Green Wizardry: Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills From the Appropriate Tech Toolkit
By John Michael Greer
Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers
September 10, 2013
Paperback, $18.95
241 pages
If you are troubled by a uncertain future due to climate change and other environmental karma coming our way, Green Wizardry is a book you will want to read. Not because it has all of the answers -- it doesn't. Also, the author, John Michael Greer, sounds like an ecology dinosaur -- grumpy and opinionated -- even though he was a child himself in the Seventies. So what does this little book offer? Well, it sticks a hot poker in the wound of our conscience and pops the balloon of our wishful thinking that the global economy can grow its way out of the current predicament we're in.
Green Wizardry is part physics/chemistry lesson, part apocalyptic rant and part toolbox dusted off from the days before cheap energy. Greer, author of The Archdruid Report blog, believes that the First World economy driven by cheap fossil fuels shortly will be going off the rails for good, and the prudent among us should get busy preparing for a radical change in lifestyle.
The writer begins with a kind of prologue consisting of basic lessons in physics, ecology and information systems. If you have knowledge of these areas of science, feel free to skip over to the main event. But there are some important takeaways here. Reviewing the laws of thermodynamics, Greer points out that for our purposes, energy is finite -- it diffuses from a source like the sun to the "elephant graveyard" of entropy where it no longer can be used. This is important to humankind because we keep returning to the illusion that energy is infinite -- we just have to "drill, baby drill" to keep our world humming. The illusion is coming apart now as we have reached limits such as peak oil. An inverse truth can be said of matter, he says. When it comes to stuff, from toxins to poop, there is no such place as "away." For example, one suggested solution to pollution, dilution, does not work because "dilute an environmental toxin all you want, and it's a safe bet that a food chain somewhere will concentrate it right back up for you and serve it on your plate for breakfast," according to Greer. Regarding information, he contends that we are so awash in data today that it is difficult to sift through all the info noise to perceive what is important. Furthermore, the information revolution has left us with the mistaken belief that more information will solve the ecological crises of today. Add up these basic lessons about the way the world works and we find ourselves facing "an inconvenient truth" -- we cannot grow ourselves out of the current crises of resource depletion, pollution and income disparity.
Listen to the media, the internet, or everyday talk these days, and you're guaranteed to hear somebody insisting that worrying about the limits to growth is just plain silly because science, technology, progress, the free market, the space brothers, or some other convenient deus ex machina will let us keep extracting an ever-increasing supply of energy and raw materials from a finite planet without ever running short, and always find places to dump the rising tide of waste without having it turn up again to give us problems.
Greer's answer to wrongheaded thinking about a sustainable future is green wizardry, which involves immersing ourselves in ecological practices that will help us survive monumental changes that lie ahead. Greer believes in the coming decades half of Americans will find themselves without cheap and reliable energy for heating their homes and fueling their cars. Many kinds of food will be intermittently available, at best, due to a declining global economy. Becoming a green wizard means learning how to raise a lot of your own food, composting waste to add to the nutrient cycling of your garden and returning to old technologies like windmills as a source of locally generated electricity. This is a very curious part of
Green Wizardry. Just about all of the ideas and resources -- he provides extensive lists of ecology and do-it-yourself books at the ends of major sections -- were written in the 1970s and early 80s. Why are the answers found in the early days of the environmental movement? Greer believes that was the golden era before the movement was co-opted by the idea that we can grow ourselves out of any predicament. Whenever anyone starts extolling a period of thought as ideal, you can't help but think there is some myopia going on. But there is more going on with
Green Wizardry than hippy eco-nostalgia.
Greer points out that before cheap fossil fuels changed everything 100 years ago, Americans lived fairly comfortably on the family farm, often raising a cash crop and maintaining an intensive garden-orchard to help put food on the table. There is surely idealizing going on here; we all know the stories of folks in the early 20th century who could not wait to get away from the farm, with its long hours, drudgery and exploitation of cheap labor (especially that of children). But the writer insists we do not have much of a choice -- scarcity is coming like it or now.
