Spirit in Action
Peak Oil & Druidry - John Michael Greer, Part 1
John Michael Greer is a prolific author writing on diverse topics like peak oil, nature-based economics and, of course, druidry, because he is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His knowledge is vast and his presentation makes even complex topics understandable and compelling. His books include The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World and The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if survival Matter.
- Broadcast on:
- 26 Feb 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along We've got a great guest for today's Spirit in Action. His name is John Michael Greer And he's written a whole pile of books on a range of topics, many of which have Everything to do with the health and healing of the world. A couple titles include the eco-technic future, envisioning a post-peak world And the wealth of nature, economics as if survival mattered. One of his latest books is Apocalypse Not. Everything you know about 2012, Nostradamus, and the Rapture is wrong. If you browse the full list, you'll also notice that some stand out for a very special reason. John Michael Greer is Grand Arch Druid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His connection with nature both led him to Druidry and is fostered in his life by that connection. And you can read a lot about that on his blog, the arch druidreport.blogspot.com Because there's such a wealth of material that John Michael has to offer to us, We'll be talking with him both this week and next. Today we'll focus on the druidic underpinnings of his outlook Especially as that influences his environmental outlook and activism. Obviously, part and parcel of what he's written in the eco-technic future and the wealth of nature. Next week, we'll continue with further aspects of that perspective But also talk about Apocalypse Not and the supposed turning point due to arrive in December of 2012. You'll find that John Michael Greer does an incredible job of conveying concepts, even the most complex in understandable and compelling ways and he's a really interesting guy. I suppose we could expect no less from a true arch druid. Before we get John Michael on the phone, I want to get you in a druidic frame of mind. So have a seat and listen to a mystical visit to ancient druidic remains by a group called Magpie. I've had both Terry Leonino and Greg Artsner of Magpie as guests and this is their song, Circle of Stone and then we'll talk to John Michael, Magpie Circle of Stone. There's a black rock soaring in silent dreaming. In a sun wide circle that starts in the west. From stone to stone, it's meandering journey. It leads to the north stone that airs. In a high green meadow on a misty morning. We follow that path, touching every stone. And beyond that rain, another circle. Mountains that rise up, one by one. And the wind whistles through, with the flurry of raindrops. Chasing a chair that cuts straight to the bone. But you can't really say who's sending that shirt. Stinging all the mist for the Circle of Stone. Circle of Stone, Circle of Power. Circle of Time and History. Long have you stood and watched our seasons. Circle of Magic and History. Ancestors come in a dreamtime vision. Bringing the giant, one by one. With beasts and bronze, their circles building. Seeking the power of standing stones. A place to pray, a place for dancing. One place to watch the seasons turn. The wisdom of the silent centuries. Lessons of the wheeled blood. Circle of Stone, Circle of Power. Circle of Time and History. Long have you stood and watched our seasons. Circle of Magic and History. The Mack I came in the early morning. And took the bread right from my hand. And though I gave it, she did not eat it. But gave it back to me again. And then she gave it to me a pebble. Warning me to look around. And in my shoe, she tucked it safe. Tread with care, on sacred ground. (music) John Michael, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Thank you very much for having me on the show. Before we get into some really very important environmental issues, let's get something else out of the way. Questions that listeners may or may not have about the validity of druids. Most people, I'm guessing, if they hear about druids, they think about long ago folks doing human sacrifice in the woods or maybe current day folks who are doing play, pretend, reenactments of fantasy scenes. I don't know if that sounds accurate to you, but I think that's what most people out there think. I've actually read the Druidry handbook that you wrote. So I know that these are just really horribly flawed images. So please start us out by telling us what druids are and aren't. Okay, well first of all, those images are not so much flawed as the incomplete. The ancient druids did exist. Did they practice human sacrifice? We have the least idea. What the Roman writers who comment on that actually says is they officiate at what amounts to capital punishment. The execution of people for various high crimes. There are also people who play dress up games and get involved. I think it's World of Warcraft or some of these online things where druids as a character class have some kind of relevance. But there's also another thing going on here, which is that starting about the early part of the 18th century, people in Britain and then little later on in Brittany and the United States and a variety of other places, started finding their way toward a spirituality of nature that was in part inspired by what was known to the ancient druids back in the day. And they probably could have called themselves pretty much anything, but as it