Book Review: Green Wizardry by John Michael Greer
If you or someone you know is stressed out about the climate crisis and feels like the little petty things the mainstream media suggest that people do in response are not nearly enough, this book may be for you, as a first step.
The author doesn't pussyfoot around the issue. The middle class lifestyle as we know it today is, he argues, unsustainable. The renewables are never going to produce enough, and no big technological breakthroughs are coming to replace what fossil fuels give us at the quality, quantity, and price we're used to.
At the same time, he is skeptical about various Mad Max style apocalyptic futures. He considers those to be another flavor of denial, another way of avoiding dealing with the future we're most likely to actually get. That future is characterized by less energy but not none, and therefore less but not none of the stuff cheap and abundant energy gives us.
He spends most of the book talking about how to prepare for that future, which happens to also be the best strategy for slowing down the rate of change and giving more people a chance to get prepared. He expects that, as with most major life changes, preparedness will make most of the difference between a postindustrial life that is pretty decent and one that is nasty, brutish, and short. Furthermore, he presents a strategy for gaining enough knowledge about the various technologies of preparation to be a consultant for others who did not think that far ahead, to help them adapt as well. He calls this kind of consultant a green wizard, after the actual historic wizards of the early medieval period in Europe: not spell-casters but "freelance intellectual[s] whose main stock in trade was good advice."
Most of the rest of the book is quick introductions to various strategies for post-oil living, for getting basic human needs and some minimal amount of wants satisfied without the extravagant use of energy that we are currently used to. Food, housing, heating and cooling, transportation, health care, the chapters are short but there are lots of references for people who want to take it further. And, yes, there are some technologies for generating electricity at the household and small business level, for those few amenities of life that need it. (He has elsewhere argued that a minimal text-based internet can be maintained using mainly ham radio.) He also includes (in fact, he foregrounds) a very brief and easy introduction to systems thinking that can help aspiring green wizards adapt their strategies to their particular local conditions.
At the end, he has a couple of Even Bigger Picture chapters, titled "The Long View" and "Why It Matters", which contain the debate points you might need when your family and longtime associates ask why you want to do this instead of having faith in technological progress and pursuing normal life goals such as money and prestige. In those chapters he's also got some helpful tips for noticing those ways of thinking that keep you stuck in the mainstream and get in the way of the changes we say we want to make.
It's in these last chapters that I have my few differences with him. For one thing, he leans hard on the word "poverty" as a way of communicating the degree to which the lifestyle that we now call middle class is going to become a luxury for a smaller and smaller elite over the next several generations. As a longtime reader of leftist writings, I am used to seeing poverty defined as a form of oppression, typified as much by victimization as by deprivation. But he's not talking to me. He's talking to more mainstream Americans (and he is definitely talking to Americans; the whole book is very USA-centric) who still regard poverty as a result of individual, personal shortcomings.
Here's his perspective: "What we are talking about, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, is voluntary poverty. The founders of the movement of 'voluntary simplicity' backed away uncomfortably from the noun in Thoreau's phrase, and thereby did themselves and their movement a huge disservice. It's all too easy to turn 'voluntary simplicity' into a sales pitch for yet another round of allegedly simple products at fashionably high prices. The concept of voluntary poverty does not lend itself to such evasions... What most people in today's industrial nations do not know, and have no interest in learning, is that it's possible to be poor in relative comfort... The central secret of green wizardry is that one way to be poor and comfortable is to learn how to work with nature so that natural processes take care of many of your needs."
My definition of "poor" still excludes "comfortable" but I see what he's getting at. I prefer to say that we can still aspire to be middle class the way Amish farmers are middle class. Amish farmers typically own their land, equipment, livestock, etc., and thus from a simple economic point of view they are solidly middle class, but people who make their living in offices and suffer from the sorts of health problems that result from excessive sitting are often uncomfortable with including them just from an aesthetic point of view. Amish farmers get dirt under their fingernails. They deal with manure. They have callouses on their hands. As you will, according to Greer, or your descendants will, when the fossil fuels become unaffordable and modern mechanized farming becomes economically unworkable. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"One way or another, the [microscopic] livestock in your compost bin is essential to the composting process because without them, what you get isn't compost, but stinking goo. What happens in a compost bin is exactly what happens in ordinary soil to the vegetable matter that falls onto it in the normal course of nature: decomposers - living things that feed on dead matter - eat it, cycle its nutrients through their own life processes, and then excrete those nutrients in a form that plants can use. What makes a compost bin different is that you, the green wizard, tinker with the conditions so that this natural process can happen as quickly and efficiently as possible so that you can put the results in your garden, which is where you want it. This is where lesson number two for a sustainable society comes in: instead of wasting your time trying to fight nature, figure out what she wants to do and arrange things so that her actions work to your advantage."
You also don't have to plunge into it all at once. "The strategy of a staged disconnection from failing technologies, made on the basis of local conditions and personal, family and community needs, offers a pragmatic alternative to the forced choice between dependence on a crumbling industrial system and the unreachable ideal of complete personal or community independence. The backyard garden approach to food is founded on that strategy, and most of the energy conservation and renewable energy methods that are central to the next set of lessons rely on it as well."
Green Wizardry is structured as a workbook, so most of its chapters are called lessons, with an assignment at the end of each. The idea is to get your feet wet in each area of study before you decide on a direction. He's not going to get specific about that direction because he offers, not a single direction, but many. "If the environmental sciences have any lesson to teach us... it's that every problem has many possible solutions, and the best way to find and use as many of those solutions as possible is for everyone to 'work apart,' so to speak, heading off in as many disparate directions as possible, so the largest number of options will be tried... Passion can't be legislated, and the sort of passion that led, for example, Gregor Mendel to spend years crossing pea plants to tease out the secrets of heredity is one of the things the world needs most right now."
For those of you who argue that personal lifestyle change is not enough, Greer has said, not in this book but in the occasional blog post, that before you can credibly advocate for political action to move society in a more sustainable direction, you have to be living sustainably yourself. Otherwise you are vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy, which reduce the likelihood that anybody at all will listen to you.
https://newsociety.com/books/g/green-wizardry