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After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion.
What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways.
Dark Age America, then, seeks to map out in advance the history of collapse, giving us an idea of what the next five hundred years or so might look like as globalization ends and North American civilization reaches the end of its lifecycle and enters the stages of decline and fall.
In many ways, this is Greer's most uncompromising work, though by no means without hope to offer. Knowing where we're headed collectively is a crucial step in responding constructively to the challenges of the future and doing what we can now to help our descendants make the most of the world we're leaving them.
John Michael Greer, historian of ideas and one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited weekly blog the Archdruid Report and has published more than thirty books including The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature, and After Progress. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.
- Sales Rank: #130210 in Books
- Published on: 2016-09-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.90" h x .70" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Review
Greer's Dark Age America is the essential education and impetus for boomers who choose legacy focus over longevity fixation. We've lived through peak oil, peak debt, peak comfort, peak me-ness, peak pettiness. Now, let us become ancestors our grandchildren will be proud of.
--- Connie Barlow, science writer, creator of Torreya Guardians and TheGreatStory
John Michael Greer is a modern-day prophet speaking on behalf of Reality. Dark Age America draws upon Greer’s vast knowledge of the patterns and rhythms of history to yield insights grounded in our best evidential understandings of ecology, economics, systems science, and human nature. The result is a work of remarkable clarity and searing wisdom vital for these confusing times.”
--- Rev. Michael Dowd, author, Thank God for Evolution and host, “The Future Is Calling Us to Greatness”
If the future trajectory of our civilization follows the same general patterns laid down by previous ones, then John Michael Greer's new book gives us perhaps the best view of the future currently available. His thoughts on the great unraveling ahead are rooted in a broad and deep knowledge of history: even if you disagree with him about the future, you will learn a great deal from his survey of the relevant human past.
---Richard Heinberg, author, The End of Growth
Dark Age America argues cogently and compellingly the inevitable decline of industrial civilization and its ramifications within the next five centuries. Whereas the human psyche may hold out for a faux Great Turning or the fantasy that “this time it will be different,” Greer demonstrates that ecologically, politically, economically, and technologically, the decline is not only inevitable but well underway. How the demise unfolds and whether any members of our species prevail may well be determined by the choices we make now. Business as usual is not an option.
---Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author, Love In The Age Of Ecological Apocalypse and Collapsing Consciously
Whether you only just figured it out or have known for a long time that globalized consumer culture is a sinking ship, it really helps when a polite steward comes to your cabin and offers to guide you to the lifeboat and then chats breezily, easing your fears, as he guides you down the metallic corridors with blinking fluorescent lights, describing all you may need to know to get your life back on track once the lifeboats reach safe harbor. Dark Age America is John Michael Greer’s finest work. He does not cut any slack, even for his own predictions. Read it slowly, in a comfortable chair, with a cup of your favorite warm beverage.
---Albert Bates, author, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, The Biochar Solution, and The Paris Agreement
Civilization isn’t selling too well. The would-be masters of the universe want billions of consumers, productivity gains, growth and profits. In return they offer open borders, fancy widgets, gender equality for a rainbow of genders and space exploration pipe dreams. But there are no takers; what the people want is nine hours of sleep, summers in the country, family and friends around and somebody to buy their rutabagas. A dark age cometh, but don’t worry. As Greer explains, this is perfectly normal—just takes some getting used to. A dark age is a great time to catch up on sleep.
---Dmitry Orlov, author, Reinventing Collapse and The Five Stages of Collapse
Dark Age America is a courageous, thoughtful, timely and well-researched prognosis for the next five centuries of life on Earth. John brings to bear a thorough knowledge of how past civilizations have unraveled, an appreciation of how complex systems work (and when they don’t), and an understanding of how humans behave in crises that are not sudden and transitory, but gradual, uneven, profound and enduring. No matter where on the political spectrum your sensibilities lie, this intelligently reasoned, thought-provoking and important work will challenge your ways of thinking and prod you to take useful preparatory actions.
---Dave Pollard, author, How to Save the World
From the Back Cover
Confronting the Inevitable Collapse
…courageous, thoughtful, timely and well-researched … this intelligently reasoned, thought-provoking and important work will challenge your ways of thinking and prod you to take useful preparatory actions.
