“Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future”: Writing About the Long Descent, Practicing Green Wizardry. A Conversation with John Michael Greer

Christian Arnsperger is Professor of Sustainability and Economic Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and coordinator of the Master’s program in Foundations and Practices of Sustainability. He specializes in the existential and ecological critique of capitalism, post-growth economics and sustainable counterculture, the transition from circularity to “permacircularity,” and the systemic links between money and sustainability.
https://igd.unil.ch/ChArnsperger/en/publications/
https://arnsperger-perma-circular.com/

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne and co-director of the New American Studies Master’s specialization program. She has published two monographs, eight edited collections of essays, and numerous articles on topics ranging from the Eco-Gothic to American counterculture.
https://people.unil.ch/agnieszkasoltysikmonnet/

John Michael Greer (b. 1962) reflects and writes about the future, both as a science fiction author and as a thinker—who has been publishing both books and blog posts on “energy descent” since 2006—on the de-industrial trajectory that awaits contemporary, industrialized humanity. One of the most astute commentators on the links between ecology, economy, technology, and religion, he describes himself as a moderate Burkean conservative and has achieved wide recognition for his critique of the “religion of progress” and for the “middle way” he traces between the two polar-opposite imaginaries of endless progress and growth, on the one hand, and abrupt collapse and apocalypse, on the other.

His novel ideas about a plurality of technological regimes and about “technological choice,” as well as his cogent advocacy of appropriate technology as an answer to many of the ecological and economic woes of industrial culture, make him a fitting successor to thinkers such as Ernst F. Schumacher, the author of Small Is Beautiful. Greer lives in Rhode Island and definitely tries to walk his talk, choosing to forgo quite a few of industrial late modernity’s luxuries and amenities.

Aside from his influential environmental analyses, he is also a prolific writer of fiction and has published, among other things, a seven-volume cycle entitled The Weird of Hali, which adopts an “alternative” perspective on H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos and the non-human creatures that people it, and a number of “de-industrial” novels that seek to describe what a post-industrial world characterized by much lower energy consumption and a variety of technological choices might look like. He is also intensely interested in esoteric thought and practices and is a member of the Druidic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he founded in 2014. From his point of view, being a practitioner of a form of spiritual ecology (along with hands-on energy descent practices which he calls “green wizardry”) and writing about energy descent and the de-industrial future are part and parcel of one single thing—namely, to actively explore the implications of, and to start actually living in, a culture that has dumped the illusory, modern narrative of progress by the wayside.
https://www.ecosophia.net/