Carolyn Baker reviews Reinventing Collapse

"A key psychological factor in the individualization of oppression, deeply embedded in the American psyche, is the notion that in the face of utter powerlessness, blaming oneself provides the last semblance of empowerment, i.e., "It's my fault; I caused it; if only I hadn't...." This is not unlike the internal psychological mechanisms that engage within a child during and after abuse in which the child unconsciously blames him/herself for the abuse because not to do so confronts the child with an intolerable, overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

"Noting that Americans find it difficult to imagine failure collectively in terms of the nation itself and prefer to insist that all failure is individual in nature, Dmitry concedes that collapse will be different for each person, but that one way to bridge the gap between "individual" and "collective" might be to notice the pre- and post-collapse conditions of the Soviet Union and compare them hypothetically with those of the United States. The ultimate intention here is to invite the reader to ask him/herself to what extent each important thing in one's life is "collapse-proof" and then after several pages of deepening and refining many of the concepts of his "Post-Soviet Lessons" series, Dmitry makes a stunning request: to consider how to make that "important thing" collapse-proof, or come to terms with how to live without it."

Read the rest of the review on Carolyn's site.

C-Realm Podcast

Episode 79: The Red Queen

http://c-realmpodcast.podOmatic.com/entry/eg/2008-02-27T16_21_45-08_00

First up Dmitry Orlov and Albert K. Bates explore visions of a post-collapse America, and later KMO talks food, consciousness, and the forces of darkness with Neil Kramer of the Cleaver.

The Five Stages of Collapse

[Update November 2011: In light of the unfolding global sovereign debt fiasco, I have issued an update. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our elected and unelected representatives to artificially extend the lives of bankrupt financial institutions, collapse is turning out to be less of a waterfall and more of an avalanche.]
[Update May 2010: Two years after its publication, this article has been read by 54000 or so people, and is still being read by an average of 1500 people each month—on this site alone. Based on this steady level of interest, and on how effective of this taxonomy of collapse has proven to be in mapping out the events of the intervening two years, I have decided to give it a book-length treatment, which I will announce on this site once the publication date becomes known.]

[Update January 2013: The book, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors’ Toolkit, now has a publication date of May 1st, 2013. Please order it directly from this web site.]

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one's career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence. But so far, little has been said specifically about the finer structure of these discontinuities. Instead, there is to be found a continuum of subjective judgments, ranging from "a severe and prolonged recession" (the prediction we most often read in the financial press), to Kunstler's "Long Emergency," to the ever-popular "Collapse of Western Civilization," painted with an ever-wider brush-stroke.

For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point. Even if society at the current stage of socioeconomic complexity will no longer be possible, and even if, as Tainter points in his "Collapse of Complex Societies," there are circumstances in which collapse happens to be the correct adaptive response, it need not automatically cause a population crash, with the survivors disbanding into solitary, feral humans dispersed in the wilderness and subsisting miserably. Collapse can be conceived of as an orderly, organized retreat rather than a rout.

For instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union - our most recent and my personal favorite example of an imperial collapse - did not reach the point of political disintegration of the republics that made it up, although some of them (Georgia, Moldova) did lose some territory to separatist movements. And although most of the economy shut down for a time, many institutions, including the military, public utilities, and public transportation, continued to function throughout. And although there was much social dislocation and suffering, society as a whole did not collapse, because most of the population did not lose access to food, housing, medicine, or any of the other survival necessities. The command-and-control structure of the Soviet economy largely decoupled the necessities of daily life from any element of market psychology, associating them instead with physical flows of energy and physical access to resources. This situation, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Collapse, allowed the Soviet population to inadvertently achieve a greater level of collapse-preparedness than is currently possible in the United States.

Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers - the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this - I feel ready to attempt a bold conjecture, and define five stages of collapse, to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it. Rather than tying each phase to a particular emotion, as in the Kübler-Ross model, the proposed taxonomy ties each of the five collapse stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo. Although each stage causes physical, observable changes in the environment, these can be gradual, while the mental flip is generally quite swift. It is something of a cultural universal that nobody (but a real fool) wants to be the last fool to believe in a lie.

Stages of Collapse

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned. Rather, driving us all to Stage 5 will require that a concerted effort be made at each of the intervening stages. That all the players seem poised to make just such an effort may give this collapse the form a classical tragedy - a conscious but inexorable march to perdition - rather than a farce ("Oops! Ah, here we are, Stage 5." - "So, whom do we eat first?" - "Me! I am delicious!") Let us sketch out this process.

