Ron Paul joins the Collapse Party

US Congressman Ron Paul is sounding like quite the shoo-in for a leadership position within the Collapse Party, which I proposed over three years ago (and which is fast becoming a great success: without fielding a single candidate in any election, it is well on its way to successfully implementing the entire collapse agenda).

Lately, Ron has been heard saying things like this:

[The US] government is in the process of failing, and they can't deliver on the goods, just as the Soviets couldn't deliver the goods and maintain their own power... We will have those same problems domestically. We face serious economic problems as this dollar crisis evolves. ... We don't need to just change political parties. We need to change our philosophy about what this country is all about.

So, Ron, what is the Soviet Union all about these days, other than staying dead?

Announcing: Reinventing Collapse 2.0

The Soviet Experience and American Prospects – Revised & Updated

Pre-order this book direct from the publisher and get a 20% pre-publication discount, valid through April 15th, 2011.

While updating the text for the second edition, I have been careful not to add any new predictions, but I did take a few out because, as I now realize, energy and financial trends are too volatile to call over as short a term as the publication cycle of a book. But the longer-term trends, which I identified in the first edition over 3 years ago, are unmistakable. Global oil production has peaked for good, but is yet to start seriously declining, and this has produced a slow-motion crash rather than an outright collapse. Financially, the high volume of debts going bad has so far outpaced the government’s printing presses, keeping inflation out of the picture, while creative accounting at the Federal Reserve has so far prevented a run on the US dollar, though how long this can continue is anyone’s guess. Washington continues to set new records for political dysfunction, while the American empire is unraveling at an ever-increasing rate. We are in uncharted territory; all we know is that there is a cliff up ahead.

Here is what Michael Ruppert said about this book:

Reinventing Collapse in its original version has more than stood the test of time and events as a propphetic vision of the challenges that are being so clearly defined for us as a civilization today. The new and revised edition is priceless because it incorporates current events and emerging trends and views them through the eyes of this terrific writer and thinker. And Orlov's sense of humor always plants a minefield full of laugh bombs in the right places.

Video Interview: The Nation

 

Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union

[Resumen de la entrevista en español]

The Nation and On The Earth Productions

Dmitry Orlov, engineer and author, warns that the US's reliance on diminishing fuel supplies might be sending it down the same path the Soviet Union took before it collapsed.

In this fifth video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Orlov, who was an eyewitness to the collapse of the Soviet Union, asserts that as oil becomes more expensive and scarcer, the US will no longer be able to finance its oil addiction and the economy will hit a wall.

“Sixty percent of all of our transportation fuels are imported—a lot of that is on credit. A large chunk of the trade deficit is actually in transportation fuels. When those stop arriving because of our inability to borrow more money, then the economy is at a standstill,” he says.

Go here to learn more about “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” and to see the other videos in the series.

Transcript

I witnessed the Soviet collapse, and then later on I couldn’t help but notice that something very similar is happening to the United States. So, as a matter of public service, I’ve tried to warn people of what to expect. But I would just like to point out that I’m not any sort of policy wonk, or a wannabe politician or an activist. All of those things are very tangential to what I’m interested in, which is basically to warn people and to equip them for what’s coming up.

The way collapse unfolds is actually very interesting, because a lot of it has to do with people’s faith in the status quo. As long as people think that there’s something in it for them, they will cooperate. As soon as they decide that there is nothing in it for them, they will cease to cooperate and the system starts to crumble, cave in on itself. So what we saw in the Soviet Union was political dysfunction where basically the communist regime was so endemically corrupt, and so out to steal as much as they could at the very end, that they really didn’t even bother paying attention to whether they kept the system going. The system was basically on autopilot until it crashed. Something similar is happening here where we have people in all branches of government, both political parties trying to prop up the financial industry, which has become completely irrelevant to most people in the United States, who don’t have savings and are not creditworthy. They’re basically trying to use up people’s savings and use up people’s retirement to prop up this set of institutions that only help the very rich people, and these very rich people are only rich on paper, they are "long paper," all of them. What they own is pieces of paper with letters and numbers on them, which will turn out to be worthless. So this is all just basically musical chairs, and something very similar was happening in the Soviet Union, and something like that is happening here.

The reason I started talking about this is because I was, frankly, very worried about the United States because I saw the United States as not nearly as well prepared for collapse as the Soviet Union. You see, the Russian people never had a great deal of faith in their government or in the system, so they grew and gathered a lot of their own food, they relied on private, personal connections, there was a very large gray or black economy that provided most of what people needed. So when the system went away, people had something to hold onto, they had their personal relationships. Also the country was set up in a way that was much more stable, with public transportation and with public housing. People were not stranded and people were not dispossessed and put out on the street and evicted. So all of those things allowed the Russians to survive collapse, and all of those things are pretty much missing in this country. Most people in this country would pretty much just be out on the street starving unless they have an income, unless they have credit cards or a bank account. They’re just woefully unprepared.

There’s an element to market economics that is very hard edged, and when it fails it hurts people whether they can afford to pay their way out of it or not. If they can afford to pay their way out of it, it basically hurts their soul because they’re just leaving everybody else behind, and there’s a lot of fear with it because your umbilical is connected to your bank account. Once that goes away you’re just completely lost. Now a lot of the dislocation that went on in the Soviet Union really had to do with people being sort of set adrift in the official economy, and all they could fall back on was people they knew, people they could trust who would help them. The whole mindset of what’s mine and is mine and I get it by paying for it is really not very survival-oriented. One of the shocking things about Americans is that they have this innate faith that the rich people will abide, that there will always be rich people. And the rich people have bought into this dream, this idea that the various symbols that they have that tell them they’re rich—pieces of paper and things—will actually be meaningful moving forward, but it seems like the further you have to fall, the harder you will fall. So I think that the wealthy people in the United States are in for a much ruder awakening than the people who are poor already. Really the most important thing to consider is, who do you know and how will they help you even if you don’t give them any money for it. It’s as basic as that. In the case of the Russians it turned out that money was borderline irrelevant for a lot of things that people needed to survive. That’s what allowed them to survive. That’s not the case here, and its time to get very worried about that.

