Interview with John Michael Greer by Kent Gustavson of Sound Authors Radio January 23, 2009 http://www.soundauthors.com/interview-with-john-michael-greer-sound-authors-radio.htm Dr.

Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors! Today is Friday January 16th and Ive got four great guests on the show today. Im very excited about it. Its inauguration week and Im excited about all of the events happening this week. Theres no guests on the show talking about that specifically but Ill certainly ask the guests what theyre thinking. I have some really varied topics on the show today, one of the authors has written a book about the Middle East, one has written about the ancient Middle East, the pyramids, but its my honor to welcome to the show John Michael Greer who is the author of The Long Descent. A Users Guide to the end of the Industrial Age. And theres a beautiful front cover on the book, little men descending down the gears. So welcome to the show John Michael Greer. John Michael Greer: Thank you, its a pleasure to be on. Dr. Kent: Tell me about this book. John Michael Greer: Well basically do you remember back in the 1970s the last time we had an energy crisis when a lot of scientists were saying you know were going to have to change the way we do things pretty dramatically and then in a few decades oh were going to hit a wall when we get to the 21st century? Dr. Kent: Right. John Michael Greer: The point of my book is basically they were right and were in the process of hitting that wall now and weve got to try to figure out what were going to do about it. Dr. Kent: Now you are a certified master conserver. Tell me what that is. John Michael Greer: Okay, I dont know if this is true out in your end of the country but a lot of states out on the west coast where I live have programs like the master gardener program, there are master composter programs, very good things put on by the local agristations or in part by state governments put on to train citizens to do very useful things. In fact during that last energy crisis there was a thing called the master conserver program and people who took part in it did classes in conservation of various kinds and then they did a certain amount of community work and they got their certificates and Im one of the people who went through that program back in the day. So the publisher was really kind of looking around for something that would make an unofficial sounding credential and I said well try this one. Really there are no experts in this field, the field of where were headed as a society, where were headed as a culture. We all have to try to figure it out as we go along. Dr. Kent: You are also called the Grand Arch Druid and you also have a great blog at the archdruidreport.blogspot.com but tell me about what that is. John Michael Greer: Well there youre basically touching on my religion. Im a druid, I belong to the old faith of the old nature worshipping faith of the Celts or rather its modern version, recreation, redevelopment. It so happens that after various years of doing various things within the druid community in 2003 I was elected head of one of the druid orders in this country, the Integral Druids of America. Now grand arch druid sounds like an exciting title; that is ### get you a cup of coffee but it does come with an unusual looking hat which is something.

Dr. Kent: Very good. So this book itself its got such a gorgeous cover like I said. The long descent and here are these men just they could be women but descending these years. Talk about the general premise behind the book. A users guide to the end of the industrial age. John Michael Greer: Okay, its a users guide to the end of the industrial age. One of the things that we tend to get when people start talking about the future these days is that either they think things are going to go on pretty much business as usual off for the foreseeable future. We get more and more exciting technological toys and stuff but no real dramatic changes on the one hand. Or on the other hand you have the people who are convinced that next Thursday or something like that everything is going to crash into ruin and be bombed and starving survivors roaming the landscape and anything you watched in Mad Max and so on. And nobodies talking about what life in between those two very extremes are. Thats what was brought up in the 1970s in the various problems in the relationship we face to living outside our planet mean that were not going to be able to continue business as usual for very much longer. Were already starting to have some major problems with that. But that doesnt mean that everythings going to fall apart in a hurry. What were facing instead is what Ive called as the title suggests the long descent. A long, slow potentially fairly rough transition from the high tech industrial sort of society we have now to societies of the future that have a lot less energy and a lot less natural resources to pass around and that are basically working with a much simpler technology than were used to using today. So thats the basic theme of the book. Dr. Kent: Once youve hit some key words for what the pundits are talking about right now. Talk about your view of whats happening right now in politics and society and all of that? John Michael Greer: Well politics I think if society were a glass of beer, politics is the foam on top. Politics is froth; its how we argue about the changes that are going on and there are some important things going on in politics. Im delighted; the candidate I voted for is about to be inaugurated its going to be a very historic day for this country. But the real changes that are going on, the changes that are defining what our political leaders and what we ourselves can accomplish, have to do with our relationship with the planet. They have to do with the amount of oil thats being produced, the amount of oil that can be produced, because weve actually pumped out a lot of the worlds total petroleum at this point; and various other resources. And what the petroleum geologists, what the scientists are telling us is that weve actually used more than half of most of our energy resources now and so were looking at a situation where we saw last year the price of oil went zooming through the atmosphere and then we crashed and basically its like a little bubble. When the price was going up everybody bought into it, bought oil futures zooming up at $143 a barrel, and then when it turned down everybody bailed out of it and sent it crashing down to what it is, $38. And were going to see more of that. More of that volatility. You wont be able to tell from one year to the next what the price of gas is going to be. And its not going to be what it is today. Dr. Kent: Now in a situation like that, weve got a brand new president and he promises change and I find that very exciting but you talk about in your book very clearly that the change needs to come from the bottom not the top. John Michael Greer: Yeah, well its important that we have leaders who are inspiring, its important that we have people in politics who are willing to embrace the idea of change and not and Ill trot out Dick Cheneys line about the American way of life is nonnegotiable. Hes wrong. In a sense hes right, theres no way we can negotiate to keep the American way of life weve had. Its going to change and its great that we have somebody