Financial collapse, as we are are currently observing it, consists of two parts. One is that a part of the general population is forced to move, no longer able to afford the house they bought based on inflated assessments, forged income numbers, and foolish expectations of endless asset inflation. Since, technically, they should never have been allowed to buy these houses, and were only able to do so because of financial and political malfeasance, this is actually a healthy development. The second part consists of men in expensive suits tossing bundles of suddenly worthless paper up in the air, ripping out their remaining hair, and (some of us might uncharitably hope) setting themselves on fire on the steps of the Federal Reserve. They, to express it in their own vernacular, "fucked up," and so this is also just as it should be.

The government response to this could be to offer some helpful homilies about "the wages of sin" and to open a few soup kitchens and flop houses in a variety of locations including Wall Street. The message would be: "You former debt addicts and gamblers, as you say, 'fucked up,' and so this will really hurt for a long time. We will never let you anywhere near big money again. Get yourselves over to the soup kitchen, and bring your own bowl, because we don't do dishes." This would result in a stable Stage 1 collapse - the Second Great Depression.

However, this is unlikely, because in the US the government happens to be debt addict and gambler number one. As individuals, we may have been as virtuous as we wished, but the government will have still run up exorbitant debts on our behalf. Every level of government, from local municipalities and authorities, which need the financial markets to finance their public works and public services, to the federal government, which relies on foreign investment to finance its endless wars, is addicted to public debt. They know they cannot stop borrowing, and so they will do anything they can to keep the game going for as long as possible.

About the only thing the government currently seems it fit to do is extend further credit to those in trouble, by setting interest rates at far below inflation, by accepting worthless bits of paper as collateral and by pumping money into insolvent financial institutions. This has the effect of diluting the dollar, further undermining its value, and will, in due course, lead to hyperinflation, which is bad enough in any economy, but is especially serious for one dominated by imports. As imports dry up and the associated parts of the economy shut down, we pass Stage 2: Commercial Collapse.

As businesses shut down, storefronts are boarded up and the population is left largely penniless and dependent on FEMA and charity for survival, the government may consider what to do next. It could, for example, repatriate all foreign troops and set them to work on public works projects designed to directly help the population. It could promote local economic self-sufficiency, by establishing community-supported agriculture programs, erecting renewable energy systems, and organizing and training local self-defence forces to maintain law and order. The Army Corps of Engineers could be ordered to bulldoze buildings erected on former farmland around city centers, return the land to cultivation, and to construct high-density solar-heated housing in urban centers to resettle those who are displaced. In the interim, it could reduce homelessness by imposing a steep tax on vacant residential properties and funneling the proceeds into rent subsidies for the indigent. With plenty of luck, such measures may be able to reverse the trend, eventually providing for a restoration of pre-Stage 2 conditions.

This may or may not be a good plan, but in any case it is rather unrealistic, because the United States, being so deeply in debt, will be forced to accede to the wishes of its foreign creditors, who own a lot of national assets (land, buildings, and businesses) and who would rather see a dependent American population slaving away working off their debt than a self-sufficient one, conveniently forgetting that they have mortgaged their children's futures to pay for military fiascos, big houses, big cars, and flat-screen television sets. Thus, a much more likely scenario is that the federal government (knowing who butters their bread) will remain subservient to foreign financial interests. It will impose austerity conditions, maintain law and order through draconian means, and aide in the construction of foreign-owned factory towns and plantations. As people start to think that having a government may not be such a good idea, conditions become ripe for Stage 3.

If Stage 1 collapse can be observed by watching television, observing Stage 2 might require a hike or a bicycle ride to the nearest population center, while Stage 3 collapse is more than likely to be visible directly through one's own living-room window, which may or may not still have glass in it. After a significant amount of bloodletting, much of the country becomes a no-go zone for the remaining authorities. Foreign creditors decide that their debts might not be repaid after all, cut their losses and depart in haste. The rest of the world decides to act as if there is no such place as The United States - because "nobody goes there any more." So as not to lose out on the entertainment value, the foreign press still prints sporadic fables about Americans who eat their young, much as they did about Russia following the Soviet collapse. A few brave American expatriates who still come back to visit bring back amazing stories of a different kind, but everyone considers them eccentric and perhaps a little bit crazy.

Stage 3 collapse can sometimes be avoided by the timely introduction of international peacekeepers and through the efforts of international humanitarian NGOs. In the aftermath of a Stage 2 collapse, domestic authorities are highly unlikely to have either the resources or the legitimacy, or even the will, to arrest the collapse dynamic and reconstitute themselves in a way that the population would accept.

As stage 3 collapse runs its course, the power vacuum left by the now defunct federal, state and local government is filled by a variety of new power structures. Remnants of former law enforcement and military, urban gangs, ethnic mafias, religious cults and wealthy property owners all attempt to build their little empires on the ruins of the big one, fighting each other over territory and access to resources. This is the age of Big Men: charismatic leaders, rabble-rousers, ruthless Macchiavelian princes and war lords. In the luckier places, they find it to their common advantage to pool their resources and amalgamate into some sort of legitimate local government, while in the rest their jostling for power leads to a spiral of conflict and open war.

