The main lesson I took from JMG's blog and books was "collapse now and avoid the rush"

This resonated wiith me as I had started to collapse...not because I knew about peak oil etc. but because I was thoroughly disgusted with the corporations and how they do business, and the complete disregard for this planet we live on.

I have no power against them except my buying power....so off I went down the rabbit hole of make it yourself, or do without.

That is how I live, I doubt it will change anything in the comming collapse. I actually doubt anything any of us do will change anything, we are to far gone.

I will be 68 this year and I plan to just keep plugging along not consuming, growing a garden and doing my crafts.

Oh! I do still write letters, call politicians, attend town hall meetings...but that will change nothing.

To me, Green Wizardry is the summation of what Greer wrote about in his book by that title. But you can also have fun with the Middle Ages concept of it. There are lots of skills to learn toward less dependence on a system destined to fail, and when you take it to its conclusion, ultimately, you must cultivate a community of like-minded people, which can be quite hard to do. That is the biggest challenge, and last week I saw a commenter on ADR ask for advice. I really ought to contact him and invite him over here.

I am grateful to David for keeping this blog up. I am sure we'll see more activity over this way, with Greer busy (I hope everything is okay with him), but hard times can actually atomize communities, especially if you are trying to get along in the failing technological system, of which this blog here still represents a part. (We'll keep tending it until that no longer is possible, learning from each others' experiences far away.)

I was very lucky to witness the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was highly atomizing to families. There were suicides, rampant alcoholism, with children already addicted, girls forced to sell their beauty to support their dad's habits. But they got by,and most of them found ways to enjoy their lives.

They had food. The fractured communities began reorganizing, people found ways to help children. Throughout all of this, mechanical, shopkeeping, hunting, foraging, animal husbandry and other skills became essential. The people who did okay had about three skills they could rely on for some cash as the breadwinner, with the wife contributing in a fourth way. Typically one was their former job, for which months might go by with no pay, and when it came, it was a pittance. Thus a park ranger was also a taxi driver and hostel keeper. His wife sucked at facing customers, but found a way to travel (merchant). Their society never devolved into roaming hordes--the Soviet Union had stressed some degree of food self-sufficiency.

Thus I would put food production at the center of the skills needed now before a real crisis hits. In Russia, people got by who had a dacha on the outskirts of town and a way to get there (reasonably good public transport), or if they had relatives in rural areas who could bring them food. The biggest problems happened when a drunken uncle sold the dacha. That kind of thing has to be guarded against.

Right now, I'm focusing on gardening, sewing, and embroidery. As those things become easier for me, I'll start working on other skills.

Maybe green wizardry is a process whereby you learn to do more for yourself so you can gradually use less energy, stuff, and stimulation. The particular details are up to you.

I don't know where my copy of Green Wizardy has gone. I saw it a couple weeks ago and "shelved" it. Haven't seen it since. I just finished Decline and Fall, and I am half-way thru After Progress. Had a Pagan Meetup last weekend, and when we went around and introduced ourselves, I said as I usually do that my path was "applied Druidry." Then I went looking for info on the Green Wizardry book to post to our FB group and discovered that there was a Green Wizardry podcast with JMG on YouTube. In fact, there are HOURS of JMG on YouTube! Many podcasts discussing his books--most of them posted by Legalise-Freedom.com--but also conferences and what not.

I have this stupid new internet TV service, but has a YouTube channel. If I can figure out how to create a playlist, I think I can watch JMG videos on the TV. But you can find them here.

https://youtu.be/Yro4hcx2UUc

I am starting to think that a decent knowledge of classical knowledge is still very valid. A lot of the stuff that is common knowledge now just won't be applicable in a de-industrial future. Sometime in the last couple of years I think JMG challenged his listeners to personally find something they value of modern culture and make every effort to preserve it for the future. Honest to pete, I couldn't think of anything that I thought I would do to preserve something for the future that wasn't something of a practical, manual skill. That would probably be the same things that were preserved from classical times.

Music comes to mind, since so little survived from classical times, but that requires a rather sophisticated suite of technologies to also survive. Building musical instruments is possible with the right tools and resources and so is sheet music, but without tools and paper and all that those things require, modern music may vanish.

I confess that I am rather confused about what would make a Green Wizard and I have read the book a couple of times. Perhaps I need to read it again. I hope this thread provides some good insights from other site members.

I admit I'm kind of surprisd to learn that the Green Wizard Project has gone off the tracks. Dissensus has always been our by-word, and I guess I'm just out here doing my thing. If I have to define Green Wizardry, I call it "Applied Druidry". because the foundation appears to come from the Earth Path in The Druidry Handbook: Spiritual Practice Rooted in the Living Earth by JMG. The post that originally broght us HERE was "Merlin's Time" (June 30. 2010). And the key paragraph for me was:

"By 'wizard" here I don’t mean your common or garden variety fortune teller or ritual practitioner; we have those in abundance today. The wizard of the early Middle Ages in Europe and the Muslim world, rather, was a freelance intellectual whose main stock in trade was good advice, though admittedly that came well frosted with incantation and prophecy as needed. He had a good working knowledge of astrology, which filled roughly the same role in medieval thought that theoretical physics does today, and an equally solid knowledge of ritual magic, but his training did not begin or end there. According to Picatrix, the compleat wizard in training needed to get a thorough education in agriculture; navigation; political science; military science; grammar, languages, and rhetoric; commerce, all the mathematics known at the time, including arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy; logic; medicine, including a good knowledge of herbal pharmaceuticals; the natural sciences, including meteorology, mineralogy, botany, and zoology; and Aristotle’s metaphysics: in effect, the sum total of the scientific learning that had survived from the classical world."

Well, cool beans!

Green Wizardry has mostly focused on the hands-on stuff: agriculture and crafts. I picked up The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered and ran with that! And I've been having a lovely time ever since Does anybody know what a "qanat" or "well chain" is? I just came across it this week: I don't quite grok it yet, but I know we are going to need it in the very near future, so here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat

I need to get it over into the water circle later today.

--I'm going to be 66 on Saturday, and growing tomatoes or making my own clothes is pretty much a waste of my limited time and energy. But I was born to read and surf the internet, so while me and it survive, I'm going hunting for "the sum total of the scientific learning that had survived" from Olden Times, and I am studying economics and political science and having a good time. I'm also building a nice library, so if somebody wants to marry me, lol, I have a good dowery and three cats.

For me the simplest way to describe it would be somebody who works against entropy. Somebody who moves through an area and leaves it better than he found it.

We all know them, you can hand them a sow's ear and they will hand you back a silk purse and a handful of change to go into it. Most people see a yard full of weeds but they see potential lunch. When others spend a fortune renovating a kitchen, they can do something better with stuff scrounged from a garbage dump. Need to get something done, and they can get the whole community believing that they actually can fight city hall----and see it through to a good result.

These are the "green wizards": polymorphs who have spent their lifetime learning hands-on, practical skills. Right now, most of them are barely tolerated by mainstream society. But in a world with zero economic growth, stagnant wages, and a general decline in the cash economy, these people have the important survival skills that will allow individuals, families, and communities to thrive in hard times.