turned out, they ended up calling themselves druids. And so the druid revival, as it's called, the recreation of druidry as a modern nature religion movement. It's kind of on for a little, not quite 300 years now, and it's not a huge movement by any means. I believe, well, let's see, the last actual attempt at the census that was done was in a doctoral dissertation out of a French university in the big 1984, and they estimated about 2 million druids in the world at that point. So it's a minority religious tradition that's been going on for, as I said, pushing 300 years now. It focuses on the sacredness of nature, of the living earth, and these days especially, on some of the real difficulties with humanity's lack of willingness to deal with the fact that we are dependent on the rest of nature, that we are dependent on the living our far own lives. Issues of that sort, in terms of myself, I wandered my way into druidry after kind of a long route through various other alternative spiritualities. I was raised in a non-religious family. My actual title is "Grand Archduids of the Grand Growth of the Ancient Order of Druids in America." And that in 350 you'll get your cup of coffee, mind you, but it's a colorful title. We're good at colorful titles. That perfectly means I'm the Chief Administrative Officer, if you will, of one of the dozen or so fairly large druid orders in the United States. So your Grand Archduid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, and I'm wondering just how deep this vein of humor and irony runs in US Druidry with a site like AODA.org, which maybe means Ancient Order of Druids in America, but everyone else is used to alcohol and other drug abuse. So was there intentional irony there? Not at least. AODA was founded in 1912 before that other acronym was created, and we were really rather startled because when we launched the first website for the order in 2004, none of us had heard of AODA as alcohol and other drug abuse. We were really rather startled by it, especially when we started getting emails from various people who just noted, "Are you or help?" I'm saying, "Oh, you'll be interested in this stuff about alcohol and other drug abuse," or, "Uh, okay." So we sent some emails around and got all that straightened out. Well, you mentioned another one of the orders, the one that started as something of a spoof at Carlton College in '63, and they called themselves the Reformed Druids of North America. The Reformed Druids of North America? Yes, and R-D-N-A, which for some of us who are scientific types, you know, that may mean recombinant or ribosomal DNA. They're doing irony there, aren't they? Well, except for the fact that there again, this was founded in 1963, so were people doing recombinant DNA research in 1963? I don't -- I'm not absolutely dead sure of the point where the structure of DNA was discovered, but it was right around that time. I think there again, it's one of those bits of accidental humor. Not that there's a shortage of a certain kind of dry humor in the druid tradition going way back. You've got -- well, I'm being Owen Morgan, who was a Welsh druid in the reign of Queen Victoria, who worked out -- wrote this amazing book called "The Light in Britannia," which presents Christianity as a pagan sex cult. Totally dead pain, but it's one of those things. And to be clear also about what druidry is and isn't, one of the things that people assume is if you're a druid, you're not Christian, but some of what I read in the druidry handbook indicates that there are definitely people who are associated in both directions. That's absolutely true. Many of the early members of the druid revival were Christian -- in fact, many of them were Christian ministers. William Stockley, who was one of the very influential early figures in the revival, was himself an Anglican minister in England with a parish of his own and all this kind of stuff. So, yeah, there's the assumption that there's a break there, but in fact, druidry tends to ignore a lot of boundaries that are held very rigid in other places, boundaries between the sacred and secular, boundaries between Christian and pagan, boundaries between nature and the supernatural. Look at those and go, "Well, you know, these interesting human constructs, do they actually have any relevance to our life in the world, to our experience of spirituality, and to our need to relate in the same sense of all manner to the living world on which we depend for our lives?" Would you mind saying a few more words, John Michael, about how you got to druidry. You talked about a couple steps along the way. What were those? Well, like a lot of people growing up in the 1960s and the 1970s, I didn't have a lot of exposure to the mainstream of Western religion and the exposure that I had left me distinctly unabressed. I really came at age about the time that the current Christian fundamentalist movement was really getting going. We had campus crusade for Christ marching down the halls of my high school and presenting a very strident, very angry, very self-righteous creed as Christianity. And since I, as I said, I was raised in a non-religious family. This did not impress me at all. And I know a lot of other people who had that same response, you know, if this is what Christianity means, I don't want to be part of it. So I dabbled in a range of things. I spent a while studying certain Asian spiritual traditions, some studies at Buddhism for a while, studied Daoism for a while, got involved in some of the various Western esoteric traditions, you know, the Hermetic tradition, for example. And eventually, just by way of connections through their met, somebody