Tag: climate change

Climate Change: The Crisis Management Model

John Michael Greer293 Comments

These days we live in a hyperpolarized political environment where most people assume that if you’re not all the way over to one extreme, you must be all the way over to the other. That’s a major cause of the collective stupidities that afflict the world today, since the opposite of one bad idea is…

Lords of the Fall

John Michael Greer366 Comments

It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a…

Riding the Climate Toboggan

John Michael Greer284 Comments

Every year or two on this blog I post an update on the global climate.  Now and then I wonder if this is a futile effort. Outside the four notional walls of this one little blog on the fringe, and a few other equally marginal venues, the rest of the world seems to be caught…

Futurus Interruptus

John Michael Greer410 Comments

Most of the time, in writing these essays, I try to treat the decline of industrial society with the seriousness that it deserves. Sometimes, though, the plain raw absurdity of our current situation rises to a point that only raucous laughter can address. I ran into another of those points a few days back, while…

The End of the Industrial Age

John Michael Greer386 Comments

The fourth enduring theme of my blogging over the last sixteen years, the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization, is also the one that most people try hardest to misunderstand. It’s not just that so many people blankly insist that it can’t happen and of course we’re on our way to the stars, just…

The Fire This Time

John Michael Greer340 Comments

Over the last sixteen years I’ve spent blogging, one of my most reliable sources of amusement is the experience of being condemned as a hopeless pessimist by some readers and denounced as a clueless optimist by others.  What makes this even more interesting is that the two groups of critics are usually incensed by the…

Whispers of the Fall

John Michael Greer354 Comments

It’s been sixteen years now since I first started posting these weekly essays to the internet. Though I didn’t originally intend them to focus on the crisis of industrial society, that theme was impossible for me to evade, and I soon gave up trying; there was too much that had to be said about the…

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,”…

What We Can Still Accomplish

John Michael Greer356 Comments

One of the unexpected benefits of posting my reflections on the future of industrial society in public is that quite often I get advance warning of events on the horizon that others haven’t anticipated yet.  Sometimes, I’m glad to say, it’s because someone in my commentariat happens to have noticed an obscure news story or…

Strange Days Dawning

John Michael Greer484 Comments

Late in 2019 I wrote a series of posts entitled “Dancers at the End of Time,” sketching out certain weird and deeply troubling shifts in the collective consciousness of our time; you can read them here, here, and here, if you like.  They got about as much attention as my posts here generally do, and…