last few weeks of political gyrations in the US. I grant that it was highly entertaining to watch politicians who spent most of 2020 insisting that rioting is a perfectly acceptable form of political activity throwing a fine tantrum when the other side…

The Dream of a Managed Society

John Michael Greer391 Comments

My essay here two weeks ago on the way that the industrial world’s elites are beginning to back away from environmentalism, using chatter about “ecofascism” as a convenient excuse, got the lively response I expected. To be fair, there was also a certain amount of noise, and a certain number of exasperated demands that I…

The Next Twilight of Environmentalism

John Michael Greer478 Comments

Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not…