who is into, who's involved in one of the other druid orders. This was the order of Bards of Aids and Druids, which is the world's largest druid order these days. And they invited me in a very casual way. Druids don't proselytize. It's just a matter of, you know, would you be interested? We'd be happy to talk to you about it. And so I got involved kind of that way by way of connection with a friend. It just kind of unfolded from there. Sounds like a proper way to do it. You explored and found the place that fit for you. Yeah, exactly. I take it that nature spirituality, that that part of it was a particular draw for you. To me, that's the crucial thing. All of the really powerful experiences of the sort that I would call spiritual, that I've had in my life, have been in some relationship to nature. I don't find being inside of a building, particularly holy. And which kind of got in the way of one of the things getting away, a regular church membership. But I do find nature very holy. I find that that's a very natural, very unforced, very direct kind of experience of the sacred farming. So, Druidry Luz is one of the few traditions that really speaks to that directly. Since you're the first self-avowed druid that I've had in my program, I am exploring this a little bit more deeply before we get to the environmental stuff that you've dealt with. And John Michael, I am impressed by your output of literature you've taught. You must type at 2,000 words a minute. I'm pretty impressed. I don't know that I quite get to that, but I do type fast. And I have a lot of things to say. I'm a talker to sort. And, you know, it makes it much sense to me to talk with under your tips. One last thing before I go on to more general topics. What is it that you do or should or have to do or maybe most druids do in order to be a druid? Could I be a druid? What would it take? Typical. What's one of those complex questions? As with so many things in Druidry, ask three druids. You'll get at least five different answers. But most of what makes a druid is participation in some of the traditional practices and activities of one or another druid organization. It's very much something that is, it has been in groups, if you will. And since the name is simply the label for tradition, I mean, we're not saying everybody has to be a druid. Or even everybody has to be a druid in order to relate to nature in a spiritual fashion, nobody ludicrous. Being a druid simply means participating in a given tradition, a particular way of relating to nature as sacred. And so, for example, in the order that I had these days, we have a system of meditation that we teach. We have seasonal celebrations on the solaces and the equinoxes that we celebrate. We have a custom of making changes in our lives to lighten the burden that each of us places on the biosphere. And those three things, we call the moon path of the sun path and the earth path, respectively, the moon path of meditation, the sun path of seasonal celebration, and the earth path of lightening our burden on the planet. Those are really the three core elements of druid practice in AODA. Go to another druid organization. You'll find things arranged somewhat differently. But very often, the same broad pattern of personal spiritual practice, celebration of the seasons, and paying attention to how we live in the world is central to most druid orders, I'd say. You know, John Michael, I've only read two of the at least 22 books that you've written. Plus, I've read a little bit from the arts druid report that you do on blogspot.com. I'm sure that in that reading, those two books and what I've read there, I've only scratched the surface of the ideas and the knowledge that you've been conveying. It's clear to me that there's a much larger body of knowledge behind that. As a matter of fact, turning out 22 books in 15 years, it makes me think of Isaac Asimov. I'm not sure you're going for opus 100 like he did, or opus 200 or whatever. No, but I'll probably make opus 100 or something happens. Actually, it's 27 books in the last 16 years. They've got books listed on Wikipedia up through 2011, and they're missing one of them, I know, which is 2011. They're missing several. Well, in any case, it's quite an output that you've done. Is your mind just so voracious that you're constantly churning this out? Do you have an objective? Is there an overview that you could give us of your publications that would give us an idea where your mind's been going? Yes, and there's also another factor that I should interject before we get to the overview, which is simply that I'm not just writing this stuff out of my own hand. Much of what I've been doing has been a matter of taking traditions, teachings that I've received, especially since I became Grand Arc Stuart. I inherited a lot of material, and part of my job as I see it is to transmit that material in a more easily accessible form. Because many of the things that have been part of the inner traditions of the minority traditions of Western spirituality have been very hard to get to. They've been kept in somebody's filing cabinet somewhere, or what have you, and especially during the years since the kind of wick and the sort of pop wickah became so powerful, as a religious metaphor in the alternative scenes. A lot of the older traditions were pretty thoroughly ignored, and a lot of people didn't want to hear about them. And so there's been a certain amount of salvage to be done, and a certain amount of "Okay, you know, I may have the last copy of this particular stack of documents anywhere in the world. I need to get this material into print." So that's been a lot of what's motivated, for