About this item
Merlin, Gandalf, Voldemort - these well-known sorcerers from popular culture are famed for their amazing spells and spectacular magical powers. In ancient times, however, a wizard was actually a freelance intellectual whose main stock in trade was good advice, supported by a thorough education in agriculture, navigation, political and military science, languages, commerce, mathematics, medicine, and the natural sciences - in essence, the true Renaissance man.John Michael Greer proposes a modern mage for uncertain times; one who possesses a startling array of practical skills gleaned from the appropriate tech and organic gardening movements forged in the energy crisis of the 1970s. From the basic concepts of ecology to a plethora of practical techniques such as composting, green manure, low-tech food preservation and storage, small-scale chicken and rabbit raising, solar water heating, alternative energy sources, and more, Green Wizardry is a comprehensive manual for today's wizard-in-training.Providing a solid practical introduction to the entire appropriate tech toolkit, this book is a must-read for anyone concerned about decreasing our dependence on an overloaded industrial system and, in a world of serious energy shortages and economic troubles, making life a great deal less traumatic and more livable.John Michael Greer is a scholar of ecological history and an internationally renowned Peak Oil theorist whose blog The Archdruid Report has become one of the most widely cited online resources dealing with the future of industrial society. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Wealth of Nature and The Long Descent.
About the Author
Born in the gritty Navy town of Bremerton, Washington and raised in the south Seattle suburbs, I began writing about as soon as I could hold a pencil. SF editor George Scithers' dictum that all would-be writers have a million words of so of bad prose in them, and have to write it out, pretty much sums up the couple of decades between my first serious attempt to write a book and my first published book, "Paths of Wisdom", which appeared in 1996. These days I live in Cumberland, Maryland with my spouse Sara; serve as presiding officer -- Grand Archdruid is the official title -- of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) , a Druid order founded in 1912; and write in half a dozen nonfiction fields, nearly all of them focused on the revival of forgotten ideas, insights, and traditions of practice from the rubbish heap of history.