The five stages of collapse is an essay that I published two and a half years ago when nobody was really talking about a financial collapse, people were talking about a financial crisis. I decided to try to think of how this proceeds in identifiable stages and I thought that basically it’s sort of like the kubler-ross hierarchy relating to grief and here it has to do with something similar which is psychological thresholds that are breached. Various bits of faith that we have in the status quo and in society and the people around us, when they’re invalidated the change can be rather sudden whereas changes in the physical world take time to work out. So the stages were: financial collapse where our assumptions about risk in the future are invalidated and political collapse, which is basically our assumptions that there is a political system that functions and can serve the interest of the people at some level, that is invalidated. Then there is commercial collapse, which is the idea that you can get whatever you need by paying for it is invalidated because your money is worthless or you don’t have any anymore. Then there is social and cultural collapse which I got by reading some cultural anthropology. Basically social collapse is when the social infrastructure that people have be it charities or social organizations or community based groups cease to function because they’re overwhelmed, they run out of resources and people can no longer rely on them. Then cultural collapse, I got the idea from reading Colin Turnbull who described a completely failed African society of dispossessed hunter-gatherers where basically family structure fell apart. Parents no longer brought up their children, they didn’t take care of the old people, families didn’t even share food. They basically got food and ate it by themselves and hid it from each other and that was the level at which humans stopped resembling humans and people no longer recognized each other. At that point you’re almost talking about a different animal. Not what we have evolved as, but something that we might devolve into.

I’m always asked this question, where are we in the collapse scenario, the question is who are we? I know a lot of people who are pretty far along in the collapse scenario. I like to tell people that social and cultural collapse has, in some places in this country, already run its course. Financial collapse, well it depends on whether you’ve been bankrupted or foreclosed yet, it’s a bit of, you could say that for a lot of people collapse has already arrived. It just hasn’t been widely distributed and people don’t actually share stories about it unless they actually know each other personally. So I would say this is something that is proceeding, you could say that the United States is already bankrupt as a country. I don’t think that you could actually get a cogent argument against that from anyone who knows what they’re talking about. It’s just that the aftermath of that hasn’t really completely arrived. We’re not yet completely immersed in the consequences of that. Now, in terms of what could be done to salvage the situation, well a lot of things would have to change rather dramatically. Right now there’s basically a stranglehold on political power in this country by an elite that divides itself into two camps Republicans and Democrats and what have you, maybe even more, but its really the same bunch of people. This same bunch of people is almost militant in refusing to look at reality and it’s almost a question of them at some point being wheeled out of their offices along with the office furniture. Its not like they can be really spoken to without it being one’s complete waste of time. So I see that quite similar to what the old communists went through. Basically they went from being in charge to being crazy, to being insane and being disregarded. I see something very similar happening here.

The question for why there’s so much denial is a really interesting one. Denial is a large question in itself. There are certainly a few aspects to it that are interesting. One is that it makes it possible for people to lead what amounts to a meaningless dead end existence because the moment they realize that its meaningless and its dead-end then they’re forced to do something about it and if they can’t think of anything useful to do about it then they’re stuck, they’re stuck with a mental difficulty. So denial is a way of avoiding mental difficulties. Another part of it is that if you actually have a long-term perspective on the future that makes you very unpopular in any given group of people because the future, as it stands in a market economy, is a faulty product. It cannot be sold for any price. No sane person would pay for it. So if we live in an environment where we sell ourselves by putting things on our resumes and promoting ourselves in various ways and thinking what we’re worth in a market economy, actually being honest about what we’re looking forward to, all of us, makes us less successful as individuals and so this is something that we avoid doing.

I think what’s going to happen is the dissolution of the United States as a political and economic entity. It will more or less fade from the world scene in the same way that the Soviet Union faded from the world scene. Parts of it will later be reborn as something that we might have a lot more trouble imagining because there isn’t something called Russia that part of the Soviet Union. There isn’t something similar to that in the United States. It’s really a bunch of territories, very disjointed territories held together by Washington. So if Washington fails then it’s not clear what is going to hold these territories together.

The reason Washington is likely to fail is really the same reason that Moscow failed which is runaway debt and national bankruptcy. It was not even the level of debt it was the fact that the debt could not be expanded or taken on at an ever-increasing rate with never any reason for anyone to expect that the gap can ever be closed. So what happened in Moscow was that Moscow could no longer finance the periphery and the periphery decided to go its own way. We’re something similar in this country where California could do quite well if they stop paying the federal tax. So if they left the union their finances would be much better and this is what happened in the Soviet Union. This is what we’re witnessing right now in the United States. There are other similarities as well. One of the largest ones is, in the Soviet Union the armed forces more or less took on a life of their own, they ate the national budget, about a quarter of it, and also they couldn’t deliver any results. So it’s a striking similarity that the mighty Soviet army lost in Afghanistan and now the mighty American army is doing exactly the same thing. It amazes me that dying empires shoot straight for Afghanistan to have Afghanis deliver the coup de grace and this is what’s happening to the United States as well.