example, my textbook's on Druidry. A very little of that is out of my own hand. But in terms of an overview, there's an intersection between the capacities that each of us have for knowledge and power and goodness in our own lives. And the same relationship with the humanity as a whole and the biosphere that we as a species desperately need to move toward and fast. Those two are not disconnected from one another. There's a tendency to think of what the outward world is itself, and then there's their spirituality. So this is what we do in the privacy of our rooms or what have you. But that's always coming out of a common set of ideas, a common set of understandings. The way we think about ourselves shapes how we think about the world and vice versa. There's this real tendency to think of our outer lives and our inner lives as two separate things. We've got the outer world of politics, of the environment, of how we deal with the planet, how we deal with each other. And then we have our own inner lives, our own relationship to spirituality, our own relationship to the basic sources of meaning and value. Our society is tempted to treat these as two different things, what you do in the privacy of your own head or the privacy of your own rooms. And public policy toward the environment is another. But I have become convinced that it's exactly in the intersection between those two. The intersection between spirit and environment between the within and the without. That any solution to the rising spiral of crises that the industrial society is facing these days has got to be found if there is a solution. That's where we're going to get it. And that makes perfect sense to me as a matter of fact, that idea that we divide it is part of why I do this show. This show, Spirit and Action, is targeted really towards the more liberal end of the spectrum. It's people on the same campus I find myself in part because if we don't draw on that spiritual depth, that knitting together of the various layers of our lives, we are so much poorer when we address the big questions. So thank you for saying that because you just put into words very well what I would myself have liked to have been able to say as eloquently. The two books that I've read of yours are the Druidry Handbook, Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth, and Apocalypse Not. Everything you know about 2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture is wrong. Two that I didn't read unfortunately were the Ecotechnic Future envisioning a post-peak world and the wealth of nature, economics as if survival mattered. I'm pretty sure I have clues as to what these might have been about because of your blog. And for our listeners, that blog again is the archedruidreport.blogspot.com. Let's first talk about peak oil, what the concern is and what this Ecotechnic Future you've written about is. Okay, peak oil is simply a shorthand term for the peak of global conventional petroleum production. There's a certain amount of misunderstanding that creeps into almost all public discussion of energy. And a lot of it centers around the idea that we can just keep calm as much oil as we want from the earth at whatever rate we want. Talk to a petroleum engineer, they'll tell you that getting this viscous stuff out of the rock at any given speed, it's challenging. You know, it doesn't necessarily flow as fast as you'd like. It flows at a given rate. If you try to push it too fast, you're going to leave a lot of it stuck in little crevices where it can't be gotten out. And so what's true of a well, it's true of an oil field, is true of a region, a country, the planet. You can only come through oil so fast. And what this means is that as old fields mature out and start running dry and do ones come on at perhaps a slower rate because it's harder to find them. This kind of stuff, you reach a point where you can no longer increase the annual production of oil. It's just, it's peak. And after that, you're going to be stuck on a plateau for a while and then the annual production is going to go down no matter what you do. For two reasons. The first is that the earth is a finite planet, okay? It doesn't, it only has so much oil in it. And the world petroleum industry has been scouring the globe for how many decades now, trying to find every last patch of ground that has oil under it. And the second thing is, again, this tendency of oil to be sticky and to flow only at a certain rate. Now, we've heard a certain amount of talk about peak oil recently. People were saying, well, you know, we could be at peak oil by 2020 or by 2030 or people saying, no, no, no, no, no, until 2050. This is fascinating to those of us who've actually been trapping the situation because the world actually reached its peak of conventional petroleum production in 2005. We're post peak now. The only reason this, the amount of oil for sale has remained as a plateau and it has, it's been, it has not increased noticeably since 2005. The only reason it hasn't dropped is that we've been throwing everything that will burn into our gas tanks. We've been putting in ethanol, we've been doing biofuels, we've been in cars and extractives. We've been, you name it, of the natural gas liquid. Anything that can be put into the petroleum supply is being thrown in. Even though it costs more, delivers less energy, output energy put in, it has all these other problems. It doesn't matter. The industry is desperately trying to keep the world's gas tanks full and it's failing. That's peak oil. If we peaked back in 2005 or so, what does that mean is going to happen in the near future? What is this future that we're preparing