I came upon Dmitry Orlov's writings—as with most good things on the Internet—by letting chance and curiosity guide me from link to link. It was one of those moments of clarity when a large number of confusing questions find their answer along with their correct formulation. For example, the existence of fundamental similarities between the Soviet Union and the United States was for me a vague intuition, but I was unable to draw up a detailed list as Dmitry has done. One must have lived in two crumbling empires in order to be able to do that.
I must say that my enthusiasm was not shared
by those around me, with whom I have shared my translations. It's
only natural: who wants to hear how our world of material comfort,
opportunity and unstoppable individual progress is about to collapse
under the weight of its own expansion? Certainly not the post-war
generation weaned on the exuberant growth of the postwar boom (1945-1973),
well established in their lives of average consumers since the 1980s,
and willing to enjoy a hedonistic age while remaining convinced that
despite the economic tragedies ravaging society around them, their
grandchildren will benefit from more or less the same well-padded,
industrialized lifestyle. The generation of their children is more
receptive to the notion of economic decline—though to varying
degrees, depending on the decrease of their purchasing power and how lethally bored they feel at work (if they can find any)
.
It would be wrong to shoot the messenger who brings bad news. If you read Dmitry carefully, scrupulously separating the factual bad news, which are beyond his control, from his views on what can be done to survive and live in a post-industrial world, you will find evidence of strong optimism. I hope that in this he is right.
Whatever our views on peak oil and its consequences—or our distate for scary prophecies—we can find in Dmitry Orlov fresh ideas on how to conduct our lives in a degraded economic and political environment, reasons to seek fruitful relations with people you might not normally cherry-pick, or the most effective approach to the frustrating political and media chatter and the honeyed whisper of commercial propaganda (shrug, turn around and go on with your life).
It would be wrong to shoot the messenger who brings bad news. If you read Dmitry carefully, scrupulously separating the factual bad news, which are beyond his control, from his views on what can be done to survive and live in a post-industrial world, you will find evidence of strong optimism. I hope that in this he is right.
Whatever our views on peak oil and its consequences—or our distate for scary prophecies—we can find in Dmitry Orlov fresh ideas on how to conduct our lives in a degraded economic and political environment, reasons to seek fruitful relations with people you might not normally cherry-pick, or the most effective approach to the frustrating political and media chatter and the honeyed whisper of commercial propaganda (shrug, turn around and go on with your life).
Tancrède Bastié
TB: What difference do you see
between American and European close future?
DO: European countries are historical
entities that still hold vestiges of allegiances beyond the
monetized, corporate realm, while the United States was started as a
corporate entity, based on a revolution that was essentially a tax
revolt and thus has no fall-back. The European population is less
transient than in America, with a stronger sense of regional
belonging and are more likely to be acquainted with their neighbors
and to be able to find a common language and to find solutions to
common problems.
Probably the largest difference, and
the one most promising for fruitful discussion, is in the area of
local politics. European political life may be damaged by money
politics and free market liberalism, but unlike in the United States,
it does not seem completely brain-dead. At least I hope that it isn't
completely dead; the warm air coming out of Brussels is often
indistinguishable from the vapor vented by Washington, but better
things might happen on the local level. In Europe there is something
of a political spectrum left, dissent is not entirely futile, and
revolt is not entirely suicidal. In all, the European political
landscape may offer many more possibilities for relocalization, for
demonetization of human relationships, for devolution to more local
institutions and support systems, than the United States.
TB: Will American collapse delay
European collapse or accelerate it?
DO: There are many uncertainties to how
events might unfold, but Europe is at least twice as able to weather
the next, predicted oil shock as the United States. Once petroleum
demand in the US collapses following a hard crash, Europe will for a
time, perhaps for as long as a decade, have the petroleum resources
it needs, before resource depletion catches up with demand.