Well the power vacuum that was left when the Soviet Empire collapsed was not a complete vacuum. There was a lot of black market economics active within the Soviet Union, there was a lot of what would be called corruption, but really they were workable ways of circumventing an unworkable system. There is some of that in this country as well. Strangely enough, the people who are the best positioned to start a full-blown black market economy in the United States are the narco-cartels. So they’re the next aristocracy as far as the Americans are concerned. They will be the ones moving in and replacing the power vacuum. You already see it happening in certain parts of the country close to the Mexican border. You can see that the local police and law enforcement are in no position to oppose them. They’re much better organized and armed. So this is what we can look forward to. A lot of that happened in Russia as well there were a lot of ethnic mafias that moved in. The Chechens controlled a lot of the trade for quite a while, even in produce and things like that. So we can look forward to quite a bit of that here as well.

There was a lot of what you could call “corporatocracy” in the Soviet Union as well. There were a lot of very large state-owned enterprises that went on existing because they didn’t really have a supply chain, they were empires onto themselves. A place like Norilsk Nickel for instance that makes a lot of the nickel in the world was pretty much a company town. That was a standard thing in Russia. It’s not just a factory but also cafeterias and kindergartens, and hospitals, retirement homes, and just about everything else. So these were economic empires onto themselves that continued to function. A lot of them, once there was no workable currency, they resorted to barter trade and they would trade food for something that they made or stock they had accumulated over the years. The American “corporatocracy” is very much into just in time delivery and everything is network based and that makes it extremely fragile and I don’t see that pattern holding. A while ago I thought that some large companies like Google for instance could take a lot of things in house and Google has been making forays into energy and private currencies and all sorts of things. They have money to throw at experiments like that but they’re not about to achieve any sort of sustainability so when the surrounding economy crumbles they will probably cease to function as well.

People look at the short term. Energy availability in the short term. Basically the fact that energy demand shrank because of the recession/depression. That bought us a little bit of time but its more or less inevitable that some kind of economic growth somewhere will resume at some point and then whatever part of the economy that tries to grow will hit a brick wall again and the harder economies try to grow from this point on, the worse they will fail. The more growth dependent and growth addicted they are the worse they will fail. Countries vary along a set of parameters between how well they can absorb lack of economic growth; some can do it pretty well, some not at all. So this is really what we’re looking at now. We could have a scenario where entire parts of the globe suddenly go dark. I think the United States is one of them because 60% of all of the transportation fuels are imported, a lot of that is on credit. A large chunk of the trade deficit is actually transportation fuels, so when those stop arriving because of inability to borrow more and more money then the economy is at a standstill and after a while the lights go out. Now, what that buys the rest of the world is about 1/3 of all the energy consumed in the United States. The United States consumes about a third of the global energy supply. That suddenly becomes available to the rest of the world. So you could theoretically have other countries grow for another decade or more while the United States goes dark and disappears, fades from the world scene much as the Soviet Union did after it collapsed.

The important thing to understand about collapse is that it’s brought on by overreach and overstretch and people being zealous and trying too hard. Its not brought on by people being laid back and doing the absolute minimum. Americans could very easily feed themselves and clothe themselves and have a place to live working maybe a hundred days a year. You know, it’s a rich country in terms of resources there’s really no reason to work maybe more than a third of your time and that’s sort of a standard pattern in the world. But if you want to build a huge empire and have endless economic growth and have the largest number of billionaires on the planet then you have to work over forty hours a week all the time and if you don’t then you’re in danger of going bankrupt. So that’s the predicament that people have ended up in. Now the cure of course is not to do the same thing even harder, so what people have to get used to is the idea that most things aren’t worth doing anyway and things really slow down when the economy goes away. The idea is to do the absolute bare minimum that is essential and just find interesting ways to while away the time because not much is going to be happening. So walking down the road is an all day affair whereas before it was a three-minute drive but now you don’t drive, you have to walk so it’s an all day affair. People just have to learn to slow way down and have a lot more patience, a lot more patience with each other. Those that don’t will probably end up killing each other in due course, that’s probably a period of time that most people will want to sit out, wait until the dust settles. A lot of people just don’t have the right character to deal with collapse. They’ll be running around trying to fix things. That’s the opposite of what they should be doing.

Peak oil is getting to be a really boring subject. Most people don’t realize that yet. It’s something that becomes obvious after the fact, its something that shows up in aggregate production statistics and those statistics tend to be retroactively adjusted as better numbers come in. So now we’re pretty sure that it was in 2005-2006 for conventional oil, that is oil that comes out in oil form out of the ground on dry land, out of conventional oil wells. All liquids, which includes tar sands and coal to liquid conversion and corn based ethanol and just any other muck that you could possibly get liquid fuels from, that peaked in 2008. So it’s all behind us.

The thing that’s worth discussing now is what post peak production looks like. A lot of people look at these charts that have a very smooth decline curve that always looked a little strange to me. So I did a lot of research into trying to figure out what that meant and it turned out that its just sheer nonsense there’s no reality behind it at all. I’ve identified many many factors that combine in various unpredictable ways, its really too complicated to predict, but the chance of this very smooth decline, I would say, is zero. Its going to be a step-wise decline and various parts of the planet will be cut off from transportation fuel permanently at various times. There will be disruptions and then it will be a permanent cut-off from that point on. So what people should be planning on is not slightly more expensive gasoline, or slightly less gasoline or heating oil or diesel fuel, but fuel that you might have for special occasions, so for ambulances you might have it longer than for taxis, things like that. What people should really be planning for is life without fossil fuels at all and that is actually a tall order. It takes a lot of thinking to prepare for that right now.