for? Well, look at what's happened since 2005. The price of oil has gone from, what was at the beginning of 2005, about 35 bucks a barrel? What is it now, about 110 bucks a barrel? There was all this rhetoric dating back to the '70s, really, saying that, well, as soon as the price of oil gets above, choose your amount, then all of these other resources are going to come online because then they'll be affordable. Well, oil was $110 a barrel. And these other resources still aren't affordable. The trick that nobody paid attention to is that all these other resources are being extracted by machinery that use oil. I'm going to use diesel for equipment to dig coal. We use a lot of petroleum products to put up wind turbines to fill in the blank. Our oil supply is the energy key that allows us access to every other kinds of energy as well as providing all our transportation 40% of our bulk energy. So what we've seen between 2005 and now is a partase to the future. What have we seen? We've seen economic contraction. We've seen political chaos. We've seen in the United States and elsewhere, we've got a situation where nobody actually has any solutions. The various parties, the various mainstream parties are just yelling at each other. But they don't actually have any answers. They don't have anything they can do or anything to propose because they haven't grappled with the fact, the terrifying fact that growth is over. And we all have this idea, well, growth. We've got to have economic growth. We've got to grow this. We've got to grow that. People who talk about spirituality is personal growth. Growth is so hardwired into our way of thinking. We've lost track of the fact that unlimited growth, for example, in our bodies, unlimited growth has a name. It's cancer. This idea that growth is always good would be silly if it wasn't so destructive. But that's hardwired into our way of thinking of things. And so it's become almost impossible for us to realize growth is over. We are not going to have growth in the future. We're not going to have growth for a very, very, very long time to come. It's certainly not in our lifetimes. And probably not for very, very long after that. We are going to have to make do with less. We are going to have to learn to get bionalistics on less extravagant lifestyles, buying strawberries in January. Many of our listeners must have read the Grimm's fairy tales back in the day. And I forget which one it is where the orphan child is driven out in the snow by the evil stepmother and told, "A Christmas time, go get me some strawberries." And that was just the most impossible thing. Nowadays, you just go down to your grocery store. That kind of extravagant, a kind of wild extravagant, we can't afford it anymore, but we haven't grappled with that fact yet. So the future that is ahead of us is a future of retrenchment, of contraction, of learning to get bionalness, of relearning a lot of lessons that our grandparents and great-grandparents knew, and that we forgot during the age of abundance, that burning up the earth's cheap petroleum supplies at a high speed, briefly purchased us. The delightful discussion you're listening to is called Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit radio production website, northernspiritradio.org. On the site, you'll find more than six and a half years of archives of our programs. You'll find links to our guests, like John Michael Greer, who's with us today for Spirit in Action. You'll also find place to leave comments we love hearing from you. Please drop us your bit of wisdom and insight. Again, John Michael Greer is the author of 27 books on numerous topics, among them Druidry, Peak Oil, Nature-based Economics, and Apocalypse. He's also grand druid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, and we'll get back to talking to John Michael in a moment, but first I thought a bit of music by Joaquin Erickson would be appropriate heartfelt music on today's topics. Here's Joaquin Erickson and his song Forgetting Home, a song about global warming, then back to John Michael Greer. At the time of man's splendid glory, when well-filled nations of old, at that time came a plate in the heat that took hold of the earth and home of all his known. Heaven's tears fell upon man's head, raging fires, rip out through his land, but he fought with his heart, turned to stone, for he forgot all about his home. [Music] By the fear of losing all his glory, his comfort, profits, and pain, and would fight, have fight again without deletion orignment, all his care, or how his well will spend. Raving oceans, crushed the dreams of man's stormy wings, rip out down his plans, eat at night, who destroyed mankind's throne, and we forgot all about his home. At the end of time for mankind's glory, he will bring common yet to come, of the unborn yet to be, of his children that would seek scalars, wastes, and lack of dignity. Price of pain, they come through all the land's language tears, fill the heart of man that kind failed, and the light of earth was gone, and cried a lot when he realized he was home. And this is not exactly mourning in America type ideology, so contrary to it, no politician wants to touch this one. No politician, well the whole mourning in America garbage, I'm sorry, I know there's a lot of people who are very fond of Ronald Reagan, but up until the Reagan administration, America was actually moving painfully, slowly, clumsily toward sustainability. We had that idea, and then the faction around Reagan was able to elbow their way into control, the Republican party, and then say no, we don't have to do this, we can party, and what happened is we basically sold our