Ecotechnic Future
Book: The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World. By John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers, 2009
URL = http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4051
Description
"In response to the coming impact of peak oil, John Michael Greer helps us envision the transition from an industrial society to a sustainable ecotechnic world - not returning to the past, but creating a society that supports relatively advanced technology on a sustainable resource base.
Fusing human ecology and history, this book challenges assumptions held by mainstream and alternative thinkers about the evolution of human societies. Human societies, like ecosystems, evolve in complex and unpredictable ways, making it futile to try to impose rigid ideological forms on the patterns of evolutionary change. Instead, social change must explore many pathways over which we have no control. The troubling and exhilarating prospect of an open-ended future, he proposes, requires dissensus - a deliberate acceptance of radical diversity that widens the range of potential approaches to infinity.
Written in three parts, the book places the present crisis of the industrial world in its historical and ecological context in part one; part two explores the toolkit for Ecotechnic Age, and part three opens a door to the complexity of future visions." (http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4051)
Review
Frank Kaminski:
"Greer's newest book, The Ecotechnic Future, builds on The Long Descent by sketching out some of the likely dimensions of the future that Greer believes lies on the other side of our descent. It doesn't devote much space to explaining why our civilization is headed for collapse, or describing how people can prepare on the individual and community levels, since these were covered in his earlier book. Instead, in a series of chapters with straightforward titles like "Food," "Home," "Community" and "Culture," it takes an in-depth look at the kinds of changes that we can expect in these and other aspects of our lives as industrial civilization winds down.
What, exactly, is the "ecotechnic future" to which the title refers? Well, to begin with, it's a play on the phrase "technic society," a term coined to describe the modern world that came into being following the Industrial Revolution. Greer's conception of the technic society is that it's the first human society powered primarily by nonfood energy, rather than by the food energy that has sustained, for example, the far-more-stable hunter-gatherer societies that have existed throughout history. The phase of the technic society coming to an end with the advent of peak oil is one that Greer refers to as "abundance industrialism," in which humanity has used the immense energy contained in cheap, abundant fossil fuels to maximize the production of goods and services at the expense of gross inefficiency. In contrast, the ecotechnic society that Greer sees as the inevitable successor to abundance industrialism is one that relies wholly on renewable energy resources, and that places a premium on using them as efficiently as possible at the expense of reduced access to goods and services.
A transition away from our current economy of plunder and waste to a sustainable ecotechnic society is necessary and will happen eventually, since the resources that we're plundering are finite, as is our planet's ability to absorb the waste products. But Greer regards efforts to establish an ecotechnic society right in the here and now as misguided. In his view, such efforts are doomed to failure because the conditions that would allow an ecotechnic society to flourish aren't yet in place, and we don't have even the faintest clue what such a society would resemble.
Before we can set about creating an ecotechnic society, we must first spend several decades muddling through what Greer terms "scarcity industrialism," in which we liquidate the second half of the planet's oil endowment, the other remaining fossil fuels and other essential nonrenewable resources. This, in turn, will give way to a one-to-three-century "salvage society" phase, in which, having depleted these non-renewables, we scavenge the ruins of long-abandoned man-made structures for their iron, steel and other raw materials. Then, once scarcity industrialism and the salvage society have played themselves out, an ecotechnic society can slowly begin to take root. In short, to quote Greer, "[t]hose 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." One of the many things that you come to admire about Greer is his knack for drawing apt analogies.
In The Ecotechnic Future, Greer appropriates terminology from a variety of disciplines, including ecology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, the history of ideas and the 1970s appropriate technology movement. He persuasively argues for the need to respond adaptively to the changes ahead, and to encourage people to pursue as many different ideas as possible, rather than formulating a detailed plan of action on which everyone can agree. He reasons that the greater the number of possibilities being investigated at any one time, the more likely someone is to stumble upon something that works. He borrows the postmodern term "dissensus"—meaning "a deliberate avoidance of consensus"—in describing this adaptive approach. And he humbly admits that no plans (including his own) are infallible, and invites readers to dissent from his ideas in favor of pursuing some of their own.
Like The Long Descent, Greer's new book incorporates a series of shorter writings that he originally published online—and, once again, their arrival in print is a happy occasion. The typical Greer essay is thoughtful, profoundly insightful, well-supported and impeccably argued; and Greer's prose style is nothing if not elegant. His new book delivers on all of these levels in spades, the various shorter writings having simmered to great effect by the time they're reaching us in book form. The only faint complaint I have is that I feel that the book could have been a tad longer, with the extra length being added to the chapters on various aspects of our ecotechnic future. Not that there's anything obviously missing on which I can easily place my finger. It's just that, at barely 20 pages, and some of them not even that long, the chapters do seem a bit skimpy. And Greer is such an engaging writer with so much to say that one looks forward to each new entry with the excitement of the proverbial giddy schoolboy (or schoolgirl, as the case may be). One can never have too much Greer, I say. Those who are already aware of the long, bumpy decline ahead for our civilization, and who want a clearer picture of what to expect, as well as some real, practical responses, will be well-served by reading both The Ecotechnic Future and The Long Descent. But I'm happy to believe that a significant number of casual bookstore browsers who are environmentally conscious, but not yet fully in the know, also will pick up these books, will be captivated by them and will join the ranks of the converted."