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The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age Paperback – September 1, 2008

4.3 out of 5 stars 119

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The author of Dark Age America shares a harrowing vision of the future and what you can do to take action and make change.

Americans are expressing deep concern about US dependence on petroleum, rising energy prices and the threat of climate change. Unlike the energy crisis of the 1970s, however, there is a lurking fear that, now, the times are different, and the crisis may not easily be resolved.

The Long Descent examines the basis of such fear through three core themes:

  • Industrial society is following the same well-worn path that has led other civilizations into decline, a path involving a much slower and more complex transformation than the sudden catastrophes imagined by so many social critics today.
  • The roots of the crisis lie in the cultural stories that shape the way we understand the world. Since problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them, these ways of thinking need to be replaced with others better suited to the needs of our time.
  • It is too late for massive programs for top-down change; the change must come from individuals.

Hope exists in actions that range from taking up a handicraft or adopting an “obsolete” technology, through planting an organic vegetable garden, taking charge of your own health care or spirituality, and building community.

Focusing eloquently on constructive adaptation to massive change, this book will have wide appeal.

Praise for The Long Descent

“At once erudite and entertaining, Greer’s exploration of the dynamics of societal collapse couldn’t be more timely.” ―Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, and author of The Party’s Over and Peak Everything

“Candidates for public office, and the voters who elect them, should be required to read [Greer’s] accurate diagnosis of the terminal illness our fossil-energy subsidized industrial civilization has too long denied. He shows how stubborn belief in perpetual progress blinded us to the abyss toward which we were speeding and thus impeded wise preparation for our unavoidable descent into a deindustrial age. We must hope that the array of mitigating tools he prescribes may yet render that descent down the back side of Hubbert’s peak less devastating than it will be if we insistently claim a right to be prodigal in using this finite Earth.” ―Willam R. Catton, Jr., author of Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change


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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Candidates for public office, and the voters who elect them, should be required to read John Michael Greer’s accurate diagnosis of the terminal illness our fossil-energy subsidized industrial civilization has too long denied. He shows how stubborn belief in perpetual progress blinded us to the abyss toward which we were speeding and thus impeded wise preparation for our unavoidable descent into a deindustrial age. We must hope that the array of mitigating tools he prescribes may yet render that descent down the back side of Hubbert’s peak less devastating than it will be if we insistently claim a right to be prodigal in using this finite Earth."
― William R. Catton, Jr. author of
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
"This is a very wise and timely message for a nation facing enormous practical challenges. Greer’s generosity of spirit and essential kindness are habits of mind and heart very much worth emulating."
― James Howard Kunstler author of
World Made by Hand and The Long Emergency

When we find ourselves falling off the lofty peak of infinite progress, our civilization’s mythology predisposes our imaginations to bypass reality altogether, and to roll straight for the equally profound abyss of the Apocalypse. Greer breaks this spell, and instead offers us a view on our deindustrial future that is both carefully reasoned and grounded in spirituality.
― Dmitry Orlov author of
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects

"If, as Greer suggests, our“prolonged brush with ecological reality” is not a slide or a free-fall, but a stair-step, then we have time to see this book made required reading in every U.S. high school. This is both a past and future history book, written from a perspective that is rare now, but will soon be widely shared."
― Albert Bates, author of
The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook

"“Sweeping historical vision”is not generally a term applied to books about peak oil, which tend to imagine the coming crisis in terms as a culmination and a single event. John Michael Greer offers a useful corrective to this narrow vision in a book that is both pragmatic and visionary. In this deeply engaging book, Greer places us not at the end of our historical narrative, but at the beginning of a some- times harrowing, but potentially fascinating transition."
― Sharon Astyk author of
Depletion & Abundance: Life on the New Home Front and blogger, SharonAstyk.com

"At once erudite and entertaining, Greer’s exploration of the dynamics of societal collapse couldn’t be more timely. Resource depletion and climate change guarantee that industrial societies will contract in the decades ahead. Do we face a universally destructive calamity, or a long transition to a sustainable future? That’s one of the most important questions facing us, and this book is one of the very few to address it on the basis of clear reasoning and historical precedents."
― Richard Heinberg Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, and author of
The Party’s Over and Peak Everything