The relative proximity to Eurasia's
large natural gas reserves should also prove to be a major safeguard
against disruption, in spite of toxic pipeline politics. The
predicted sudden demise of the US dollar will no doubt be
economically disruptive, but in the slightly longer term the collapse
of the dollar system will stop the hemorrhaging of the world's
savings into American risky debt and unaffordable consumption. This
should boost the fortunes of Eurozone countries and also give some
breathing space to the world's poorer countries.
TB: How does Europe compare to the
United States and the former Soviet Union, collapse-wise?
DO: Europe is ahead of the United
States in all the key Collapse Gap categories, such as housing,
transportation, food, medicine, education and security. In all these
areas, there is at least some system of public support and some
elements of local resilience. How the subjective experience of
collapse will compare to what happened in the Soviet Union is
something we will all have to think about after the fact. One major
difference is that the collapse of the USSR was followed by a wave of
corrupt and even criminal privatization and economic liberalization,
which was like having an earthquake followed by arson, whereas I do
not see any horrible new economic system on the horizon that is ready
to be imposed on Europe the moment it stumbles. On the other hand,
the remnants of socialism that were so helpful after the Soviet
collapse are far more eroded in Europe thanks to the recent wave of
failed experiments of market liberalization.
TB: How does peak oil interact with
peak gas and peak coal? Should we care about other peaks?
DO: The various fossil fuels are not
interchangeable. Oil provides the vast majority of transport fuels,
without which commerce in developed economies comes to a standstill.
Coal is important for providing for the base electric load in many
countries (not France, which relies on nuclear). Natural gas
(methane) provides ammonia fertilizer for industrial agriculture, and
also provides thermal energy for domestic heating, cooking and
numerous manufacturing processes.
All of these supplies are past their
peaks in most countries, and are either past or approaching their
peaks globally.
About a quarter of all the oil is still
being produced from a handful of super-giant oil fields which were
discovered several decades ago. The productive lives of these fields
have been extended by techniques such as in-fill drilling and water
injection. These techniques allow the resource to be depleted more
fully and more quickly, resulting in a much steeper decline: the oil
turns to water, slowly at first, then all at once. The super-giant
Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example of such rapid
depletion, and Mexico does not have many years left as an oil
exporter. Saudi Arabia, the world's second-largest oil producer after
Russia, is very secretive about its fields, but it is telltale that
they have curtailed oil field development and are investing in solar
technology.
Although there is currently an attempt
to represent as a break-through the new (in reality, not so new) hydraulic fracturing
and horizontal drilling techniques for producing natural gas from
geological formations, such as shale, that were previously considered
insufficiently porous, this is, in reality, a financial play. The
effort is too expensive in terms of both technical requirements and
environmental damage to pay for itself, unless the price of natural
gas rises to the point where it starts to cause economic damage,
which suppresses demand.
Coal was previously thought to be very
abundant, with hundreds of years of supply left at current levels.
However, these estimates have been reassessed in recent years, and it
would appear that the world's largest coal producer, China, is quite
close to its peak. Since it is coal that has directly fueled the
recent bout of Chinese economic growth, this implies that Chinese
economic growth is at an end, with severe economic, social and
political dislocations to follow. The US relies on coal for close to
half of its electricity generation, and is likewise unable to
increase the use of this resource. Most of the energy-dense
anthracite has been depleted in the US, and what is being produced
now, through environmentally destructive techniques such as
mountaintop removal, is much lower grades of coal. The coal is slowly
turning to dirt. At a certain point in time coal will cease to
provide an energy gain: digging it up, crushing it and transporting
it to a power plant will become a net waste of energy.
It is essential to appreciate the fact
that it is oil, and the transport fuels produced from it, that
enables all other types of economic activity. Without diesel for
locomotives, coal cannot be transported to power plants, the electric
grid goes down, and all economic activity stops. It is also essential
to understand that even minor shortfalls in the availability of
transport fuels have severe economic knock-on effects. These effects
are exacerbated by the fact that it is economic growth, not economic
décroissance [Fr., "de-growth"] (which seems inevitable, given the factors described
above) that forms the basis of all economic and industrial planning.