future. We basically sold our future in order to have a few more decades of wild partying. Was it bright? No. And the whole mourning in America business was part and parcel of that. Not surprisingly, I had the same conception, but I do find reasons for optimism regularly, but they're not probably in the same points of interest that the politicians are usually touting. Do you have some kind of a background education related to environmentalism, or is this just a homegrown enthusiasm of yours? Well, back in the day, back in the late 70s and very early 80s, I was actually preparing for a career in the alternative energy field. I took classes at the Huxley College of Environmental Studies. I don't know if that even exists anymore. It was connected to Western Washington University and Bellingham, learned organic farming and helped build a wind turbine and all this kind of stuff. I was deeply into that stuff, but the bottom basically fell out of the market with the coming of the Reagan administration. I mean, I went to college in 1980, just before things started winding down. And so my career plans basically went away because nobody was interested. So it becomes kind of personal between you and Ronald Reagan because he destroyed your economic future, didn't he? Well, no, he simply made me go a very different direction. It was always a choice. Was I going to get into appropriate tech or was I going to become a writer? And I had pretty much decided on appropriate tech and then that got foreclosed on me because the whole ideological camp that was trotted out at that time. No, no, no, we have all the energy we need or at least we can get it from the Saudis and conservation is un-American and all this crap. But I retained my interest in that. I continued studying and obviously I was not able to get a job in that field, but I continued doing a lot of studying and I continued. I kept in practice at a time when most people were eagerly claiming the early versions of the SUV lifestyle. I was still running an organic garden in my backyard and I have had absolutely no cost to regret that. I've never owned a car. That was one of the things that I decided back in the day and I've stuck with it. I've stuck with it all the way. I've never owned an automobile. I've never had a driver's license. I've had to make certain changes in my lifestyle to fit that, but it's also meant that I've had many hundreds of spare dollars every single month that would have gone on car payments and gasoline or all the other expenses. This made it much easier to pursue a writing career during the early and early phase of that when writing doesn't pay that well. Yes, most writers are, I think they have to adjust to the idea of not having personal possessions very much. They've got paper and that's pretty important and they're typing material. Yeah, basically, if you want to be a writer, you need to plan on 10 years living in a garage or something like that. Well, so I guess maybe the technical side of the environment's loss has been our benefit because this 20, what did you say, 26, 27 looks like? 27, 27. Yeah, that we might not have gotten that if you'd been all wrapped up in building wind turbines. Building wind turbines and the insulating houses and all the other stuff that I studied back in the day here. So, does a druid tend to live any differently than a non druid physically? I mean, are all druids obviously more environmentally attuned in their lifestyle than non druids? Is that, if I just looked at them, would I see that? There again, ask three druids, get at least five answers. I don't know that, I mean, I think there's a lot of people in the world who are concerned about the environment. There are a lot of people in the world who have taken steps to make their lives less burdensome on the planet. I don't know that druids have any special claim to virtue in that field. It is true that I know a lot of a very large number of the druids that I know are quite comfortable with a much simpler lifestyle than many other people. You'll find a lot of druids who don't have a television in the living room. You'll find a lot of druids who find a significant number of druids who don't have a car in the driveway. But it really varies because our faith is not one that focuses on commandments or on one person telling another person what they have to do. There's a lot of flexibility. In AODA, for example, in our first-year training program, we ask each student to make three changes in their lives to cut the burden they place on the virus. But we don't tell them which three changes to make. They have to come up with them and stick with them for a year and pay attention to what they learned by doing that. It can be very complex as to what specific angle and what specific appearance you get as a result of that. There are druids who you would look at and go, "Oh, man, back to the land hippie." There are druids who you would look at and you would never guess. Well, I did read in the Druidry Handbook, you have some of the levels that you can go through, three degrees of initiation. You call them druid apprentice, druid companion, druid adept. I assume that you're an adept because you get to write about that kind of thing. I get to write about this stuff, yes. I've worked my way through. I've actually been through the equivalent in three different druid orders. There's a lot of overlap. At that first level, I don't know if you're a druid apprentice for that first year. You have to do at least a full cycle of the seasons. How long does it take to walk up this if you're going great guns? If you're going great guns and you just shove your way through everything, you can complete