— Dave Pollard, author, How to Save the World
Greer demonstrates that ecologically, politically, economically, and technologically, decline is not only inevitable but well underway. How the demise unfolds and whether any members of our species prevail may well be determined by the choices we make now.
— Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., author, Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse and Collapsing Consciously
After decades of missed opportunities, John Michael Greer eloquently argues, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today’s industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion.
What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways.
Dark Age America, then, seeks to map out in advance the history of collapse, giving us an idea of what the next 500 years or so might look like as globalization ends and North American civilization reaches the end of its lifecycle and enters the stages of decline and fall.In many ways, this is John Michael Greer’s most uncompromising work, though by no means without hope to offer. Knowing where we’re headed collectively is a crucial step in responding constructively to the challenges of the future and doing what we can now to help our descendants make the most of the world we’re leaving them.
…even if you disagree with [Greer] about the future, you will learn a great deal from his survey of the relevant human past.
— Richard Heinberg, author, The End of Growth
John Michael Greer, historian of ideas and one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited weekly blog “The Archdruid Report,” and has published more than thirty books including The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature and After Progress. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.
About the Author
John Michael Greer, historian of ideas and one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited weekly blog "The Archdruid Report" and has published more than thirty books on ecology, history, and nature spirituality. His involvement in sustainability issues dates back to the early 1980s, when he was active in the Appropriate Technology movement and became certified as a Master Conserver. He is the author of numerous titles, including The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature, and After Progress. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Give this author some ale, please
By Ashtar Command
John Michael Greer is a prolific author and blogger on the “peak oil” end of things. He is also a pagan, occultist and ritual magician. “Dark Age America” is Greer's latest book. It delineates the author's pessimistic visions of the future. Most of the material will be familiar to avid followers of Greer's blog, The Archdruid Report or ADR.
“Dark Age America” starts off well but loses the thread somewhere in the middle. Personally, I still think “The Long Descent” is Greer's best book on the inevitable decline and fall of modern civilization. Greer constantly attacks both cornucopians and apocalypse-mongers but this “moderate pessimism” is voided by the first half of “Dark Age America”, in which he makes some pretty startling claims. Greer believes that 95% of the world's population will die off within one to three centuries due to mass starvation, pandemics and war. Agriculture will be made impossible over large areas due to loss of top soil. The seas are overfished and will become effectively empty within our lifetimes. Due to climate change, half of North America will turn into desert, while failing nuclear power plants will create huge “dead zones” even in otherwise inhabitable areas. Florida will disappear under water. Modern science and technology will (of course) disappear or even be actively destroyed by the common people. Virtually all current ethnic groups will go extinct, and the survivors will have identities created de novo. These survivors will regroup in feudal societies or roving war bands. The process of collapse have already started and can't be stopped by any political or economic reforms whatsoever.
This may or may not be true, but it's difficult *not* to see it as an apocalyptic scenario, unless you have a very narrow definition of what constitutes an apocalypse (“everyone will die/be turned into zombies tomorrow morning”). It also seems to contradict what Greer says in other books and blog posts, where he proposes various forms of societal reform to help the United States cope with the decline. Gone are the plans for decentralization, direct democracy, mutual aid societies, a return to pre-industrial high tech (such as sailing ships) or speculations about alternative forms of industrial high tech (such as steam punk). Instead, we get a super-bleak picture of a future in which only purely individual solutions are possible, if you're extremely clever, crafty or lucky. Even the fun is gone: Greer no longer talks about his plans to brew really good ale, something that would probably work even during a dark age! I get the feeling that the only option available (if you belong to the lucky 5%) is to form secret orders of book-printers to keep some of the legacy of pre-collapse civilization alive until somebody can begin anew centuries or millennia into the future…
“Dark Age America” also has some curious blind spots. Greer frequently mentions the senility of modern elites, but never the infantilism, hedonism and degeneracy which has taken hold not only of the Western elites, but of a large portion of the population as well. Nor does he mention the bizarre suicidal reflexes of some Western elites when faced with existential threats such as mass migration, major crime waves or terrorism. I think Vilfredo Pareto nailed it when he said that elite groups at the end of a cycle are “effeminate but rapacious”. In Greer's scenario, the elites are clueless (and, of course, rapacious) but seem to lack the weird naivety and lunatic fringe pseudo-liberalism which arguably characterizes much of the official discourse today. Their cluelessness is more similar to that of Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy. Or is it George W Bush? It's not clear whether Greer believes that “SJW” liberalism is a purely ephemeral phenomenon, soon to be replaced by business-as-usual clueless Neo-Con wars and repression, or whether this is a genuine blind spot in his highly eclectic private philosophy. It's also curious to see Greer suggest that the “internal proletariat” of a declining West will unite with the “external proletariat”, i.e. the war bands attacking the West from the outside. This may happen if both proletariats are similar (perhaps both will be Muslim), but what if the internal proletariat remains White and adopts, say, paganism or Orthodox Christianity? Then the unity scenario sounds more farfetched.
