Six Perspectives on Collapse - Part 3: John Michael Greer's 'The Ecotechnic Future'

I've been a follower of John Michael Greer's writings for some time now. He maintains the blog 'The Archdruid Report', in which he's spent much of the past two years critiquing modern society, from the dual perspective of ecology and a compendium of modern and ancient history. In addition to being one of the prominent social critics of our time, John Michael Greer's online resume presents him as a 'futureologist.' He is the elected leader of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. while you might be tempted to think of the druids as that strange cult that built Stonehenge, their 'religion' is nothing very radical. It's a belief in the spirituality of nature and built around ecology and natural cycles. In addition to this odd role, Greer is a scholar of the occult, and has written books on magic, secret societies, and UFO's. Greer brings some of this discussion into his blog, but it always seems that the purpose of these diversions is to present rational explanations or to explain that what our culture has portrayed as something magical or mystical actually was actually very down-to-earth. Wizards, according to Greer, arose in the wake of the fall of Rome, and were really just renaissance men; engineers, ecologists and social scientists rolled into one. They were highly treasured by leaders in such dark times for their advisory role on very tough questions of the day. Superstitions, according to Greer, can be generally defined as bits of conventional wisdom that have been divorced from their original source of meaning.

'The Ecotechnic Future' presents a rather unique perspective on collapse. It begins with the assertion that human societies are ecologies. This is only really a contrarian viewpoint from the perspective of Western narratives of manifest destiny and of technology enabling us humans to rise above and to conquer nature. Greer's perspective, I would argue, however, is patently true. The fact that we have successfully managed different natural systems for our benefit in the past does not mean we are immune from the natural world or that we are not completely dependent upon natural earth systems for the maintenance of those same societies.

Greer discusses human ecologies in terms of archetypical natural ecologies that undergo periods of succession (or seres). In succession, a new ecological space is first taken up and overrun with an R-selected species. R-selected species grow very fast, use up resources very quickly, but are ultimately unsustainable. In his example of the formation of an old-growth forest, these would be the weeds and undergrowth that first fill an ecological void. As competition for resources becomes important, however, these R-selected species gradually get outcompeted by more energy-efficient K-selected species, like the tall trees, that grow very slowly, but eventually form a climax community that is long-lasting. The longevity does not imply permanency, however. Over time, changing environmental conditions may favor a new R-selected invasive species that would then take over, before the ecosystem transitioned to a new sere of entirely different K-selected species. This process typically occurs in nature on the time frame of centuries or millenia. Greer presents this same dynamic as driving the rise and fall of human ecologies. Writes Greer, "Modern industrial society is the exact equivalent of the first sere of pioneer weeds on a vacant lot - fast growing, resource hungry, inefficient, and at constant risk of replacement by a more efficient K-selected seres as the process of succession unfolds...As it exists today, modern society can best eb described as a scheme for turning resources into pollution as fast as possible. Resource depletion and pollution aren't accidental outcomes of industrialism. They are hardwired into the system: the faster resources turn into pollution , the more the industrial economy prospers, and vice versa. That forms the heart of our predicament. Peak oil is just one symptom of a wider crisis - the radical unsustainability of a severely R-selected human ecology - and trying to deal with the peak of worldwide petroleum production without dealing with the need to move to a broader sustainability will simply guarantee that other symptoms will take its place." This is Leibig's Law of the Minimum applied to industrial society. Oil is the limiting factor on the continued growth of our current society, but were we to be endowed with endless oil, another limiting factor would crop up close on its heels; fresh water, pollution, material shortages, etc. But as it is, oil is the key to understanding the unavoidable transition. Oil, as an energy form is unique and irreplacible. It exists in a concentrated and stable liquid form. It's energy density is tremendous. It can be transported very easily, and thermodynamically, speaking, all the work is already done. Relatively little energy has to be spent on converting the fuel into a useful form. Renewable fuels don't have many of these characteristics, and their much higher price tag reflects the fact that their use is not compatible with the profligate use of energy in today's industrial world. The high energy, water, and land costs, as well as the astronomically high costs of changing to new energy infrastuctures essentially dictate that they will not be used to run the same sort of society in which we currently inhabit (but may find important niches for critical uses of energy).

