Have you had your dose of depressing reality today? I just had mine … it came in the form of this paragraph:
I may be wrong, but I’ve long thought that one question above all would haunt my imagined historian of our future: why did we do it? Given that our entire civilization had plenty of warning, and that ten minutes of unprejudiced thought ought to have been enough to demonstrate to anybody the absurdity of expecting to get away with infinite economic growth on a finite planet, why didn’t we do what must, to the eyes of the future, look like the obviously right decision, and downshift to a less energy- and resource-intensive steady state economy while we had the chance? Why, instead, did we keep on lurching blindly forward on a one-way street headed straight to history’s compost bin, all the while angrily shouting down the few that tried to warn us of where we were going?
That’s from the Archdruid Report, a blog by John Michael Greer, who is the independent author of a variety of books and papers on an eclectic list of topics. Looking over his credentials and pondering his self-described title as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, one could be forgiven for wondering about him. Serious author or eccentric dabbler?
I’m going to go with serious author for now. Reading his blog, I see no wild speculation or foaming at the mouth rhetoric. Just extremely well reasoned arguments for why the planet needs to get out of the cycle of destruction of our resources as we continue to pretend that the economies of the world can in fact sustain infinite growth.
Surely we are deluding ourselves on that one. And from that argument, all the others flow.
Anyway, have a look … this guy’s writing is interesting even if you are a terminal cynic. And you might just find yourself haunted by some of what he says that is so obviously reasonable.
