The Long Descent

John Michael Greer Archdruid

photo credit: Sara Greer

Author Biography

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.
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Favorite Books

An eclectic mess of fiction and nonfiction: Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill," M. John Harrison's "The Pastel City," John Michell's "The View Over Atlantis" (a grand visionary prose poem too often read as fact), Edgar Pangborn's "Davy," Theodore Roszak's "Where the Wasteland Ends," J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," and Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History," among too many others.

What I'm Reading

Mircea Eliade's "The Myth of the Eternal Return," Edwin Way Teale's entomological classic "Grassroot Jungles," and a decades-old programmed instructional text on using an oscilloscope by Charles H. Roth Jr.

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Synopsis:

A harrowing but ultimately hopeful vision of the aftermath of the age of oil, The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age explores the approaching end of an industrial civilization based on cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy. Rather than the sudden catastrophes imagined by so many social critics today, The Long Descent explores the possibility that our civilization is facing the well-worn path of gradual, uneven decline that so many other cultures have followed in their time, and proposes concrete steps to deal with a future very different from the ones our cultural narratives lead us to expect.

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