moving into the white house on Tuesday who is in tune with the need for change. But yeah, the real change has to come in our own lives. It doesnt matter what the government does, if were not willing to bite the bullet and live a little more simply and a little less extravagantly than weve all been doing this last quarter century or so, changing the government arent really going to help them unless they change. Dr. Kent: Well I have my best friend in the world has trained in organic farming and its a fascinating world and its actually creeping into somewhat of the corporate environment. Whats your take on local and organic versus whole foods or large scale organics? John Michael Greer: Basically I mean even the corporate organic is a step in the right direction because among many other things organic farming uses less energy. Most of the pesticides, most of the various organic chemicals, those are actually made most of them from petroleum. So by cutting that out, were decreasing our dependence on oil. The next step of course is to move from big corporate organic farms that ship food all across the country to local farms producing local foods for families. And thats the next step and its going to happen simply because while were going to see these variations drastic variations in the price of oil, and the price of gas, diesel fuel in turns, its generally going to trend upwards, just as its been trending upwards in most of the last decade. So basically were in a situation where those people want to be thinking about where their food is coming from not tomorrow but ten years from now need to be looking at local organic farms. We need to see city councils and county councils making changes and theres zoning to encourage small local farming. And also just to be people who are willing to pay that little bit more to shop locally, to support the local farmers. Thats going to do a huge amount of benefit for the future. As well as the fact that locally grown organic food is usually fresher and tastes better. Dr. Kent: Im curious about your background in terms of when did you get into the organic farming to thinking about all this. I know that youve published several books and this is sort of a new venture for you into kind of a mainstream trade crowd. Talk about that a little bit, your past. John Michael Greer: I originally got involved with this back in the 1970s when I was a teenager. The energy crisis was a big thing and I did a lot of reading, a lot of studying in those days. When I first went to college I ended up, I lived most of the time at a little organic farm just past the campus of western Washington University in Washington. So I would be going to classes during the daytime then coming back and helping to tend the farm, getting up early to milk the goats and things like this and so it was a very perfect way of living in its own way. I mean I was living in a small cabin with wood heat and no running water but you would be surprised how pleasant that could be. So when the 1980s came and we had Regan saying America is back and getting further backward all the time although I dont think he ever said THAT, and everybody just covered their eyes and covered their ears and the I cant hear you, I cant hear you to the ecological problems or anything I just kind of kept with them but mostly was involved with my faith, the druid faith, which is also very supportive of nature and so when I got into writing much of what I was writing those days correlated to that faith and to the traditions true to that. There were people interested in reading what I had to say. I thought it would be a complete waste of time to try to write something for the general public about this sort of thing but a few years back Richard Feinberg an excellent, excellent author wrote a book called The Partys Over, which was a discussion on big oil and it actually sold quite well and I went wow, okay I guess its time to start talking about this. So I launched my blog the Arch Druid Report and started talking about people living out the end of the industrial age and it actually got quite a large audience. So from that the book sort of followed.