Modern industrial economies, at the financial, political and
technological level, are not designed for shrinkage, or even for
steady state. Thus, a minor oil crisis (such as the recent steady
increase in the price of oil punctuated by severe price spikes)
results in a sociopolitical calamity.
Lastly, it bears mentioning that fossil
fuels are really only useful in the context of an industrial economy
that can make use of them. An industrial economy that is in an
advanced state of decay and collapse can neither produce nor make use
of the vast quantities of fossil fuels that are currently burned up
daily. There is no known method of scaling industry down to boutique
size, to serve just the needs of the elite, or to provide life
support to social, financial and political institutions that
co-evolved with industry in absence of industry. It also bears
pointing out that fossil fuel use was very tightly correlated with
human population size on the way up, and is likely to remain so on
the way down. Thus, it may not be necessary to look too far past the
peak in global oil production to see major disruption of global
industry, which will make other fossil fuels irrelevant.
TB: How is post-collapse Russia
doing ? Ready for its second peak ?
DO: Russia remains the world's largest
oil producer. Although it has been unable to grow its conventional
oil production, it has recently claimed that it can double its oil
endowment by drilling offshore in the melting Arctic. Russia is and
remains Europe's second largest energy asset. In spite of toxic
pipeline politics (which have recently been remedied somewhat by the
construction of the Nordstream gas pipeline across the Baltic) it has
historically been the single most reliable European energy supplier,
and shows every intention of remaining so into the future.
TB: Is there hope for a safe,
harmless European decline, or is any industrial society just bound to
collapse at once when fuel runs out?
DO: The severity of collapse will
depend on how quickly societies can scale down their energy use,
curtail their reliance on industry, grow their own food, go back to
manual methods of production for fulfilling their immediate needs,
and so forth. It is to be expected that large cities and industrial
centers will depopulate the fastest. On the other hand, remote,
land-locked, rural areas will not have the local resources to reboot
into a post-industrial mode. But there is hope for small-to-middling
towns that are surrounded by arable land and have access to a
waterway. To see what will be survivable, one needs to look at
ancient and medieval settlement patterns, ignoring places that became
overdeveloped during the industrial era. Those are the places to move
to, to ride out the coming events.
TB: I remember my grandmother
telling me about the German occupation, when urban and suburban
dwellers flocked into country towns every Sunday with empty cases,
eager too find some food to buy from the local farmers, hopping back
in a train the same day. Is there any advantage in living in a city,
in a post-collapse era, rather than in the countryside?
DO: Surviving in the countryside
requires a different mindset, and different set of skills than
surviving in a town or a city. Certainly, most of our contemporaries,
who spend their days manipulating symbols, and expect to be fed for
doing so, would not survive when left to their own devices in the
countryside. On the other hand, even those living in the countryside
are currently missing much of the know-how they once had for
surviving without industrial supplies, and lack the resources to
reconstitute it in a crisis. There could be some fruitful
collaboration between them, given sufficient focus and preparation.
TB: Can we grow sufficient food with
low technology, low energy methods, out of highly exhausted, highly
polluted farmland ? It seems we might end up in a worse farming
situation than our ancestors just two or three generations ago.
DO: That is certainly true. Add global
warming, which is already causing severe soil erosion due to
torrential rains and floods, droughts and heat waves in other areas.
It is likely that agriculture as it has existed for the past ten
thousand years will become ineffective in many areas. However, there
are other techniques for growing food, which involve setting up
stable ecosystems consisting of many species of plants and animals,
including humans, living together synergistically. What will of
necessity be left behind is the current system, where fertilizers and
pesticides are spread out on tilled dirt (rather than living soil) to
kill everything but one organism (a cash crop) which is then
mechanically harvested, processed, ingested, excreted, and flushed
into the ocean. This system is already encountering a hard limit in
the availability of phosphate fertilizer. But it is possible to
create closed cycle systems, where nutrients stay on the land and are
allowed to build up over time. The key to post-industrial human
survival, it turns out, is in making proper use of human excrement
and urine.
TB: If cities or big towns survive
collapse, what will be their core activities? What do we need cities
for?