The whole question of die off produces very strong emotions in people, but to just lay it out in a non-emotional way. We had this thing called the green revolution, which is probably the worst misnomer we have because it was basically the fossil fuel food revolution. It's growing food with fossil fuels that allowed the earth’s population to go to 6 and a half billion and there’s no reason to think that it can be sustained through means other than fossil fuels inputs into industrial agriculture. So the question is what happens to all these people when they can no longer be fed. Now, people think that this is in the future but its not. Russia is back to importing grain after the disastrous harvest of this year. That’s a bad sign right there, Russia used to be a grain exporter until this year and so that is happening in more and more parts of the world. Now, die-offs, people have trouble imagining them. There was a bit of a die off in the Soviet Union after the Soviet Union collapsed. Life expectancy plummeted. The odd thing about it, I was there during that time, and it’s not really noticeable unless you happen to be dropping by the hospitals and the morgues all the time and going to a lot of funerals. You just don’t know that people are going away. Its more that people look at their school photos and realize that half their class is dead. And that’s a bit of a shock, but its more of a shock when you realize it than when its happening because you don’t really realize its happening. In fact human populations can shrink quite dramatically without anyone even within those populations really noticing. People just accept whatever is happening, tune it out, stop paying attention or cope with it some way. With that said, ok we have 6 and a half billion people without fossil fuel inputs into agriculture might sustain one billion but that’s without climate change. Now the reason we have agriculture is because we’ve had ten thousand years of stable climate, which seems to have ended. So that is something to take into consideration as well. As hunter/gatherers as opposed to farmers we would not be one billion without fossil fuel input, we would be a lot smaller population than that even. So this is one of those things that people try not to think about and the question that comes to my mind is why should we even think about it? I mean, whatever happens, happens. We don’t get to decide how many people survive all we get to do is you know, try to survive, and find ways to do it. Thinking about mind numbing billions of people that will no longer be around is not really a productive activity given that there is nothing we can do about it. So I try to limit discussion of that because I just don’t see it going anywhere useful.

Well the whole climate change debate, it almost makes me laugh because people say things and the words, if you look at it what do they mean, they don’t mean anything and the most important question is “what do we do?” I have a problem with defining we and I have a problem with defining “do” just on a semantic level, I think that that particular question is completely meaningless. “We” includes melting tundra we don’t actually tell it what to do it does whatever it wants to. And “do” involves people who are completely beyond our control politically, economically, or otherwise. So it doesn’t really even matter what we decide. People have this inflated picture of what policy can achieve that is not based on what policy has achieved in the past. There is one example of a great policy issue that Al Gore talks about which is limitations on refrigerants that were destroying the ozone layer. Well that was a bit of a success but it only involved a few chemical manufacturers around the planet. So those could be individually talked to and replacements could be found. What they’ve achieved is that the ozone hole is now not growing anymore but its not shrinking either so it’s not really a complete success and that’s really the only success story that they have. In terms of global warming it seems like we’re in for a roller coaster ride. It’s not even that we can predict what’s happen, but we can certainly predict that there will be a lot of upheaval. We don’t need scientists to tell us that. I’ve been living in New England for decades now and I’m used to the ocean being cold. So if in the middle of the summer I jump in the ocean and its body temperature you don’t have to be a scientist to tell me that something is going very strangely here. You know, it’s really quite obvious. People who are a little bit more in tune with the elements, people who have spent a lot of time outdoors, you can talk to them. Very few of them will tell you that, oh this is nothing out of the ordinary, this is the usual thing. So we’re in for a great deal of climate upheaval. I would predict that when the industrial economies around the world start crashing there will be a huge amount of reforestation that will happen. So then we might have a mini ice age because of that and then that might run its course and something else will happen. The kind of goldilocks climate that has allowed human populations to swell to billions of individuals, that period of climatic history seems to have ended already. We’re in a different planet now; we’re in a different world.

The Fix is Off

[Update: John Robb has been providing some of the most lucid analysis on Egypt. Well worth a look.]

Protest is sweeping through the Arab world. One corrupt and repressive regime, in Tunisia, has already been toppled, and now Hosni Mubarak Washington's man in Egypt, has been forced to deploy the army in an attempt to quell violent protests that have set the ruling party headquarters ablaze. Egypt, which is home to half of the world's Arabs, is the fulcrum on which the Arab world turns. What happens now in Egypt is bound to resonate throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Are we about to see something similar to the heady days of 1989, when Eastern Europe cast off Moscow's yoke? Is the Middle East going to turn out to be Washington's Eastern Europe? Will Wikileaks turn out to be Washington's equivalent of Gorbachev's Glasnost, cutting right through all the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and showing the imperial regime to be repressive, craven, corrupt, foolish, weak and, ultimately, self-defeating?

American leaders appear to be following the Soviet playbook for the imperial end-game quite faithfully: cringing behind high walls and locked doors, looting the treasury like there's no tomorrow, and, of course, lying their heads off. There are a few moments each century when status quo suddenly becomes status quo ante. We may be living through just such a moment now.

Exclusive: US empire will fall due to lack of faith, not finances or war, author warns

As many in the American empire longingly talk of "recovery" from the most devastating economic condition since the Great Depression, others have begun thinking in a very different direction, urging fellow citizens to prepare for the worst.

Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, is one of the latter.

Soon, he told Raw Story in an exclusive interview, Americans will "stop expecting anything of Washington," turning the US into more of a "banana republic" than a superpower.

More...

Lifeboats: A Memoir

[This is a guest post by Albert, whose amazing erudition and experience gives him the right to tell just about anyone to sit down, shut up and listen—although he is far too nice to actually say that. But I am not, so I will: sit down, shut up and listen.]

 

During the early days of The Farm, 1971-1973, we learned a number of lessons that will be useful again now that a rapid petrocollapse scenario is likely to come to pass. The Farm spiritual community emerged from a 50-bus caravan of 320 Haight-Ashbury refugees fleeing hard drugs, exploitation and counterculture tourism. After a year on the road the gypsy vagabonds pooled inheritances and purchased 1050 acres (450 hectares) of land 80 miles (130 km) from Nashville. It was US$70 per acre.