After this criticism, perhaps I should point out that “Dark Age America” also contain strong chapters, the most interesting being Greer's discussion of science. He points out that although science is one of the great achievements of the human mind, really existing scientists and scientific institutions at the end of our civilization's lifespan are frequently so corrupted, oppressive and arrogant, that they inevitably alienate the common people, with disastrous results. Something similar happened to ancient philosophy. In a provocative section (remember, the author is a pagan), Greer describes Hypatia as a clueless aristocrat beaten to death by the proletarian Christian mob, since the oppressed proles of Alexandria couldn't care less about Neo-Platonist philosophy. They did notice her gilded carriage, though… Unfortunately, I think Greer is on to something when he discusses science. The author is at pains to point out that he is not an anti-vaxxer, climate denialist or creationist, but he understands why people (including thinking people) may be drawn to pseudo-science by the antics of a corrupted medical industry, privileged and hypocritical “environmentalists” or militant atheist “Brights”. Since the “internal proletariat” of a dying civilization will identify all elite activities with the old system they are trying to overthrow, science will get a bad bruising from which it may not be able to recover as the people throw out the baby with the bathwater.
“Dark Age America” may be John Michael Greer's most pessimistic book to date. It feels like Greer on downers. However, since the Archdruid Emeritus is eclectic and mercurial, we may expect this “collapse” to be followed but a more optimistic “stability” in the near future. Right as we speak, Greer is serializing the first draft of a more upbeat utopian novel on his blog, and he has promised to shortly tell us what we must do to build a mass movement against environmental destruction. Perhaps Attila and the Four Horsemen aren't standing outside the city gates just yet…
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Greer today, gone tomorrow!
By Kitsapcamper
Greer picks up a different angle than Orlov's Five Stages of Collapse and takes the reader back through a historical perspective of Dark Ages that are oh-so-ready to spring into life in the modern era. Well written, I would recommend this book to anyone who is trying to consolidate the shreds of evidence you are just now starting to see in mainstream media. Get local, get small, and hold on. The Society for the Preservation of North American Entitlement (SPNAE) will have a hard time covering their heads with Make America Great Again hats and cheap Chinese ponchos by the time this is all done. Electing Ms. Hey-It's-My-Turn will not be a panacea either. Read Greer, buckle up and love thy neighbor!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Grim Historical Lessons for our Impending Collapse
By Dick_Burkhart
Typical Greer - this book delights with no-nonsense pronouncements on the grim consequences of ecological overshoot, but sometimes his mastery of history surpasses that of current affairs. In fact, Greer is at his best when he relies on good historians, like Arnold Toynbee, to burst the bubbles of hype and “progress” that pervade our media. Yet why no mention of one our best current historians of precisely this subject? - Peter Turchin, whose marvelous book “War and Peace and War – the Rise and Fall of Empires” has now been updated to apply to current US history (“Ages of Discord”). Greer misses the greed factor that Turchin has so effectively modeled, though, in turn, Turchin misses the overshoot factor.
