Cassandra's View (John Michael Greer)

   Oct. 1, 2008 (Archdruid Report) -- As I mentioned in last week’s post, I took the opportunity this year to travel to Sacramento to attend the annual conference hosted by ASPO-USA -- the acronym-impaired may want to know that this is the U.S. branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, the largest and most respected organization in the peak oil field. It was, as the Grateful Dead might have put it, a long strange trip, and ever since my return I have been wondering just how to talk about the experience on The Archdruid Report.

  That the conference needed to be discussed here I had no doubt. Some of the presentations at the conference were profoundly insightful. Others were profoundly obtuse – and this very fact is worth noting, as a marker of the extent to which intelligent people with the best intentions in the world can still miss the most crucial implications of the systemic crisis facing the industrial world just now. Still, inspiration chooses its own path; it wasn’t until I unpacked a book I’d found in a very different place the day before the conference, and flipped idly through its pages, that I knew how to say what needed to be said.

  Perhaps the most surprising personal discovery I made at the conference was that while many people there had encountered these essays, most of them apparently thought that the word “archdruid” in the title was a cute internet handle rather than a job description. I am in fact the elected head of a Druid order, and in that capacity I travel now and then to events hosted by other Druid organizations around the country. It so happened that the ASPO conference took place just after one such event, a harvest festival for Sacramento’s Pagan community, celebrating the autumn equinox.

  That’s where I was on the two days prior to the conference, celebrating the coming of autumn with Sacramento’s Druids and Pagans in a sunny, pleasant park east of town. That’s where I wandered into a bookstall in the row of vendors, and bought a copy of an old favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology; and it was as I paged through the volume, thinking mostly of the challenges involved in finding a place for it on my already overcrowded bookshelves, that I found a reference to the old story of Cassandra.

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