The Ecotechnic Future by John Michael Greer won my heart with this paragraph p 219-220):
“The conflict between these narratives and the hard realities of the predicament of industrial civilization could not be more stark. Human limits, not human power , define the situation we face today because the technological revolutions and economic boom times that most modern people take for granted were a product, not of science or such impresssive intangibles as “the human spirit,” but simply of a brief period of extravagance in which we squandered half a billion years of stored sunlight. The power we claimed, in other words, was never really ours, and we never “conquered” nature; instead, we raided as much of her carbon assets as we could reach and went on a spending spree three centuries long. Now the bills are doming due, the balance left in the account won’t meet them and the remaining question is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still be ours when nature’s foreclosure proceedings finish with us.
Good read, here are some clips from Amazon reviews:
“Rather than pummeling us senseless with statistics proving the validity of the peak oil hypothesis, he moves forward well past that. Instead he connects the dots between peak-oil, global warming, the future of food, economics, energy, employment, and culture. Using general terms, he wisely avoids being prescriptive about how we might respond to the challenges facing us.”
“Always interested in what Greer has to say. Sometimes I think he’s looking too far into the future.”
“Greer makes no claim on the exact shape that future holds, he is too well grounded in a broad spectrum of knowledge, from an encylopedic grasp of History, to his keen understanding of disperate fields such as biology, and economics, energy and evolution to claim omnisciensce. Instead he offers a theory that integrates his broad spectrum of knowledge with the Ecological concepts of succession.”
Good, good read.
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