Stage 4 collapse occurs when society becomes so disordered and impoverished that it can no longer support the Big Men, who become smaller and smaller, and eventually fade from view. Society fragments into extended families and small tribes of a dozen or so families, who find it advantageous to band together for mutual support and defense. This is the form of society that has existed over some 98.5% of humanity's existence as a biological species, and can be said to be the bedrock of human existence. Humans can exist at this level of organization for thousands, perhaps millions of years. Most mammalian species go extinct after just a few million years, but, for all we know, Homo Sapiens still have a million or two left.

If pre-collapse society is too atomized, alienated and individualistic to form cohesive extended families and tribes, or if its physical environment becomes so disordered and impoverished that hunger and starvation become widespread, then Stage 5 collapse becomes likely. At this stage, a simpler biological imperative takes over, to preserve the life of the breeding couples. Families disband, the old are abandoned to their own devices, and children are only cared for up to age 3. All social unity is destroyed, and even the couples may disband for a time, preferring to forage on their own and refusing to share food. This is the state of society described by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his book The Mountain People. If society prior to Stage 5 collapse can be said to be the historical norm for humans, Stage 5 collapse brings humanity to the verge of physical extinction.

As we can easily imagine, the default is cascaded failure: each stage of collapse can easily lead to the next, perhaps even overlapping it. In Russia, the process was arrested just past Stage 3: there was considerable trouble with ethnic mafias and even some warlordism, but government authority won out in the end. In my other writings, I go into a lot of detail in describing the exact conditions that inadvertently made Russian society relatively collapse-proof. Here, I will simply say that these ingredients are not currently present in the United States.

While attempting to arrest collapse at Stage 1 and Stage 2 would probably be a dangerous waste of energy, it is probably worth everyone's while to dig in their heels at Stage 3, definitely at Stage 4, and it is quite simply a matter of physical survival to avoid Stage 5. In certain localities - those with high population densities, as well as those that contain dangerous nuclear and industrial installations - avoiding Stage 3 collapse is rather important, to the point of inviting foreign troops and governments in to maintain order and avoid disasters. Other localities may be able to prosper indefinitely at Stage 3, and even the most impoverished environments may be able to support a sparse population subsisting indefinitely at Stage 4.

Although it is possible to prepare directly for surviving Stage 5, this seems like an altogether demoralizing thing to attempt. Preparing to survive Stages 3 and 4 may seem somewhat more reasonable, while explicitly aiming for Stage 3 may be reasonable if you plan to become one of the Big Men. Be that as it may, I must leave such preparations as an exercise for the reader. My hope is that these definitions of specific stages of collapse will enable a more specific and fruitful discussion than the one currently dominated by such vague and ultimately nonsensical terms as "the collapse of Western civilization."

Radio Interview

I gave an interview to Roger Wendell of KGNU Radio on Friday morning, February 29th, at 10:30 AM Eastern. We talked about my book, collapse, and what an exciting time it is to be alive.

Surviving Financial and Social Collapse

LATOC Teleseminar: Surviving Financial and Social Collapse with Dmitry Orlov

To be held on three consecutive Thursdays: February 28th, March 6th, and March 13th at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. Each teleseminar will last approximately 60 minutes. (total time approximately 3-to-3.5 hours). Click on the image above to sign up.

Money as Metaphor

Those who feel that they have a good handle on reality often hate to hear that their perception of reality is shaped by their language. Yet this is often the case. For instance, we think about electricity in terms of current (amperage) and pressure (voltage) because it is too difficult to think directly in terms of electromagnetic fields. We think about the origin of the universe as an explosion - a very loud one, hence the term "Big Bang" - although no physicist can tell us just how loud it was in terms we can appreciate. Loud enough to pulverize your eardrums and shoot them clear out of the Solar system at relativistic speeds? Since you wouldn't be left standing around to enjoy such a noise, why call it a noise at all? Probably because "Big Bang" is the best we can do, being unable to directly imagine a universe erupting out of nothing, and need a linguistic handle by which to hold it. Metaphors allow us to take something that is too abstract and to make it visceral enough for us to comprehend.

A long time ago, money was quite visceral: bags and boxes of shiny metal coins, or bits of paper that you could take to a bank and exchange for shiny metal coins. The coins could be both weighed and counted. But with the advent of fiat money - paper money that is not directly redeemable for a fixed quantity of anything - we are left with just naked digits printed on scraps of paper. All that remains is the lingering metaphor of coinage. Unlike numbers that represent physical quantities, which are usually known only to a few decimal places, money still demands the arduous task of counting, summing up meaningless pennies. The people at the top, who have all the power, and who create money out of nothing by writing government IOU's, force the rest of us to keep track of every penny.

