Creator / John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer (born 1962) is an American writer and druid. He served twelve years as head of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, but is most well-known for his two blogs, The Archdruid Report (currently defunct, though archives and print versions exist) and Ecosophia (currently active), which cover themes of environmentalism, appropriate technology, historical cycles, and the spirituality of nature. Similar themes are present in his library of print media.

His current blog, Ecosophia, can be found here. In addition to his blog posts, it also fields monthly (well, more or less) open posts where he responds to reader comments.

His works of fiction include:

Tropes found in his blogs:

• Apocalypse How: During 2012, in the lead-up to the Mayan Doomsday, Greer ended each of his posts for the year with a short description of the time someone or some group predicted the end of the world, and it failed to show up, to highlight how pointless the furor surrounding the date would end up being.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In The Death of the Internet: A Pre-Mortem, Greer lists off the different functions the internet primarily serves, and how they're not all that unique or novel:
  It’s a source of wry amusement to me that so many people seem to have forgotten that the internet doesn’t actually do very much that’s new. Long before the internet, people were reading the news, publishing essays and stories, navigating through unfamiliar neighborhoods, sharing photos of kittens with their friends, ordering products from faraway stores for home delivery, looking at pictures of people with their clothes off, sending anonymous hate-filled messages to unsuspecting recipients, and doing pretty much everything else that they do on the internet today.
• Cowboy Episode: The post Animals III: The Unwanted seems like it's going to cover common garden pests in this manner, with them described as black-hatted bandits in the middle of the helpless Western town that is your garden... only for Greer to note that this is a supremely unhelpful way of thinking about the unwanted animal species that may infest your garden. Instead of filling the role of a "poison-toting sprayslinger", using chemical pesticides and the like, he advises the reader to make changes to the environment to keep these species out without upsetting the garden's ecological balance, treating the garden as the diverse ecosystem it is rather than a sterile machine.
• Day of the Jackboot: Fascism and the Future, Part Three: Weimar America describes a scenario where a neofascist party seizes power in the modern-day United States. Greer uses the thought experiment to dispel some common misconceptions about fascism, which are described in the first two posts of the series.
• Insult to Rocks: This sort of comparison shows up more than a couple of times in Greer's work. For example, in the post The Burden of Denial, he has this to say in response to the belief that iPhones and other high-tech amenities somehow disprove any criticisms of the industrial age:
  Now of course the people waving their iPhones at Chris Martenson aren’t thinking about any of these things. A good case could be made that they’re not actually thinking at all. Their reasoning, if you want to call it that, seems to be that the existence of iPhones proves that progress is still happening, and this in turn somehow proves that progress will inevitably bail us out from the impacts of every one of the predicaments we face. To call this magical thinking is an insult to honest sorcerers; rather, it’s another example of the arbitrary linkage of verbal noises to emotional reactions that all too often passes for thinking in today’s America.
• Master of None: The post Progress and Amnesia has a section where Greer explains how this trope applies to flying cars: cars and planes have certain traits which are mutually exclusive, and trying to do both means that a flying car will by definition succeed at neither.
  To cite only one of many examples, a car engine needs torque to handle hills and provide traction at slow speeds, an airplane engine needs high speed to maximize propeller efficiency, and torque and speed are opposites: you can design your engine to have a lot of one and a little of the other or vice versa, or you can end up in the middle with inadequate torque for your wheels and inadequate speed for your propeller. There are dozens of such tradeoffs, and a flying car inevitably ends up stuck in the unsatisfactory middle.
• Quality vs. Quantity: In the Archdruid Report article The Thermodynamic Economy, Greer discusses this trope with relation to energy sources. His argument is that the concentration, not the quantity, of an energy source is the relevant factor in deciding whether it can be used to perform useful work. On this basis, he notes that, while solar energy can be used for a great many useful things such as boiling water, heating buildings, and cooking food, its diffuse nature means that it's not a replacement for the highly-concentrated energy derived from burning fossil fuels.
• Running Gag: In The Next Ten Billion Years, almost every period of history he examines in the timeline has people claiming that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will solve all their problems, while other people claim that the apocalypse is imminent. Both of these are presented, as they always are on the blog, as useless non-responses to the problems of climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and biodiversity loss. This even extends to post-human species on Earth: the corvins are mentioned as having futilely attempted interstellar migration, while the corbicules ultimately discover that none of the options proposed by cornucopians were ever practical in the first place.
• Significant Anagram: In the third and final part of the Fascism and the Future series, the leader of the National Progressive American Peoples Party is named Fred Halliot. It's an anagram of Adolf Hitler, foreshadowing the neofascist nature of the party even when it's not immediately obvious. Lampshaded by the author:
  A news website you follow shows a picture of the party’s chairman, a man named Fred Halliot;* he’s an earnest-looking guy in his thirties, an Army vet who did three tours in Afghanistan and earned a Silver Star for courage under fire. You glance at his face and then go look at something more interesting.
  (*Yes, it’s an anagram. Work it out yourself.)