I tend to agree more with Greer - that we could be headed toward a Roman-type civilizational collapse (“deindustrial North American will support many fewer people than in 1880”, p.40, after “those environmental protections that haven’t been gutted already get flung aside in a frantic quest to keep the system going”, p. 37, citing ruinous top soil losses during the last years of the Roman Empire). He also points out that “externalized costs don’t just go away; one way or another they’re going to be paid.” (p. 93). However Greer views the economics and politics as basically hopeless – that as resources dwindle and uncertainties increase, distrust and political gridlock ensue, so that we can do nothing better than “muddle through, trying to deal with each stage of the descent as it comes into sight, and being prepared to make plenty of mid-course corrections” (p. 224).
Yet the real story of survival is that we survive as communities, not as individuals, so we always have economic and political options. In this case, at least half the US GDP is being wasted on the fancy life styles and pet projects of the affluent, if you track the increasing inequality since 1980. Thus there is an enormous potential for a more equitable society, giving us the ability to hunker down, to simplify and sacrifice. That’s simply what cohesive communities do as they face hardship -if they feel that “we’re all in this together”. To Greer this is probably just wishful thinking. Time will tell.
And Greer does hold out hope that the coming population decline (up to 95% of the population) could be accomplished by minimal, but continued, increases in the death rate, rather than by cataclysmic events: “of the traditional four horsemen, War, Famine, Pestilence can sit around drinking beer and playing poker. The fourth horseman, in the shape of a modest change in the crude death rate, can do the job all by himself” (p. 45). But he quickly pulls back from this optimistic note, citing “a steady demographic contraction [of the Roman world] overlaid by civil wars, barbarian invasions, economic crises, famines, and epidemics” (p. 46).
Greer also makes the interesting point that “new ethnicities emerge” (p. 50) as civilizations transition into dark ages, even after prior ethnic divisions have been ruthlessly exploited by competing factions during the collapse phase. That is, ethnic conflict doesn’t survive “political dissolution, economic implosion, social chaos, demographic collapse, and mass migration” (p. 50).
Greer blames the “political class” for driving us over the edge. Yet this is a poor choice of terminology, as it tends to blame politicians and not the economic system that they represent. In fact, even though Greer anticipates that the “free market”, even money, will disappear during the final stages of collapse, he shows us no vision of a better economic system other than of medieval feudalism.
Then comes another unfortunate choice of words: he blames “intermediaries” for taking all the wealth between producers and consumers, as fees or taxes, etc. Actually the “intermediaries” are supposed to be providing useful services (law, security, infrastructure, health care, education, religion, etc.) and there is no problem if they provide these services at reasonable prices. The problem comes when the services aren’t provided, or the costs are exorbitant due to the power and greed of the intermediaries. For example, if serfs slave away in grinding poverty while their kings and barons live in the lap of luxury, the costs would be regarded as exorbitant by most people.
Greer harbors a lot of animosity toward scientists due to a handful of militant atheists and skeptics, yet never mentions the legions of well funded religious fundamentalists who attack science, especially evolution. Most scientists have a less confrontational attitude toward religion, but are still glad that others are willing to publicly stand up to assaults by religious extremists. Yet it is noteworthy that even a militant atheist like Sam Harris is willing to have a respectful dialogue with a scholar of Islam when that scholar challenges the fundamentalism of his own faith (“Islam and the Future of Tolerance – A Dialogue” by Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz). Greer might get more respect, perhaps even from Richard Dawkins, if he made a public show of rejection of religious dogma.
And it is not just science that is harmed by dogma, but also education in general. Once when I ran for school board (and was elected), one issue was fundamentalist opposition to “critical thinking skills”, since they perceived, correctly, that their children might grow up to reject their dogma if taught these skills. Now nonbelievers outnumber fundamentalists 2 to 1, and Christianity in the US has, all too much, become a decaying religion of empire, rejecting its anti-imperialist roots in the life of Jesus. While Greer thinks that science will be among the first parts of the establishment to put on the chopping block, the public (especially youth) is already voting with their feet, but more against dogmatic religion than science.
And finally Greer predicts a new Renaissance rising from the ashes of the Dark Ages ahead. We can even help by preserving great books: “Of our positive achievements, the ones most likely to reach our descendants 5000 years from now are the ones written in books” (p. 222), citing the eternal “Epic of Gilgamesh” from 4000 years ago in Sumeria.
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