the process in about six years. If you need to take more than that, you're totally welcome to do so. It's not a race. And is that what you did? Well, one of the things that added complexity when I became a member of AODA is that AODA at that time was nearly extinct. It was one of the old line druid orders that had very few, in fact, had essentially no new members for a couple of decades. That happened to a lot of the old line alternative for American spiritual groups back in the day. Again, people got into wick and things like that. And the older American groups, they were like uncool. So when I joined, when I joined, when I actually found AODA, and that was kind of a complex process, I came to them with an extensive background in other druid orders that essentially covered the same territory. And I was kind of in AODA itself, put through the degrees very quickly because I'd done equivalent work elsewhere. And also because, although I didn't know this at the time, the elderly, the handful of elderly members who were all that was left of the order, were going, "Okay, this guy is like 35 years younger than any of us. If the order's going to have a future, it's going to be in his lab." And that's basically, I ended up getting pole vaulted into the big chair in AODA and said, "Okay, kid, let's see what we can do with this." But in the course of going through the equivalent training in the order of vards of its in druids, yeah, I mean, I think it was five and a half years that it took me to go through the whole thing. And it was a slightly different program. Is there any area of the world, maybe a demographically significant group, a city, a state, village, a neighborhood, whatever, that lives its lives, particularly in a way that would be harmonious with your druidic outlook? You know what I'm saying, just living in that kind of harmony or connection with the seasons or connection with Earth. It's very easy to imagine some place off there where people live in harmony. I find that completely, I find that not a useful thing to even think about. The question is how each of us can live in greater harmony with nature right here, right now, wherever we are. AODA has members all over the place, certainly thinly scattered on the ground at this point, although there are some local groups beginning to form. Some of the other druid orders, like what I don't know of any druid order that even comprises of the majority in the given neighborhood. And it's simply, you know, worth it on the ground, there's only maybe two million of us in the world. I think maybe I didn't make my question quite clear enough. It's not necessarily that it's a group of druids that are occupying a neighborhood, but a region that's living in a way that would be in harmony with the druidic outlook so that, you know, people who are thoughtfully engaging with these questions on a wide basis, so that society looks like it. If you had to pick a city village, nation, place to live that you thought was living harmoniously with that, where would you put yourself down? I'd say where you are, and where you are living, the way you should be living. I don't think, again, there's this tendency to romanticize distance, and that's the opposite. We need to engage with the world right where we are right now. Is there some place out there somewhere? I have a belief idea. It's not of great concern to me, the thing that concerns me is living my life and helping other people live theirs where they are, when they are, with what they have right now. Well, I mentioned another book that you wrote, Wealth of Nature Economics as if survival mattered, and I'm pretty sure this has got all kinds of crucial insights into it that I'd benefit if I actually got an opportunity to read that. I just don't read fast enough. I think you can probably type faster than I can read. It's as possible. I imagine that industrially oriented folks immediately think, when they hear a phrase like wealth of nature, they think about mineral extraction, but I'm guessing that's not what you've written about. No, one of the great blind spots in modern economics is the idea that our economic life as human beings doesn't depend on nature, but it's just kind of producing stuff out of thin air by combining labor and capital. Now, in fact, the studies that have been done indicate that out of, say, every dollar of value that's in circulation in any economy in the world, 85 cents are actually provided free by natural systems. Everything from fertile soil, rain for crops, pollination. I mean, we're busy wiping out the honeybee population, so we're starting to notice that. There's all of these services that are provided by nature to the economy on which our economic life depends, moment by moment. And economists ignore this, and because they ignore this, they've been making endlessly stupid decisions about what our economic priorities should be. In fact, because three-quarters of our economic wealth comes from nature directly, the most important investments that any society can make is investment in building up its biosphere, building up its own if it's local ecosystems, which provide it with services like clean water, fresh air, fertile soil, pollination, viable, diverse seed stocks. I could go on for a week. So, the major point of the book is to sort out precisely that we've got a primary economy, which is nature, which is the natural world as it exists outside of human activity. The secondary economy is what we do with the goods and services we receive from nature, the production of human goods and human services. And then on top of that is a tertiary economy, which is money. And money is simply a set of arbitrary