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John Michael Greer

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1. 1970's (1)
2. climate change (1)
3. dissensus (1)
4. ecology (1)
5. energy (1)
6. food (1)
7. John Michael Greer (11)
8. movements (1)
9. peak oil (2)
10. politics (2)

1. “This “empire of time,” of course, consisted of the American fossil fuel industries. Where an empire extracts wealth from other countries for the benefit of an imperial nation, fossil fuel exploitation extracts wealth in the form of very cheap thermal energy from the distant past for the benefit of one or more nations in the present.”

   www.readability.com/articles/jxp0qvfo?legacy_bookmarklet=1
   • John Michael Greer
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2. “Put more simply, an empire is a wealth pump, a device to enrich one nation at the expense of others. The mechanism of the pump varies from empire to empire and from age to age; the straightforward exaction of tribute that did the job for ancient Egypt, and had another vogue in the time of imperial Spain, has been replaced in most of the more recent empires by somewhat less blatant though equally effective systems of unbalanced exchange.”

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   • John Michael Greer
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3. “The vast majority of white Americans are descended from people who turned their backs on the static ways of the Old World to chase the dream of a better life on the other side of the ocean, and that pattern of seeking a new life elsewhere has repeated far more often than not with each generation. One of the many factors that make white Americans so clueless about nonwhite Americans, in turn, is that that experience isn’t shared with the other peoples of this nation.”

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   • John Michael Greer
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4. “If you’re going to be poor in the future, and you are, you might as well learn how to do it competently. It’s entirely possible to lead a life that’s poor in terms of money, material goods, and energy consumption, and profoundly rich—far richer than most contemporary lifestyles—in human values.”

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   • John Michael Greer
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5. “The myths you really believe in, of course, are the ones you don’t notice that you believe.”

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   • John Michael Greer
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6. “when a situation is unsustainable in the near term, the benefits that might be gained by clinging to it very often come with a prodigious cost, and the costs that have to be paid to abandon it very often come with considerable benefits.”

   thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/05/downside-of-dependence.html
   • John Michael Greer
   • peak oil
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7. “It’s easy to make fun of the excesses and eccentricities of the era: the air of well-scrubbed, fresh-faced innocence, say, that was so assiduously cultivated by the exact equivalents of those who now cultivate an equally artificial aura of sullen despair.”

   thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
   • 1970's
   • John Michael Greer
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8. “It’s useful, in making sense of this cultural shift, to remember that there are at least two kinds of cynicism. There’s the kind – variously weary, amused, hurt, or icily dangerous – that comes naturally to those who have too often seen others betray their ideals. Then there’s the other kind – sullen, jeering, brittle, and defensive – that comes just as naturally to those who betray their own ideals, and makes them lash out angrily whenever anything too reminiscent of that betrayal flicks them on the raw. It’s the latter kind, I’m convinced, that shapes the mood of America today; the disquieting sounds that murmur through the crawlspaces of our collective imagination, waking us abruptly at night, are the echoes of a profoundly troubled national conscience.”

   www.readability.com/articles/7ikumtjd?legacy_bookmarklet=1
   • John Michael Greer
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9. “The American people accepted equivalent shifts with tolerably good grace in the Second World War, and then again in the Seventies. The crucial factor in both these previous cases, though, was that the people who were advocating them were generally also doing them themselves. Simple as it seems, that’s the secret of effective leadership; people will respond to “come with me” a lot more readily and enthusiastically than they will to “go that way.””

   thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/secret-of-herding-cats.html
   • climate change
   • energy
   • John Michael Greer
   • politics
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10. “The strategy of staged disconnection is not catabolic but metabolic; it taps into existing resource flows before shortages become severe, and uses them to bridge the gap between existing systems that are likely to fail and enduring systems that have not yet been built. At the same time, if it’s done right, it doesn’t draw heavily enough on existing systems to cause them to fail before they have to.”

    thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/12/two-lessons-in-practical-ecology.html
    • ecology
    • food
    • John Michael Greer
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