"The fall of civilization, according to Greer, does not look like falling off a cliff but rather “a slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history’s dumpster.” Presenting the concept of “catabolic collapse”, Greer brilliantly assists the reader in deciphering an illusory intellectual polarity consist- ing on one side of the infinite progress of civilization and on the other, apocalypse. Not unlike the journey through the mythical Scylla and Charybdis, Greer appropriately names this odyssey
The Long Descent, and for it, he offers us not only an excellent read, but tangible tools for navigating the transition."
― Carolyn Baker author of
Speaking Truth to Power carolynbaker.net

Book Description

A harrowing but ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of the age of oil.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Society Publishers; First Edition (September 1, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0865716099
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0865716094
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.58 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 119

About the author

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John Michael Greer
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Born in the gritty Navy town of Bremerton, Washington and raised in the south Seattle suburbs, I began writing about as soon as I could hold a pencil. SF editor George Scithers' dictum that all would-be writers have a million words of so of bad prose in them, and have to write it out, pretty much sums up the couple of decades between my first serious attempt to write a book and my first published book, "Paths of Wisdom", which appeared in 1996. These days I live in Cumberland, Maryland with my spouse Sara; serve as presiding officer -- Grand Archdruid is the official title -- of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), a Druid order founded in 1912; and write in half a dozen nonfiction fields, nearly all of them focused on the revival of forgotten ideas, insights, and traditions of practice from the rubbish heap of history.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
119 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2009
People who work in the area of energy efficiency programs and follow the evidence and projections of climate change realize that nearly all of our current energy conservation efforts, while creating a useful program delivery infrastucture, are incapable of mitigating the major effects of climate change. They are not play acting within the terms given by our current misguided cost benefit tests, but they are just shadow boxing given the actual physical conditions we face already for much of our population, and soon for almost everyone (except perhaps the very rich). At the same time, people who work in the energy area tend to be aware that conventional economics is not materially true since it does not take account of the second law of thermodyanmics and the fact that it takes increasingly more energy to create a new unit of energy so as we deal with the effects of climate change we will face increasing unit costs for the use of electricity, oil, and natural gas. This will affect food supply and health and public resources just when we need them to deal with the climate problems. Together, these problems frame the immediate human future.

This book, with its projection of catabolic collapse points the way to a hopeful human future full of possibilites for community development and reasonable institutions and personal and family lives as we devolve away from the bright few years in which the earth's store of energy resources was wasted in lifestyles bound up with the foolish systems of capitalism, globalization of production, greed, and alienation from community and locality. The pattern of collapse described by Greer is quite different from the usual science fiction type pictures. It is one we can live with as population dramatically contracts and we evolve in new directions with less and less access to the leverage provided by easy access to energy resources. Evidently, what Druids do is conserve things like useful plants and simple technologies that we will need to survive.

The first three chapters of this book are excellent and should be "must reading" for every thoughtful person. The middle is dull, but the writer is, after all, the Head of and Order of Druids and slipping a bit of religion into the middle is probably what we would expect if the Pope were asked to write an excellent techical book on engineering, so it is probably fair. The next to the last chapter could have been left out. The last is, again, excellent. It also has practical advice about what one can do, now, that is real and useful.

I did not know we still had Druids, but if this is representative of what they do, then, like the monks who kept culture alive during dark ages, they are some of the most important people because they have taken on a certain representative responsibility for all of us to gather and conserve resources that will be needed, and to see clearly.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2008
While John Michael Greer's "The Long Descent" does indeed do an excellent job of explaining the concept of peak oil, i.e. that the world's production of fossil fuels has, or is about to begin declining, Greer goes far beyond the usual, mostly technological and scientific approaches. In fact, Greer clearly and convincingly explains that peak oil and the dependence on cheap fossils fuels is not a problem, ie, there is no "solution", but rather a predicament that simply must be accepted and dealt with.

Greer brilliantly exposes the true roots of the dilemma of modern industrial civilization which lie in culture and social organization. Greer is even able to step back from the modern materialistic/scientific world view in order to understand the deep historical dynamics that now bedevil contemporary civilization.

Greer's writing is always logical, clear and straightforward, giving a very lucid explanation of an area that is often difficult to think about due to our shared and usually unconscious cultural assumptions. Through the use of concrete data, historical analogies and simple logic, Greer's exposition of the causes, results and subsequent effects of the combination of the materialistic worldview of the Enlightenment and cheap fossil fuels is coherent and compelling.

