Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the…
Tag: the future ain’t what it used to be
Beyond the Peak
Earlier this week I spent a while looking through some of the early posts I put up on my original blog, The Archdruid Report. Maybe it’s just the rose-colored reactions of middle age gazing back on the follies of youth, but it all seems so innocent now. I was part of a movement in those…
Before Winter Comes
I didn’t think it would be necessary for me to start talking about energy issues quite so soon. Granted, industrial civilization remains hopelessly dependent for its very survival on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, which are being used up at breakneck paces to prop up the absurdly extravagant lifestyles of a handful of rich nations. …
The Great Rehash, Part Four: A Hill to Die On
One of the things I’ve had to get used to in writing these weekly blogs is that events sometimes move fast enough that I have to scramble to keep up. The self-inflicted epic fail of mass Covid vaccination seems to be turning into a good example of that phenomenon. Two weeks ago, when I posted…
The Great Rehash, Part Three: Unsafe and Ineffective
In the first two parts of this sequence of posts (1, 2), I’ve outlined the background of the Great Reset, Klaus Schwab’s dreary rehash of the last half century or so of fix-the-world schemes, and used the creation and destruction of the Georgia Guidestones as a lens through which to see how those schemes have…
The Great Rehash, Part Two: The Future’s Cold Eyes
Two weeks ago, as regular readers will recall, we discussed The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, the rest of the really rather dreary literature of planetary preaching in which that volume fills an overfamiliar role, and the usually disastrous consequences that follow when the clueless rich set out to tell the rest…
The End of the Industrial Age
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
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…
Running On Empty
Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change. Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count…
Whispers of the Fall
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…