the ecotechnic future

THE ECOTECHNIC FUTURE
“The Ecotechnic Future” by John Michael Greer is a continuation from his last book, “The Long Descent”. In my opinion it is actually much better. I liked the first one, including it in my short non-fiction list of books to reread. This was even better. It focuses more on the details of collapse. Of course, he is also one of my nemeses. He is strictly in the “long and oh so slow collapse” schools. Not because he is a greedy bastard and wants to keep selling books about the collapse. But because he is sceert. Unable to stand the thought of animal skin wearing savages hacking at each other with broken off pieces of metal rebar in order to fill the stew pot for dinner, unable to stand the thought of actually doing without the luxuries of the Oil Age, he intellectually refuses to accept the inevitability of PODA. Not that I blame him, most of my loyal minions probably feel the same way. I love his logic and reasoning on the collapse, I just take exception to the fact that he ignores his own logic to make his case for slow collapse.
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Early in the book, he gives a wonderful analogy of a cause for die-off. It is the same as the “too many yeast cells in the Petri dish eating up all the nutrients”, but actually much better since it leads to a much better visualization of the problem. The Oil Age was just like an overturned grain truck in a meadow. The average meadow or field is able to support X amount of mice. The mice population never exceeds the carrying capacity of the field without quickly being forced back into equilibrium. But suddenly, a grain truck that is driving by gets into an accident and overturns. Suddenly, there is a huge food surplus. The mouse population explodes, and stays at those elevated levels for some time. Yet, as the grain is eaten away the population starts to die off. There are so many mice above and beyond the natural population that those left not only eat the grain, they also strip the field of anything edible in a vain attempt to survive. In the end, the final number of surviving mice is far below the beginning number of X.
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Can you call that anything other than a mass die-off? Yet, his answer is that expecting a die-off is historically inaccurate because past empires took hundreds of years to collapse. But, by his own example, past empires never had an overturned grain truck in their meadow ( an oil age allowing a huge surplus of population ). Historically, populations were just like the pre-truck grain. Back and forth population flows. A slight population increase gave rise to a slight population contraction as it readjusted numbers to the natural carrying capacity from a solar powered economy. Most collapses were caused by soil infertility. The population increases and contractions were during phases before that ultimate collapse. I argue that as oil declines reach a certain point, we are just like the mice at “Peak Grain”. At that point there are too many mouths to feed and the seed corn is eaten. Mass die off follows. We are not at a normal population adjustment from a slight increase. We are at the point where too much soil is infertile and as oil inputs into the ground are cut back we start to lack enough food for survival.
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Yes, that is a huge complaint. But honestly the book is quite good except for the needed step to the logical end. Greer covers the steps down in energy use, from Industrialism to Scarcity Industrialism to Salvage to an ecotechnic economy. He talks in terms of sustainable ecosystems in an easy to understand manner. He talks about the need to incrementally adjust because you can’t jump ahead to sustainability ( higher energy use societies trump lower ones, so a scavenger society will be a higher energy availability economy than a solar powered ecologically balanced one ). Despite my issues, a very good book. And at ten bucks from Amazon, a good bargain.
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