Greer goes on to present his own view of how the seres of human ecology will change in the near and off into the far distant future. The next sere, which we are currently moving into, according to Greer, is scarcity industrialism. It will be defined by a world still largely hanging on to its old methods of doing things, but gradually, the less productive or marginally economical uses of oil will disappear. We'll likely stop using oil to transport cheap goods around the world. People will drive smaller cars, and plane travel will revert to more of a luxury than a mainstream mode of transportation. Jobs will spring up closer to places of residence, and so forth. Worldwide decline in consumption will be forced to occur at the rate of an additional 4-5% each year, once the full force of oil decline sets in.

As oil becomes critically scarce, the world will be forced to transition to a sere that Greer calls A Salvage Society. In such a society, it won't make economic sense any longer to continue to produce new things and mine new metals. The existing, built infrastructure will then serve as a wonderful repository of raw materials and 'embodied energy' (or energy already spent on the mining, concentration, and production). Skyscrapers, for example, may become a source of salvage for new uses of metals - molded into other, more adaptive forms. Writes Greer, "In the ruins of th old Mayan city of Tikal, excavations have unearthed traces of the people who lived there after the Maya collapse. In this quiet afterword to the city's history, the palaces of the lords of Tikal became the homes of a little community of farmers and hunters who scratched out a living in the ruins of the city and made their cooking fires and their simple pottery in the midst of crumbing splendor. The same thing appears in dead civilizations around the globe. The logic behind it, though, has not often been recognized: when a civilization breaks down, the most efficient economies are most often those that use its legacies as raw material."

The ultimate end goal of these periods of sucession is, hopefully, a climax human ecosystem that Greer calls the 'ecotechnic society'. This society, Greer envisions as a completely sustainable society that uses key technical knowledge and skills to form a new sustainable society. But don't get too excited. This is envisioned to be far into the distant future, when we're all dead, and after many wrenching changes have be wrought. In the meantime, mankind will be driven economically through the other stages, and will have to go through the long processes of adapting its scale (depopulation), its cultures, and its knowledge base. Greer suggests that the best way to drive progress towards an ecotechnic future is to encourage human adaptations that follow the same process as evolution. "Some basic guidelines for adaptive approaches can be sketched out here. First, an adaptive response is scalable- it can be started and tested on a small scale, with modest resources, and scaled up from there if it proves successful. Second, an adaptive response is resilient-it remains useful under changing conditions, and can respond creatively to pressures. Third, an adaptive response is modular - it can be be separated into distinct elements, which can be replaced at different scales and technological levels. Finally, an adaptive response is open- it does not demand assent to any particular ideology or belief system, but rather works with many different ways of thought and life."

Greer identifies a problem solving approach which is most compatible with this form of organic adaptation, that he calls dissensus. Dissensus is the opposite of consensus. It is the idea that everyone should be allowed to have different ideas, implement them on their own, and let the cream rise to the top. It is counter to typical government solutions that seek consensus towards a particular solution and pursue that solution dogmatically, usually on large scales. The dissensus approach resembles commonly held notions of how private businesses should survive by creative innovation and risk. Some will survive long-term, and some will fail - that is the ideal nature of such a system. Greer's proposition then is not necessarily so novel, except that it runs counter to another commonly held ideal that is central to our culture: the worship of the archetypical tragic hero. The tragic hero in stories relies on grand plans ad ideologies, and put everything on the line for an ideal. The romanticism associated with the tragic hero underlies a lot of decisions that we collectively make as a society and is the basis for hope and grand dreams. But as Greer points out, the tragic hero always dies in the end. Greer offers the comic hero as an alternative. The comic hero muddles through life, making wrong turns, "stumbling cluelessly through situations with no grander agenda than coming out the other side with a whole skin...unlike tragic heroes, they do usually come out alive on the other side, and often bring the rest of the cast with them." Besides following a more organic approach towards problem solving, the comic hero approach is also better able to succeed because of the shifting landscapes in the future. As Greer puts it, "Those who try to plan an ecotechnic society today are in the position of a hapless engineer tasked in 1947 with drafting a plan to produce software for computers that did not exist yet."