The Farm grew to a standing population of well over 1000, with 20 satellite centers, then, in the early 1980s, declined and decollectivized, bringing its population to under 200. Since then it has experienced something of a renaissance, finding new popularity amongst permaculturists, ecovillagers, and roving students. But let’s begin at the beginning, when our group landed in Tennessee.

Living in remodeled school buses was quite an adequate introduction to “roughing it,” especially for those of us who had never gone camping as children. The “honey pot” latrine bucket, mosquito-proof backpacker tents, canteens, flashlights, storm lanterns, and two-burner Coleman stoves were familiar to the pioneer settlers by the time they first stepped off the bus.

The land itself was barren of amenities save a small log cabin, a horse barn and a line shack, and so the first order of business was setting up facilities for bathing, sanitation, kitchen and sleeping. I’ll skip over the organizational aspects here because they would require a lengthier and more nuanced discussion; suffice it to say that circumnavigating North America in a 50-bus caravan required a degree of organization similar to running a rock-and-roll band tour. That’s enough organization to get you started in designing and constructing a settlement, although perhaps not enough to keep it intact for very long.

For pumped water, an engine was lifted from a Volkswagen Bug and set on blocks in a springhouse. A well-used and rusting 5700 liter (1500 gallon) water tower was purchased for scrap value, repaired and erected atop a hill above the springhouse. This required minor welding and auto mechanics, as well as a continuous supply of petrol. Some years later, when power lines came in, the VW engine and springhouse were replaced with a submersible pump and well. Today it would have been built with photovoltaics or wind power, but such technology, while already available in the 1970s, was well beyond the reach of a community that subsisted on average per capita cash income of US$1 per day for its first 13 years.

After the first winter, a second, larger water tower was erected near a 100 meter (300 foot) well with good aquifer recharge. The tower was salvaged from a railroad company for a purchase price of US$1, but moving and erecting the tower and tank required a crane. From the towers, water was delivered to homes in 20 liter (5 gallon) jugs by horse wagon.

While the buses provided initial shelter, with more than 6 residents per bus on average, after 8 to 12 months of living on the road most people wanted to get out into better housing, as quickly as possible. At the time, the government of the State of Tennessee held monthly auctions of surplus property, and Korean War vintage army tents could be bought for as little as US$15. These formed the basis of our first foray into home construction. With salvaged materials from construction sites and dumpsters, they morphed into “touses and hents.” Going into a partnership with a nearby sawmill allowed us to add some beautiful timber-frame buildings and D-frames. Common buildings such as the community kitchen, motor pool, canning & freezing, print shop, clinic and school sprang almost entirely from salvaged materials. Scraping mortar off cement blocks and straightening nails become well-practiced skills.

There was limited electricity to the site, and for an entire decade almost all of our electricity came from 12-volt DC systems powered by car batteries. Initially the batteries were charged by switching them through vehicles every day, but full discharge cycles make for short battery life, so after trying novel methods of pedal power, bamboo wind generators and other wacky ideas, most houses went to a “trickle charge” system — a long copper cable run through the trees to a central power center that took its electrons from Tennessee Valley Authority (although we always sent them back in the next nanosecond). 

At one of these power centers, where we did our canning and freezing, we erected walk-in coolers and freezers. Refrigeration was a necessity that is as difficult to avoid as it is to achieve. A few of the buses came with propane-powered fridges and they were a blessing. Most of the households relied on a system of 5-gallon (20 liter) buckets that rotated to the walk-in coolers and freezers near the cannery. Buckets with tight lids were obtained from dumpsters behind the McDonalds in town. The other essential item was a Flexible Flyer wooden wagon with slatted sides. If you couldn’t get your parents to give one of those to their grandchildren for Christmas, the next best thing was to weld a bike trailer or pushcart to get your buckets to the neighborhood cooler.

Buckets were also employed to carry diapers and laundry to a communal laundromat, which was set up near another trickle-charge node. Salvaged coin-op equipment was purchased in bulk, the coin slots replaced with toggle switches, and a large diaper rinse and centrifuge babe-manure extractor installed. The grey- and black-water flowed to a constructed wetlands and rainbird, creating what today, 40 years later, are some of the richest soils on the property.

Communal unisex showering facilities were constructed in places with good supplies of water and a way to heat it: downhill from the original water tower; beside Canning & Freezing and the Farm Store; at the Farm School and print shop.

A flour mill took over the tack room in the horse barn. Initially we used a small stone mill to grind corn meal. Later we bought a larger, 3-break steel feed mill and set it up in the line shack, connected to 3-phase AC power. Arrayed around the roller mill were Clipper seed cleaners, sifters, a coffee roaster, an oat huller, and bagging racks. Within a year the mill was churning out a ton per day of wheat, corn, soy and buckwheat flours, pastry flours, corn meal, grits, groats, mixed cereals and porridges, horse feed, soy nuts, popcorn, coffee, and peanut butter.

Transportation and communications were priorities, because our sustainability depended on commerce, and without good transportation and communications any attempts to create a business would have been hampered. Bear in mind that for the first 13 years the experiment was communal, meaning shared purse. Just as many societies throughout history, we have found that in times of difficulty a reversion to communal economics provides greater survival advantages than the exercise of individuated private property rights. After achieving stability, most drop the communal form in order to stimulate greater enterprise. This was the path taken by Amana, Oneida, many kibbutzim, The Farm, the People's Republic of China, and, now, Cuba.

Any group that can cross the country in 30-year-old school buses will learn something about automotive mechanics. Our motor pool and junkyard became one of the technology hubs for The Farm, a place where anything from a hay rake to a fire truck could be machined and rebuilt, nearly from scratch.

