by John Michael Greer

New Society Publishers, First Edition,  October 1, 2009.  Click to Buy this book!

To understand the need for such a book as The Ecotechnic Future an understanding of the concept of resource depletion is required, especially the concept of Peak Oil. This idea states that the amount of fossil fuels on the planet will reach a peak after which there will be a steady, irreplaceable decline in available, cheap energy. This has been addressed by many authors, dating back to the 1970s when M. King Hubbert first explained how the production of petroleum from a well typically follows a bell-shaped curve and extrapolated this idea to the planet as a whole. It is neither the author’s intention nor mine to go into the details of this concept here. There are many books available on the subject, including Matthew Simmon’s Twilight in the Desert, James Howard Kunstler’s Long Emergency, Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything, and Dimitri Orlav’s Reinventing Collapse, just to name a few.

Drastically reduced resource availability has crushing ramifications for a world in which there has been an absolute population explosion in the centuries since cheap energy became available. The author argues that the abundant availability of fossil fuels has in large part enabled this growth. If we now have this stimulus taken from us, it seems obvious that it must lead to a drastic reduction in population, with the attendant social unrest, large migrations of people attempting to find sustainable living conditions, etc. If one accepts that resource depletion is a fact for the future world and that indeed a decline in civilization is imminent, then one naturally asks oneself: How can I plan for the future? This is the question that this book largely tries to answer.

The book is broken down into three parts. The first part, Orientations, discusses the history of resource depletion generally and how this has affected other civilizations in the past. The author then attempts to roughly predict, based on this historical evidence, what phases of decline we can expect. He foresees an end of our Age of Affluence followed by three subsequent stages: An Age of Scarcity Industrialism, followed by an Age of Salvage and finally the coming of the Ecotechnic Age. More »