Dr. Kent: I dont know all that much about druids. In fact, all I know about the word druid is from what Ive read in some of the literature I read as a child. Tell me a little more about how that influences your views about the world and all of that. John Michael Greer: Druidry is a very diverse faith. The standard joke is if you have a question ask it to three different druids and youll get at least five different answers. But broadly speaking druidly treats nature as sacred nature, nature is holy. We see nature as that in which we live and move and have our being and there is people in the druid community who talk about that in various different ways whether they want to talk about God or whether they want to talk about the gods and goddesses and whether they want to talk about nature as a sacred presence within themselves, its very much a nature centered religion. So for us, anything that benefits nature, anything that helps nature move in harmony and that helps us move in harmony with nature, thats a sacred act and anything that defiles or disturbs nature is what Christians would call sin. You can see how this plays in pretty closely. Dr. Kent: Absolutely and I can also see how it plays in well with last night George Bush gave his final escape speech and he talked about the good and evil that everyone thinks is good and evil and I find that fascinating from a man thats viewed as sort of this Jesus figure to the religious right here and a Hitler figure to a lot of the rest of the world. John Michael Greer: Yeah, good and evil are challenging terms and it gets very challenging when you try to pin them on a human being as if youre playing pin the tail on the donkey. I think part of George Bushs problem is that he was very ready to see the world as full of good guys and bad guys and nothing in between and thats really not the way the world works. I mean everybody has some potential for good and some potential for evil and some people exercise one more than the other but we of course need to realize that we are human beings, we arent cardboard cutouts that wear white hats or black hats or what have you. Dr. Kent: Now, in terms of the general, theres also an extremism of opinion on environmental issues; if its global warming, the whole worlds going to die in five years or it doesnt exist. Or with oil its either lets just use oil and drill off the coast and go here and there or lets just go completely to wind. Whats your take on where were going? John Michael Greer: Well, you put your finger on a very important point, which is that this country right now is obsessed with that kind of dualistic thinking. Its either or, all the way to one extreme or all the way to the other extreme and its as though heres your choice: you can drown or you can die of thirst. Take your pick. But theres a middle ground and the middle ground is where we need to be in terms of the future were facing thats taking shape. With regard to global warming its pretty obvious to me that the people who are insisting it doesnt exist are mostly funded by big oil companies and theyre propagandists but at the same time the people who are insisting were all going to be cooked in five years are simply going to the opposite extreme and trying to circulate scare stories in order to get their point of view accepted. Neither of those is productive. We need to look among other things at what happened in the prehistoric past with global warming that happened many, many times. Its not a new thing and so we need to get outside this sort of Hollywood catastrophe model and instead look at okay, what happens when the earths temperature changes? Because it does every ten thousand billion years you have these drastic changes in temperature; the worlds been through it before. We havent, not as civilized; I mean we have but we were living in caves at the time. So we can learn a lot about that instead of getting stuck on this kind of apocalypse thing. In the same way, in terms of petroleum, are we going to go off petroleum? Well, probably not while theres petroleum still available because it is so cheap, so easy to pump out of the

ground and its so useful. Its probably still going to be used. On the other hand theres not actually that much of it left, especially in this country. America was the first country in the world to establish a petroleum industry, we were the first country to start pumping our oil reserves out and were further along in what petroleum geologists call depletion of the earth, you know the process of pumping ourselves dry than any other country on earth. So saying drill baby drill may make a good political slogan but its not a functional strategy. Dr. Kent: So kind of in closing talking about industrial society we all learned about the industrial revolution in grade school and it stuck around with some of us and this is such an extreme little bubble thats going on in the last 30 or 40 years where now everyone has as many cars as they want, as big a house as they want, stuff everywhere and Im part of that. It seems to me like this is even more of an extreme industrial revolution. How do you define what were going through and where, is it possible for us to go towards a more organic society and things like that? John Michael Greer: Well I think you put your finger on the right word there by calling it a bubble. Just think of the way the housing prices went nuts over a few years back, especially in places like Las Vegas and phoenix where people were buying houses. Not because they wanted to live in them, not because they thought anyone would live in them but because they thought they could sell them for twice the price in the future. We have this kind of speculism mentality, this notion of getting something for nothing and its really pervaded our society at this point. So we think its perfectly reasonable to have eight cars in the driveway. Who cares if we drive one than seven of them at the most, theres this idea that it doesnt matter. What were in the process of learning as we move into the second great depression right now is that it does matter, is that weve wasted a huge amount of money, and resources, and labor and time of stuff that actually doesnt matter that much. So can we make the transition? Thats not a question, were going to make the transition simply because the opportunity to keep doing things the way weve been doing them isnt there any more. So the question is what can we do about it? Well we do have all this stuff and I suspect one of the big industries of the next decade or so is going to be recycling all that stuff. Theres probably useful raw materials and things in there so yes were going to make the transition. Is it going to be a rough road? Very likely, especially for people who have kind of built their identity around this notion that whoever dies with the most toys wins. A friend of mine has a t-shirt that says whoever dies with the most toys still dies. I think thats an attitude we might want to cultivate. Dr. Kent: Exactly, so whats in your garden right now? Probably nothing much but I dont know Oregon very well. John Michael Greer: No right now up in Oregon we dont have snow on the ground just at the moment, but it was below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. In terms of the garden right now, the perennial orbs are doing very nicely, our rosemary; nothing slows rosemary down. Everything else is basically a food for winter, weve got the very first traces of buds on the blueberry bushes and the leeks are doing fine, leeks always do fine. In fact, they need a good hard freeze before they really get tasty. Other than that, the garden is very quiet. Dr. Kent: Well its been such an honor speaking with John Michael Greer; hes an organic gardener as well as a wonderful author of many books. He is the Grand Arch Druid of the AODA and his blog is at thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com and of course the book is called The Long Descent. A Users Guide to the end of the Industrial Age. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

John Michael Greer: Thank you very much for having me on it was a real pleasure. Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show will be the author of a different kind of historical book called the Secret of the Great Pyramid: How one mans obsession led to the solution of ancient Egypts greatest mystery. Thats by Bob Brier and well talk to him in just a minute.