The first two teams of horses, black Belgians and white Percherons, were acquired from neighboring Old Order Amish. They laughed at our feeble attempts, as vegans, to replace leather harness with more hippy-kosher canvas and Naugahide. “How’d you raise that nauga?” they’d ask. Interesting koan!

Communication was accomplished through a rapid succession of home and business devices. The log cabin became the business center with two phone lines. On US$1 per person per day, personal long distance charges were unaffordable, but one of our caravaners was an Eagle Scout with a ham radio merit badge, and he made a radio shack in the horse barn and began training ham radio operators to staff an amateur band Farm Net. Before the Internet I was WB4LXJ.

A 12-volt telephone system was installed to link every bus, tent, home and business. The dial tone was replaced with a Grateful Dead or reggae melody or a public service announcement (1000 jars of catsup planned today, canners needed; line at the laundry is now 90 minutes; bean shucking and banjo at horse barn 7 pm). The dial itself was replaced with a pushbutton that you used for Morse code to signal where you were calling. Four shorts meant “all points.” It was a party line, but there was a second carrier band, the “Hot Line,” used for emergencies. A toggle switch flipped you over to that band where an operator was always on call, sitting at a phone console to summon fire, police and ambulance and to assume management of the emergency. This pre-dated most emergency telephone services.

Emergencies were taken seriously, and fire marshals, gate and patrol security, and emergency medical responders were treated as actual jobs from the very beginning. Each became more sophisticated as the body of experience grew. Naive hippies learned to adjust to the rigors of self-reliance, which could sometimes be terrifying, such as when a kerosene lamp tips over in a canvas tent, the Ku-Klux-Klan rides up to the front gate or a deputy sheriff wanders into the marijuana patch while hunting deer.

Finding additional uses for the copper wires we passed through the treetops, we sent a TV signal through the phone lines, and could download direct network feeds from a 12-foot (3.7 meter) dish made of pine 2x4s and chicken wire. We watched the Watergate hearings that way. We produced our own shows, too, sent from the Bandland Studio tent to 12-volt TVs in tents and buses. If you were within 30 feet of the phone line, you could pick up the signal on channel 3. We watched Greenpeace work out its chess moves with the Spanish Navy in real time, using a slo-scan ham TV transmitter installed on the bridge of the Rainbow Warrior, sort of a proto-Animal-Planet pilot.

Eventually, when CB radios became popular, we were able to install them in our vehicles and interface them with the ham radio and “Beatnik Bell” phone system. Free international calls became possible. Our “Extra Class” hams grew in proficiency and could link to satellites, monitor police, military and secret service sidebands, and bounce audio, digital and TV signals around the world to an expanding Farm Net.

A weekly newspaper, Amazing Tales of Real Life, began coming out of the print shop, along with a host of do-it-yourself books that turned into a brand. A brisk traffic in daily visitors, more than a hundred some days, required tour crews and a large hostel tent, but also supplied nearly free labor for the fields.

From the very first arrival of the buses and through the first 5 years a community dining facility was an essential efficiency, and one of the main reasons that living could be so cheap. Milk was made from soybeans, which became tofu, mayonnaise, yogurt, sour cream and ice cream. Soybeans were also made into coffee, tempeh, soysage (from okara), soyburgers and stroganoffs. A bushel of dry soybeans (35 liters) cost US$3 (US$7 today). The protein needs (with all 8 essential amino acids in good proportion) for a hard-laboring farm worker can be supplied on less than a pound (450 grams) per day, rehydrated and made into gourmet vegan cuisine. Thinking of storing food for emergencies? Include soybeans.

Tracing back down memory lane to my experience then: a young man of 25 arriving at The Farm in 1972 with just a backpack; being greeted by the Night Sentry and shown a place to sleep; going for a breakfast at the Community Kitchen, porridge and sorghum molasses, soysage and corn biscuits; then to the field in a horse wagon; harvesting sorghum cane with a machete and piling it into the wagon; at the end of the day returning to my assigned, dirt-floored army tent lit by candles; supper of bean soup and cornbread with pickled japapeños; guitars and song around a fire under the canopy of stars; abiding sense of harmony in the world; community.

The Nation: Peak Oil and the Changing Climate

Times are so bad that even an overtly political entity such as The Nation has been forced to start acknowledging reality. Thanks to Karen and Greg for rounding up the usual suspects (Richard Heinberg, Nicole Foss, Bill McKibben, James Kunstler and me) plus, for added gravitas, I suppose, Noam Chomsky. You might think that Peak Oil and climate change are liberal issues; that's like saying that death is a conservative issue. Here is the part of the series that's been released so far. All the speakers on the video are great, especially my two minutes of it (one at 4:00, the other at 14:00). The full interview with me will be up in February.

Bright New Horizons

As Gary pointed out—that I had pointed out—in the previous post, “being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice.” Since then, I have been tossing about in search of better career choice for myself. In this time of high unemployment it is important to think out of the box and look for opportunities to create a new market niche, preferably in a high-wage segment of the economy such as finance, medicine or law.

For a very short while I entertained the notion of establishing a new field of dentistry. Everybody knows of endodontics, periodontics, orthodontics and so forth. I am not a dentist; nevertheless, I thought that I might add one more: scrimshawdontics. I would serve people who desire to have a schooner under full sail scratched into the enamel of one of their upper canines, a likeness of Herman Melville into the other, and, across their upper incisors, a majestic scene of a harpoon boat chasing after a great big whale across storm-tossed seas, men straining at the oars, and, in the bow, a prominent peg-legged figure wielding a harpoon! But I was forced to discard this idea as soon as I realized just how few people would want to spend countless hours in a dentist's chair with their mouth open while I scratch away at their teeth with an etching needle.

