Dark Age America

Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead

By: John Michael Greer

Narrated by: Michael Dowd

Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

After decades of missed opportunities, the door to a sustainable future has closed, and the future we face now is one in which today's industrial civilization unravels in the face of uncontrolled climate change and resource depletion.

What is the world going to look like when all these changes have run their course? Author John Michael Greer seeks to answer this question, and with some degree of accuracy, since civilizations tend to collapse in remarkably similar ways.

Dark Age America, then, seeks to map out in advance the history of collapse, giving us an idea of what the next 500 years or so might look like as globalization ends and North American civilization reaches the end of its lifecycle and enters the stages of decline and fall.

In many ways, this is Greer's most uncompromising work, though by no means without hope to offer. Knowing where we're headed collectively is a crucial step in responding constructively to the challenges of the future and doing what we can now to help our descendants make the most of the world we're leaving them.

John Michael Greer, historian of ideas and one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited weekly blog the Archdruid Report and has published more than 30 books including The Long Descent, The Ecotechnic Future, The Wealth of Nature, and After Progress. He lives in Cumberland, Maryland, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.

©2016 John Michael Greer (P)2017 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.

Civilization dies in darkness

Though the night is dark, dawn comes again.

Industrial civilizations reckless and myopic treatment of petrochemical energy and the consequences that will follow in the setting of the North American continent

Important

A difficult topic but it was really good for putting the things I'm seeing happen into context, both in ancient and recent history. Somehow, knowing this has happened before and will happen again helps me to know where to focus my attention, time, and resources toward living a good life no matter what scenarios are playing out on the national and world stages. Good advice and insight. Ended on a positive note.

Well worth your money

Fantastic book with actual unique takes on American society.

Also contains one of the only level-headed discussions I've read about climate change. An incredibly refreshing difference from the disingenuous environmental propaganda that pervade both the Left and Right.

Loved it

Michael Dowd does an excellent job of pacing the reading, pausing here and there where necessary and describing the images and graphs simply and clearly, allowing my tech-addled attention span access to a great book.

John Micheal Greer's writing is, itself, very good; his use of language and familiar examples prepares the reader or listener as he approaches more complex ideas. Grim as the subject matter is, a genial tone still emerges encouraging others not to wallow in despair, but instead to get up and dust off, as the work won't do itself.

A must read

A brutal view into the future of the North American continent and industrial society - I’m surprised it’s not censored.

LESS starts here

Less Energy, Stuff and Stimulation will inevitably hit North America. Start your preparation now with this audiobook

Clear-eyed realism backed by history

By the end of Dark Age America I found myself quite hopeful, knowing that there is work that we as individuals can do to be of service in a time of unraveling. The book offers a way of thinking more than a set of prescriptions, and ultimately a path forward, beginning with seeing what is, learning what has come before, and intuiting how we might preserve what is worth saving.

Everyone would be better off for having read this.

Though it goes fast at some points it's packed with well written, and equally well performed, explorations and observations that are useful in this time. Thank you for this thought provoking and emotionally moving work.

Smug, Dire, Iconizing, interesting

Forces of nature lift and swallow civilizations, unerringly, relentlessly, as described by this glass-near-empty-minded author, drawing on study and angst, watching clouds, and seeing sky-shards already swirling down at a rate uncertain.

He dismisses invention as any solution and ignores that invention spurted us to the place we now find ourselves.

He perpetuates the technologies he claims are our doom (I unsustainably paid for this book, with a touch, from a server farm and wirelessly received it, listened to it, and rared it... actions in ignorance of the futility of my reliance on those givens, but not in ignorance of his perpetuation of the systems he decries).

I'm not saying he's wrong. How can I? He schedules the collapse ranging from the time you finish this sentence to 500 years from now. In fact, I think he's probably got that right, but I think he's describing his ideology more than the science he claims to be utilizing. Instead, he uses alchemy, I think, to turn gold into lead.

He doesn't see obstacles as challenges to be overcome, but as inevitabilities to succumb to or, optimistically, to endure.

We definitely are in a tight spot, and if nothing is done (he says by at least 1980), we will likely hang 10 down the perpetual wave of inevitability, but if we want any chance at all, do NOT vote him to be our coach.

Important, but not easy to hear

I found this fascinating, depressing, discouraging and hopeful. All at the same time. John Michael Greer puts all the crises we are facing together in a way that makes sense and makes me think differently about the possibilities for the future.