Much of the rest of Greer's book is devoted to understanding how various aspects of out lives and societies fit into the context of the sea change ahead of us; dispelling myths, suggesting positive avenues to pursue, and suggesting which mores can be thrown out and which should be saved. This discussion is broken down into seven sections:

1. FOOD: Greer laments the fact that industrial agriculture treats soil as a barren infertile matrix, that is pumped with artificial, and unsustainable quantities of nutrients and despoiled with dangerous chemicals. The industrial approach is anathema to the natural ecosystem approach that is so central to Greer's druid beliefs. In the industrial food production model, nutrients are treated as a raw material that must be mined, and treated on the tail end as garbage to be disposed of. Sustainable food production on the other hand must close the nutrient cycle. The gist of his argument is that there are proven, safe and effective ways to turn plant waste and human and animal waste into valuable fertlilizers, restoring the nutrients lost from the agricultural process. They rely on composting and humanure techniques. I personally find the concept of humanure very intriguing. I've witnessed first-hand from the Cheapeake Bay Foundation's composting of human waste that once the composting process is complete, the remains smell very benign. Greer mentions that the harmful bacteria which make our wastes smell are destroyed in the heat given off by a proper compost pile.

Greer suggests that the organic farming revolution represents a huge step in the right direction, and one of the few movements towards sustainability that is really gaining large-scale traction.

2. HOME - A shift needs to be made from designing homes for aesthetics and uniformity to letting form follow from function. Homes need to work with natural processes and the sun to provide the right thermal conditions with a minimum of external energy input. Homes need to be designed that are responsible for producing some of their own energy. There are cheap solutions for some of these things, as Greer points out, like straw-bale walls that are stable and weatherproof, and provide 3 times the thermal insulation of typical stud walls. The unfortunate predicament that we are in is that we will be more or less stuck with much of the housing stock we currently have, as the complete replacement of much of today's cities and suburbs would be prohibitively expensive, in energy terms.

Greer insists on the importance of home economics - learning to produce valuable things for consumption by th family within the home, rather than seeking to pay for externally-created goods with earned income outside the home. We, as a society, says Greer, need to learn how to be proficient in a wide range of different skills, or else we are liable to fall into the 'specialization trap.' To illustrate the dangers of becoming overly specialized, Greer gives an example from the fall of Rome: "The pottery works at La Graufesenque in southern Gaul, for instance, shipped exquisite products throughout the western empire and beyond it. Ceramics bearing the La Graufesenque stamp have been found in Denmark and Eastern Germany, hundreds of miles past Roman frontiers. Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots and watertight roof tiles. All this ended when Rome fell. When archaeologists opened the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, the pottery they found told a stark tale of technological collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What's more, most of it had to be imported because the potter's wheel dropped entirely out of use in Britain - one of many technologies lost in a cascading collapse that took the island down to levels of impoverishment more extreme than anything since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before...Huge pottery factories like the one at La Graufesenque, which used specialist labor to turn out quality goods in volume, coud make a profit only by marketing their wares across much of a continent, using far-flung networks of transport and exchange to get products to consumers who wanted pottery and had denarii to spend...The political implosion of the Roman Empire thus turned an economic advantage into a fatal vulnerability. As transport and exchange networks came apart, the Roman economy went down with it, and that economy had relied on centralied production and specialized labor for so long that no one knew how to replace it with local resources."

So a practical solution that Greer proposes is to keep one family member employed in the home economy. When the home economy can be made productive enough, it can lessen or negate the burden caused by the lack of a second income stream. This feeds back into the dire need for better architecture. Making the home a productive place depends on having a properly sized kitchen and space for craftsmanship, room to garden, good lighting, etc.

3. WORK- Greer's views on the future of work mirror those of economist Jeff Rubin. The two factors (Economies of scale and cheap labor) that have driven globalization in the direction of fewer and fewer, larger and larger business manufacturing goods on the other side of the world will gradually be overcome by diseconomies of distance. Transport, (and I would add, especially overland transport) will become very expensive, which will spell a gradual end to cheap products made overseas. Declining fossil fuel availability will mean market-driven prioritization of what still makes sense to be made far away, and what, out of sheer necessity, must be made locally, with minimal energy inputs. An economy is a system that takes in energy, raw materials, and human labor and produces the necessities and luxuries of human existence. For much of human history, the energy input to the system existed primarily as inputs to the human labor component (i.e. food). The past 100 years has seen a sweeping change in the balance of inputs. technology, and especially cheap energy has facilitated the substitution of most of the human labor input with energy. A very many people in the past decades have worked at jobs that were purely superfluous positions designed to find additional ways in which to flounder the abundant energy at our disposal. As cheap energy becomes increasingly scarce, a balance will be restored between these three inputs. Not only will the manufacturing come home again, but labor, especially for tasks that aren't strictly necessary, or aren't done particularly efficiently by fossil-fuel powered machines will return to being performed by human labor. Here are the careers that Greer envisions will be in high demand during deindustrialization:

-local trades (he gives examples of butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, soap an beer makers)

-engineering of low-tech transportation networks, like railroads and canals

- salvage trades (demolition, recycling, small appliance repair, etc)

- ecologists (those who understand how to use natural flows and cycles to perform many of the societal functions that fossil fuels use today. For example, replacing insecticides by natural methods of attracting the predators of unwanted pests, and creating swales for flood prevention)

ENERGY- much of this section is devoted to dispelling myths about technology, energy, and progress. He discusses the innovation fallacy, common among economists that innovation can always trump resource limits. He notes that Nazi Germany had the most innovative technology on the planet, but one of the biggest factors in its defeat was a lack of oil. The Germans developed coal to liquids technology during the war to provide liquid fuel for the ongoing war. This technology actually had a negative net-energy, meaning it took more energy to mine, transport, and process the coal into liquid fuel than was avaiable in the fuel itself. The only value in this process was the form of the fuel. The airplanes required liquid fuel. The process, however, was enormously expensive in energy terms, and only made sense in a war economy. In a normal economy, the lesson is that technical feasibility is much less important in novel energy technologies than net energy is. Net energy is very strongly correlated with energy price, and for good reason. Many people advocate very strongly for nuclear energy, and forsee breeder reactors as the solution to our energy problems, and don't understand why we're not building more nuclear plants. The answer lies in its low net energy, and therefore, prohibitively high price. Next, Greer brings up the issue of infrastructure. Often new energy sources are touted that could take the place of petroleum. Such a transition runs into the paradox of produciton: "If energy prices are high because supplies are limited, the obvious solution is to increase the supply by producing more energy. At the same time, if this requires replacing one energy resource with another that cannot be produced, distributed, or consumed using the identical infrastructure, the immediate impact of such a replacement will be to raise energy prices, not lower them. The direct and indirect energy costs of building the new energy system become a source of additional demand that, intersecting with limited supply, drive prices up even further than they otherwise would rise." When energy prices are already so high that they are causing economic turmoil, this becomes quite the predicament, indeed. The only way out, is to invest first in large-scale conservation programs that can free up the required energy. The point of this whole discussion is that conservation will take a much more prominent role in the coming years than any large-scale switch to a new energy source will.

COMMUNITY - Like many other writers on peak oil, Greer stresses the need to reinvest ourselves in our communities - to develop local networks that have some reasonable level of division of labor. Greer has as much contempt for the idea that one's personal solution to peak oil should entail a flight to isolation as he does for the sprawling mega-cities of today's industrial world. Greer offers that a city of 20,000 to 200,000 people, situated in an agricultural area might provide the optimal backdrop for a post-peak world.

CULTURE - The main point to be made here is that culture IS memory. "An authentic culture roots into the collective experience of a community's past and from this source draws meaning for the present and tools for the future. Thus, culture is a constant negotiation between the living and the dead, as new conditions call for reinterpretation of past experience and redefine the meanings that are relevant and tools that are useful. When a society gives up on these negotiations and abandons the link with its past, what remains is not originality, but stasis, in which a persistent set of common assumptions and popular narratives are rediscovered and rehashed endlessly under a veneer of novelty. Even the most hackneyed notions can count on being described as new and innovative ideas unlike anything anyone has thought before...[An example] is the profusion of claims that everything will be all right if only the right people are given unchecked power. This sort of thinking has become unpleasantly common in some parts of the alternative scene...The arguments used to justify these schemes differ only in minor details from the ones used by defenders of aristocratic privelege in 19th century Europe...There is a way out of this paradox of unoriginal originality though its at least as paradoxical: the way to get genuinely new ideas is to deliberately learn and value the old ones." One of the main purposes of Greer's book is actually to promote actively passing on the valuable parts of our culture and the lessons of the past through the coming collapse of industrial society. He notes that during past collapses, it is often this kind of informaiton that is lost. We only have the knowledge of Greek philosophy because the texts of Greek scholars were transcribed and kept in monastic libraries. Otherwise, this knowledge would have never made it to the renaissance, and would not have provided the background for which the founders of our own country, like Thomas Jefferson, constructed the rules by which our society operates.