And so I have tried to think of another plan, and decided to borrow a page out of Matt Savinar's book. After running a rather popular “doomer” site for some years (the term “doomer” is self-applied in Matt's case; he even referred to himself as a “Juris Doctor of Doom”) Matt decided switch gears and to devote himself entirely to astrology. But the field of astrology seems far too general to me; I want to specialize further, and combine astrology with another discipline, preferably in a high-wage segment of the economy. I also want to use my technical and scientific education and put astrology on a more sound scientific footing by informing it with certain key insights from fields such as astrophysics and information theory. And so here is my new profession: astroeconomist. I will join the ranks of those who profitably combine astrology and economics.

Astrology concerns itself with the relative positions of planets within our solar system and their mysterious effect on the course of human events. But let me ask: Why do planets in this solar system exert greater influence on the course of human events than the planets that orbit all other countless stars within the billions of galaxies that populate the universe? Why is proximity of stellar bodies to us a key factor? This would plausibly be the case if the influence of planetary alignment were known to act through some known physical mechanism whose effect were attenuated by distance, such as the spread of facts of some sort, of the general form “A causes B through mechanism X.” But being unable to attest to the existence of any such X, we are forced to concede that the statement “A causes B” is not a piece of information but, in a strict epistemological sense, the absence of a fact—a statement of ignorance, of the general form “It is not known that A causes B.” Now, while information requires time and energy to propagate through space, and degrades in quality long before that energy becomes diffuse enough to be detectable as single photons, as it does in the vastness of interstellar space, ignorance is not bound by any physical constraints and is in fact instantaneous at all points in the universe. Therefore, we could justifiably assume that it is not just the nearby planets that guide our destinies but all planets in all solar systems in all galaxies, in equal measure.

You are probably used to thinking that the universe is finite; very large, but not infinitely large. However, it may well be the case that the universe is infinitely large, extending infinitely in all directions in both time and space. The leap from very, very big to infinite may seem like a technicality, but it is really a quantum leap, because infinite things have some dramatically different properties from finite ones. For instance, the national debt is very large, but it is not infinite; if it were, the interest on it, for any non-zero rate of interest, would be infinite as well and national default would be instantaneous. Aside from their insidious bigness, infinite things also tend to be infinitely complex, and contain an infinite amount of information. Take, for instance, the transcendental constant π (3.14159265...). It is an infinitely long non-repeating sequence of digits. When calculated with infinite precision, converted to binary and treated as digital data π is guaranteed contain an infinite number of each of the following:

• A high-quality video of you in flagrante delicto with every other person that ever lived
• An infinite number of Wikileaks documents containing irrefutable proof that Senator Joseph Lieberman is a Mossad agent, Obama is from the vicinity of the star Betelgeuse, while Dick Cheney is, in some unfathomable fashion, not from but the Crab Nebula itself
• An infinite number of copies and variants of this very article

More to the point, an infinite universe contains an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and, it follows, an infinite number of simultaneous planetary alignments. If, as I argue above, all of these alignments, through the force of ignorance, act together in concert irrespectively of distance and time, then the signal conveyed by astrological data is complete randomness: pure, high-grade noise. It is not just any old ignorance but the purest, highest-grade, most reliably fact-free signal imaginable.

And this brings us to astrology's sister discipline, which likewise benefits from purity of ignorance: economics. It is well-known that stocks picked by expert money managers do slightly worse, overall, than stocks picked by monkeys throwing darts. (Good monkey! Here's your bailout!) The reason for this should be obvious: monkeys produce better results because of the superior quality of ignorance that drives their decision-making process. Similarly, economists who struggle with econometric models and statistical data collected by government and industry are sometimes accidentally correct in their predictions, raising expectations and creating false hopes. But if instead economists plugged in the pure nonsense of astrological data averaged across an infinite universe, they could easily achieve a six-sigma rating, being repeatably wrong 99.99966% of the time. And wouldn't that be exciting!? Oh but wait a minute...

Come to think of it, perhaps astroeconomics is not a promising career choice either. Back to square one, then...

Peak Empire

[This is a guest post from Gary, who presents data that indicate that the US military empire is already past its peak and may collapse suddenly. Gary uses a methodology for calculating peak empire that is similar to the Hubbert curve which successfully predicted Peak Oil for both the US and, more recently, the world.

It should be noted that the DOD base structure reports on which Gary's analysis is based don't include Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the secret (black) installations all over the world, but it is unclear whether the inclusion of these data would change the picture materially.

As far as the speed of imperial collapse, it varies: Rome took five centuries to collapse but USSR took just a couple of years. Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently wrote: "empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003." My hunch is that McCoy's 22-year estimate is overly generous, and that the collapse of the USA will set a speed record, unfolding over just a handful of very strange days. When will this happen? According to Chris Hedges, it could happen any time now.]

Predicting Collapse

In February, 2009 Dmitry Orlov said the following about predicting the collapse of the US empire: “I have learned from experience – luckily, from other people’s experience – that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA (“F” is for “Former”). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn’t make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.”

As far as predicting the collapse of the US empire, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting it for 2010, and Johan Galtung has predicted it will collapse before 2020. Hubbert predicted in 1974 that global peak oil was incompatible with constantly growing money, triggering a cultural crisis (See Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon).

Andrei Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980 at the age of 42. Nevertheless, at the risk of making a poor career choice, I will attempt to offer a methodology for determining peak US empire, if not a prediction for its demise. Now that global peak oil is history perhaps it’s time to work on predicting peak empire instead. If you followed the work of Joseph Tainter, he offered the theory of diminishing and eventually negative marginal return to territorial growth and complexity of societies. (See The Collapse of Complex Societies) He offered the following graph to illustrate:

As a result he expected complex societies to reach a peak in size and then begin to decline, similar to an oil peak.