Where Greer hits the mark is his contention that in a short period of time we have lost knowledge and practices of living a relatively sustainable existence off the land. His Green Wizardry lessons range from mulching and cultivating earthworms for organic fertilizer to conservation strategies and cooking and heating with solar energy. His lessons merely serve as an entre(accent)e to many agrarian practices that present a steep learning curve to any would-be green wizard. I can tell you from personal experience after four years of studying horticulture that you don't learn pH and mineral needs of various organic vegetables and how to compost effectively just by reading books. Greer rightly points out that earthworms generate some of the best natural garden fertilizer -- there are even earthworm bins designed for small apartments. But you often have to learn by practice and instruction from a teacher before getting something like earthworm cultivation right. My first attempt at it resulted in a fetid, disgusting mess -- not enough ventilation. This leads to the conclusion that if you want to be a Green Wizard, it's going to take some time, involve a lot of mistakes and learning and you will become stinking dirty. As Greer puts it: "You need to obsess about (green wizardry) the way a computer geek obsesses about obscure programming languages. You need to drench yourself in it until it shows up in your dreams and seeps into your bones."
Another area of the book that I found particularly interesting had to do with retro technology -- rediscovering lost techniques and practices that made work easier before cheap electricity rendered them obsolete. Regarding your domicile, Greer says the first step -- before investing resources in solar or wind for your home -- is conservation. Most of our homes, designed for cheap energy, are heat sieves. Caulking and weatherstripping are the logical first step. Replacing single-pane with double-pane windows does improve energy efficiency by 100 percent -- however, considering the relatively high cost of retrofitting a homeowner might instead opt for the ancient practice of preventing heat loss by using fabric hangings in front of windows for insulation. Greer says hanging tapestries were used in the Middle Ages for that very purpose. Caulking and covering windows need to be complemented by insulating the floor of the attic to prevent rising heat from escaping. And for those who have the money, you can start from the ground up with an integrated heating system (such as the Passivhaus from Germany), which is expensive but offers virtually no energy expenditure for life.
Applying the principles of Green Wizardry to how we cook and eat will also involve returning to many forgotten and overlooked practices, says Greer. Cheap energy has allowed us the luxury of eating strawberries, grown thousands of miles away in tropical climes, in December. As we become weaned from using fossil fuels in the years ahead, green wizards will be returning to the lost art of canning, drying and smoking foods that are plentiful in summer for consumption in winter. The author suggests learning these practices now rather than when an energy crisis occurs involves the strategy of "staged disconnection" -- preparing for what is to come: "A nation used to eating factory-breaded chicken tenders and Jo-Jos is going to face some interesting traumas when food once again consists of live chickens, raw turnips, and fifty-pound sacks of dry beans." Lest you think the future of green wizard cooking involves hours of tedious work, Greer replies "down home cooking" need not be seen that way. Cooking with raw materials need not take as long as it sounds. In fact, he contends that in the time it took you to wait in line at the deli for take-out he has already whipped up a healthy home-cooked meal using organic materials from the garden.
A theme to which Greer returns time and again is the importance of diversifying resources and practices to prepare for the eventuality of scarcity. Whether it is installing a passive thermosiphoning solar water heating system or building a cheap wind turbine, the author says we need to put together "patchwork quilt" of diverse energy supplies. When an energy crisis occurs, all of your eggs at least won't be in the proverbial basket of the electricity grid.
I can foresee guilds of green wizards springing up in the near future -- master wizards like Greer teaching apprentices the lost arts of living sustainably. In truth this phenomenon is already happening. In the Bay area, where I live, there is a growing community of permaculture practitioners educated at the community college level. If you are in an isolated area, there are probably green wizards just waiting for someone to ask how to speed up the composting process or how to build a cheap solar thermoelectric generator from scratch.
After reading a few pages of Green Wizardry, you may wonder -- as I did -- who is John Michael Greer? He was educated at Western Washington University and the University of Washington and has written more than 20 books on a variety of subjects -- the Qabalah, UFOs, druids and peak oil. No doubt some folks will read his book and pronounce Greer a kook. Pictures of him won't help -- he looks like a cross between a Hebrew prophet and John Muir. He is truly an iconoclastic thinker and provocative writer, and I imagine some will put down the book and go their way believing and hoping that he is wrong -- that somehow humanity will come up with previously unknown, easy solutions to the ecological shitstorm that is coming. Yes, Green Wizardry represents a voice crying in the wilderness, but Greer is not alone. We ignore his advice at our -- and the world's -- extreme peril.