tokens. Money is not wealth. You can have all the -- I promise you, I could give you a suitcase with a billion dollars on it and stick you on some desolate island in the Aleutians, and you would still start with reach to death. Because money is not wealth. Money is just a set of social tokens that we use to distribute wealth. And economists confuse money with wealth all the time. We've got this fiasco going on in Greece right now. They're juggling this immense pile of -- essentially a loose inventory money. Money that's loaning the new existence money that is piled up death upon death upon death. And they're trying to deal with it by lending more money and spending more money and generating more money. When the problem is that grief can't support a lifestyle based on, you know, its own production, okay? There need to be some changes within the Greek economy, within the actual economy of goods and services. But those aren't happening because all the economists are fixated on money. So that's kind of the cooks to a version of the wealth of nature. It goes into a lot more detail and explains a lot more of how the way we relate to wealth is problematic, how we've landed us in many of our current economic and political problems, and how we could fix that by paying attention to the fact that our economies are dependent on nature, that the most important investment we can make is investment in nature, and in straightening out our relationships with natural sources of all our wealth. I think you'd have a lot of our listeners on board with you there. I think that's very clear that that's fundamental to us. I'm wondering if some listeners, whether they come from Christian or other backgrounds, they say, how do you proceed in constructing your values pyramid, if you will, if you're not starting from the Ten Commandments or however else, you know, if you're not starting with your holy writings, the Quran or the Torah or whatever. How do you construct that? It's very simple. Druids have a scripture too. It's called nature. You know, people used to say back, this is something from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A lot of very good Christians, in fact, used to talk about how God had written two books. There was the book of nature, and then there was the Bible. One of those books has had some rather complex processes of translation and interpretation. The other one would less so. And so one of the currents, in fact, in Western civilization, that druidry, the modern form of druidry evolved out of, is this recognition that we can learn spiritual lessons by paying attention to the natural world. Now, of course, when saying that, you also have to get past the really rather weird but very pervasive notion that nature consists of purely what's between your legs. I mean, there's some problems in the Western world about this. The equation of nature and sex. And people get very beneficial. You mean do what's natural. You mean get out there and fornicate 24/7. You know, that's not natural. We've got some very weird habits that have slipped into our way of thinking because of certain hiccups in our cultural habits of thinking. And so, you know, those are our listeners who may be devout Christians and may be thinking, well, if you're paying attention to nature, you're going to be fornicating all the time, or you're going to do this, you're going to do that. Nature has a lot of lessons to offer. One of the lessons it offers is the people who visit beings any kind of living thing that wastes its resources and lives as though there's no tomorrow is going to be in very deep trouble. We can also look at simply how things happen in the world and discover that virtue is the Greeks pointed out a very long time ago. I mean, the Greek word for virtue out of it literally means excellence. The classical virtues are those things that lead to excellence in human life. And if you actually pay attention to human life and to capacities for excellence, you get a very clear sense of what works and what doesn't. And it actually corresponds very closely to the ideas of virtue written and covered by people like Aristotle, for example, in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same way, I'm not very up on New Testament Greek, for example, but I've been told that the word that is translated "sin" in English in Greek actually amounts to missing the target, blowing it. In fact, which makes sense. And you don't have to have a particular book to get there. You don't have to have one particular volume to figure these things out. People have been figuring them out for a very long time, which is why moral philosophy around the world tends to glide on very much the same topics. We at a Buddhist track on ethics or a Shinto discussion of ethics or Native American ethical traditions, you'll find that they cover pretty much the same ground. And if it comes from our experience, we can verify it. We can verify it. Go out there and watch the natural world, see what works and see what doesn't. It's a very useful mirror to our expectations, or very useful, not not so much a mirror, it's a very useful test for expectations, our assumptions, our ways of thinking about the world because you can see when it fails. And if we look at our own lives clearly, we can see where it fails. That's all the time we have today for spirit and action, but we'll be back next week with more of John Michael Greer and a number of topics. And we'll be especially talking about the presumed coming apocalypse on December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar. That's just scratching the surface. See you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.