He offered the following examples to demonstrate the principle with historical examples of defunct empires:

From: Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Shown above are the territorial areas of the Roman, Ottoman, Russian, and US Empires. The curve for the Russian Empire ends abruptly at 1917 where the curve for its heir—the USSR—takes off. The main point is that empires follow a typical bell curve type of shape.

US Empire

In the case of the US empire, it has not continued to expand by territorial acquisition. The last territory acquired was the Marshall Islands in 1947, which then became a UN Trust Territory, followed by Independence in 1986. What has continued to expand is the presence of US military installations all over the world. As the recently deceased analyst Chalmers Johnson explained, the US is an “empire of bases”, not an empire of colonies. The US has 800-1000 foreign military bases and 4-5000 bases in the US. Colonies are so passé these days. Why bother with colonies when you can impose your will with a few bases, and you don’t have to manage the whole country. Besides you can outsource most everything to contractors, so you don’t even need the consent of the governed. All you need is their tax money, which the sheeple continue to provide with barely a bleat.

Looking at the DOD Base Structure reports it is possible to graph the total acreage owned by the US military both in the US, in foreign countries, and in US foreign territories. Since both foreign countries and territories are occupied, I will lump them together. It is also valid to use total military acreage including the US, since the 50 states of the US are essentially occupied territory of the US military as well.

I was unable to find data before 1957, but total acreage under management by the US military had a recent peak in 2007, while foreign acreage peaked in 2004. This data is from official US DOD base structure reports, which according to Chalmers Johnson leaves out quite a bit, but from a relative point of view over time, it is probably adequate. I have included the excel sheet data, and others are welcome to add to the data and do a more thorough job graphing this data.

Military spending

Looking at US military spending below, it has continued to rise, despite the recent decline in acreage under management. This is entirely consistent with Tainter’s theory of declining marginal utility to expanding empires, as imperial overstretch becomes more and more expensive, and returns to expenditures begins to decline, and even become negative. It would be entirely consistent for the expenditures to continue to rise as the empire attempts to hold onto its existing level of military acreage, until interest on the debt causes a default, and then expenditures also collapse.

Imperial Reserves

Like oil, the empire has reserves to continue fueling the military machine. It has its AAA bond rating in order to continue deficit spending by selling Treasury bonds to foreign countries, although the rating agencies have taken somewhat of a hit on their credibility after the financial crisis. Foreign governments may also be thinking twice about the future viability of the dollar. It has the Federal Reserve to continue creating money out of thin air by key strokes on a computer, and engaging in open market operations like “quantitative easing” and purchasing existing treasuries, or even monetizing the debt by buying treasury bonds directly from the US government, giving it more money to play with. Finally they have the credulous and supplicant taxpayers who continue to fund their own demise by turning their tax dollars over to an empire, which throws it down three rat holes simultaneously: The $1 trillion dollar annual military budget, the Afghanistan War, and the bankster bailouts. Like the oil reserve/production ratio, the empire has a reserve/territorial expansion ratio which is declining rapidly. If interest rates increase adequately, the interest on the debt is going to swallow up all of tax revenues, such that a tax increase might be required. Will the sheeple rebel then? We’ll see. In any case, I welcome others to comment on the viability of military acreage as a measure of peak empire, and to expand on the analysis.

[Update: Gary did some more plotting, and here are the results: graphing acreage vs military spending shows diminishing total returns on military spending, and negative marginal returns since 1991 at least.

One more thing to keep in mind: as William Pfaff, writing in Foreign Affairs, puts it, "U.S. military bases have generated apprehension and hostility and fear of the United States, and they have facilitated futile, unnecessary, unprofitable, and self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now seem to be inviting enlarged U.S. interventions in Pakistan, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa. The 9/11 attacks, according to Osama bin Laden himself, were provoked by the "blasphemy" of the existence of U.S. military bases in the sacred territories of Saudi Arabia. The global base system, it seems, tends to produce and intensify the very insecurity that is cited to justify it." Not only is American Empire post-peak, but, just like the Soviet Empire before it, it was operated at a loss throughout, even as it grew, in each case making national bankruptcy just a matter of time.]

Fleeing Vesuvius (by sea)

This hefty tome was recently published by Féasta, Ireland's Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability. It contains two articles by me: the first is a text version of the presentation I gave at the Féasta conference in Dublin two summers ago, which you can read right on this blog.

My second article in this volume—Sailing craft for a post-collapse world—is a long piece that I wrote exclusively for this publication. It spells out the transportation options that will still exist once fossil fuels are no longer available, concentrating on sail transport. It pulls together pertinent information that is currently scattered across many academic disciplines, and is also informed by my personal experience as an ocean sailor and live-aboard who does all of his own maintenance.

The full table of contents can be found here. The book can be purchased through Amazon.

Fleeing Vesuvius draws together many of the ideas our members have developed over the years and applies them to a single question—how can we bring the world out of the mess in which it finds itself?
Fleeing Vesuvius confronts this mess squarely, analyzing its many aspects: the looming scarcity of essential resources such as fossil fuels—the lifeblood of the world economy; the financial crisis in Ireland and elsewhere; the collapse of the housing bubble; the urgent need for food security; and the enormous challenge of dealing with climate change.

The solutions it puts forward involve changes to our economy and financial system, but they go much further: this substantial, wide-ranging book also looks at the changes needed in how we think, how we use the land and how we relate to others, particularly those where we live. While it doesn't discount the complexity of the problems we face, Fleeing Vesuvius is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It will arm readers with the confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting systems. It's a book that can be read all the way through or used as a resource to dip in and out of.