DO: The size of towns and cities is
proportional to the surplus that the countryside is able to produce.
This surplus has become gigantic during the period of industrial
development, where one or two percent of the population is able to
feed the rest. In a post-industrial world, where two-thirds of the
population is directly involved in growing or gathering food, there
will be many fewer people who will be able to live on agricultural
surplus. The activities that are typically centralized are those that
have to do with long-range transportation (sail ports) and
manufacturing (mills and manufactures powered by waterwheels). Some
centers of learning may also remain, although much of contemporary
higher education, which involves training young people for
occupations which will no longer exist, is sure to fall by the
wayside.
TB: Some Americans view peak oil and
collapse as another investment opportunity. You already wrote on the
fallacies of the faith in money. That leaves a more useful question:
what can people do with their savings during or preferably before
collapse? What can you buy that is truly useful? I assume the answer
vary greatly according to how much money you still have.
DO: This is a very important question.
While there is still time, money should be converted to commodity
items that will remain useful even after the industrial base
disappears. These commodities can be stockpiled in containers and are
sure to lose their value more slowly than any paper asset. One
example is hand implements for performing manual labor, to provide
essential services that are currently performed by mechanized labor.
Another is materials that will be needed to bring back essential
post-industrial services such as sail-based transportation: materials
such as synthetic fibre rope and sail cloth need to be stockpiled
beforehand to ease the transition.
TB: You don't mention arable land or
housing. Do you think some kind of real property may turn out a
valuable post-collapse asset, assuming you can afford them without
drowning into debt, or is it too much financial and fiscal liability
in our pre-collapse era to be of any use?
DO: The laws and customs that govern
real property are not helpful or conducive to the right kind of
change. As the age of mechanized agriculture comes to an end, we
should expect there to be large tracts of fallow land. It won't
matter too much who owns them, on paper, since the owner is unlikely
to be able to make productive use of large fields without mechanized
labor. Other patterns of occupying the landscape will have to emerge,
of necessity, such as small plots tended by families, for
subsistence. Absentee landlords (those who hold title to land without
actually physically residing on it but using it as a financial asset)
are likely to be simply run off once the financial and mechanical
amplifiers of their feeble physical energies are no longer available
to them. I expect several decades more of fruitless efforts to grow
cash crops on increasingly depleted land using increasingly
unaffordable and unreliable mechanical and chemical farming
techniques. These efforts will increasingly lead to failure due to
climate disruption, causing food prices to spike and robbing the
population of their savings in a downward spiral. The new patterns of
subsisting off the land will take time to emerge, but this process
can be accelerated by people who pool resources, buy up, lease, or
simply occupy small tracts of land, and practice permaculture
techniques. Community gardens, guerilla gardening efforts, planting
wild edibles using seed balls, seasonal camps for growing and
gathering food, and other humble and low-key arrangements can pave
the way towards something bigger, allowing some groups of people to
avoid the most dismal scenario.
TB: How can people make preparations
for collapse or decline without losing connections with their current
social environment, friends, relatives, jobs or customers, and
everything around them that still function as usual. That is a
question about sanity as much as practicality.
DO: This is perhaps the most difficult
question. The level of alienation in developed industrial societies,
in Europe, North America and elsewhere, is quite staggering. People
are only able to form lasting friendships in school, and are unable
to become close with people thereafter with the possible exception of
romantic involvements, which are often fleeting. By a certain age
people become set in their ways, develop manners specific to their
class, and their interactions with others become scripted and limited
to socially sanctioned, commercial modes. A far-reaching,
fundamental transition, such as the one we are discussing, is
impossible without the ability to improvise, to be flexible—in
effect, to be able to abandon who you have been and to change who you
are in favor of what the moment demands. Paradoxically, it is usually
the young and the old, who have nothing to lose, who do the best, and
it is the successful, productive people between 30 and 60 who do the
worst. It takes a certain detachment from all that is abstract and
impersonal, and a personal approach to everyone around you, to
navigate the new landscape.