Greer's views have had both an intellectual and practical effect on me personally. He has changed my thinking on likely course of the future for contemporary civilization. I even moved to a small city in the Midwest from a huge Eastern conurbation based on his writings! While I agree that the end of industrial civilization cannot be solved, Greer does offer extremely useful guidance for personal and community action to assist in ameliorating the inevitable difficulties of "the Long Descent"
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Top reviews from other countries

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Arndt Stühmeier
5.0 out of 5 stars Apokalypse? Not now.
Reviewed in Germany on May 17, 2014
In ähnlichem Ton wie "The long emergency" von James Howard Kunstler analysiert Greer hier nüchtern und sachlich, wie sich unsere Welt, unsere gesamte Gesellschaft verändern wird, wenn erst einmal allen klar wird, daß das Zeitalter der billigen fossilen Energie endgültig vorbei ist.
Statt eines apokalyptischen Augenblicksszenarios entwickelt sich hier der Ausblick auf einen langen, zähen und auch schmerzhaften Abstieg aus dem Jetzt in das neue Deindustrielle Zeitalter.

Greer räumt auf mit den üblichen Gechichten vom Untergang der Menschheit, der so nicht stattfinden wird, ebenso aber auch mit den absurden Träumereien über eine Zukunft des endlosen Wachstums, die bereits heute nicht mehr realistisch ist - und es auch niemals wirklich war. Diese Entzauberung von immer wieder gern benutzen und gehörten Alltagsmythen macht den besonderen Flair dieses Buches aus.

Persönlich bin ich der Meinung, daß Greer insgesamt noch deutlich zu optimistisch ist in seiner Darstellung, denn die soziologischen Folgen der angesprochenen Entwicklungen werden von ihm stellenweise nur gestreift. Ein bißchen mehr Apokalypse wird die Zukunft wohl doch beiinhalten. Vermutlich hält er die Menschheit einfach für schlauer und abgeklärter, als ich das tue, deswegen gibt es dafür trotzdem keinen Punktabzug und volle Sterne ;-)
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Gavin Webber
5.0 out of 5 stars A better collapse prediction
Reviewed in Australia on April 12, 2014
This book makes better sense than many collapse predictions. Greer uses historical events to show that our path is not one of sudden calamity, but one of small steps down the other side of peak oil and resource depletion. Good read for those die-hard doomers that need a reality check.
Anne Patterson
5.0 out of 5 stars The long view
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2010
John Michael Greer's the Long Descent is a very valuable addition to the Peak Oil literature. He brings a unique deep historical perspective, combined with an ecological perspective on human societies. He really does present the long view, thinking ahead not just decades but centuries into the future. He analyses the role two powerful narratives have on our view of what is facing us - the myth of progress and the myth of the acopalyse - and makes it clear how both of these are blocking us as individuals and as a society from facing up to the likely future of gradual decline into a post fossil fuel society. The book was published in 2008, before oil hit $147 a barrel and before the financial crash, but is remarkably prescient in predicting both of these as likely occurences. He paints a broad canvas but also gives some useful ideas on how we as individuals can adapt to a post-peak world, including rethinking our current work and if it will be viable in the coming years.
17 people found this helpful
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C. McAlister
4.0 out of 5 stars Eyopening, if a little academic
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2010
An eye opening book, and a pleasant change to all the apocalyptic survivalist stuff out there addressing peak oil. It's a real eyeopener, but could have done with a more ruthless edit! Chapter 2 and the final chapter were just too academic and flowery for me (on myths and spirituality - I recommend just skimming, or even skipping altogether).

The rest, whilst a little repetitive in places, was a real revelation for me. There seems to be a growing force building behind the idea that we can emerge from peak oil in a positive way through living on a smaller, community scale - getting more out of life at the same time (see "The Moneyless Man" for inspiration too - a brilliant read!). If you are concerned about the way things are going and looking for hope about the future, looking for some meaning in this consumerist world in which we live, this book is really worth a read. An education.
6 people found this helpful
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snowzz
5.0 out of 5 stars Easy read, interesting ideas.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 27, 2012
A very refreshing middle ground between the apocalyptical "Preppers" and the head-in-the-sand ostriches. For a book that is essentially a hybrid history/economics text book it was a remarkably easy read, and i found myself frequently reading out passages to my husband. If you feel you should be doing something to prepare for the changes in the coming decades, but you have no intention of giving up the easy oil-fuelled life you have right now until you absolutely have to, this book is the one for you.
2 people found this helpful
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