Somewhat more significant than these pennies are our own heads, which, in a democracy, are also supposed to be counted, by voting. Elections are conceived of as strict counting exercises, such as what you might have in a roll call. But since they are done for the benefit of those who lack power, to give them the illusion that they have some, the rules are more lax than with counting pennies. Glancing at the two columns of numbers from the incomplete recount after the New Hampshire primary elections (they are incomplete because the Kucinich campaign, which requested the recount, ran out of money), about half of the precincts miscounted their votes the first time, the second time, or (if I may conjecture) both. Later on, during the Florida primary, it was noticed that a certain precinct reported voter turn-out that was more than 100% of the registered voters for that precinct. Such things are generally not discussed, and, whenever they are brought up, someone always says that such minor variances are not statistically significant. Clearly, what we have here is a mixed metaphor: are we measuring the voters, or are we counting their votes? I am convinced that my vote is not statistically significant, so I don't vote. (I don't think my tax return is statistically significant either, so perhaps we should "measure" it as well, the same way we "measure" my vote.)

Although the powerful, who "coin" and dispense money for our use, demand that we account for every penny of it, many of the operative terms that relate to money treat it as if it were a liquid. The "flow" of money in and out of an organization is termed "cash flow" while the ability to convert assets to cash and vice versa is termed "liquidity." Those who have mortgages that are in excess of the value of the collateral are said to be "underwater," while organizations on the verge of bankruptcy often require a "bailout." There are some "fire" metaphors as well, such as the "burn rate" of funded start-up companies, as well as "blood" metaphors, such as the term "hemorrhaging money," applied to production delays of expensive legal battles. But liquid metaphors, from "float" to "slush fund" to "pool," are by far the most common.

It is therefore fair to ask, What sort of liquid might this be? Is this tap water, salt water, or bilge water? Or is it perhaps something more potent? Really, if money had the potency of tap water, few people would bother very much about it. And we certainly do bother about it: we may be well-clothed, well-fed, have adequate shelter, plenty of free time, good company and even some entertainment, but we would still want some spending money. There is nothing like a roll of bills in our pocket or a credit card in our handbag, because it can make people do things for us they otherwise would not do: serve us drinks, give us massages and pedicures, bring us shoes to try on, transport us to some place warm and sunny - the list is virtually endless. Money can give us a feeling of well-being and euphoria by allowing us to indulge our whims, or to escape.

A potent liquid that can fuel escapism and produce euphoria must be at least 80-proof, if not 100. I deduce that we are speaking of alcohol. Indeed, the nexus between money and alcohol is an obvious one. Many governments maintain monopolies on liquor, treating it as another coin of the realm, while others tax it heavily, relying on it for much of their revenue. For those at the bottom of the socioeconomic pecking order, money and liquor are largely the same: they might be willing to work for room and board, but would much prefer to be paid in money as well, in order to be able to go and get drunk. Moonshine is illegal, because it avoids taxation, and marijuana is illegal because poor people can grow it themselves and use it as a substitute for liquor, again, avoiding taxation, and possibly avoiding money altogether. Thus, the monopoly on liquor goes beyond liquor, and turns out to be a monopoly on all euphoria-inducing substances, including money itself.

A good metaphor should provide reasonable explanatory depth to the underlying phenomenon. The ability to think of electricity as a fluid turns out to be quite good, to a point, although capacitors act like springs rather than like water tanks, while alternating current in a water pipe has none of the advantages of its electromagnetic analogue. So, how far can we push the metaphor of money as liquor?

At the start we might have a traditional society, with a largely non-monetized economy, analogous to a healthy working individual, who makes a bit of spending money, and uses it to get drunk (i.e., consume) after work and on holidays. His liver (economy) is in fine shape, able to process all the alcohol with no ill effects (provide the consumer goods in exchange for money). Over time, his liquor consumption (spending) increases, and his capacity for work drops (outsourcing). He now borrows against everything he owns (equity cash-outs), his future earnings (consumer debt) and even the earnings of his unborn children (national debt) in order to continue drinking his fill every night.

Later, his liver becomes enlarged and diseased (bubble economy), is no longer capable of processing all this alcohol, generates back-pressure (commodity price spikes, energy shortages) and even causes black-outs (market crashes). He can work even less (layoffs), and becomes unable to service his debts (foreclosures, repossessions, defaults). No longer able to afford all the booze, he goes on the wagon (decrease in consumer confidence and spending), which gives him delirium tremens (recession, depression).

Now, delirium tremens is a serious, sometimes life-threatening medical condition that requires medical intervention (government stimulus package). The DT-sufferer can be a danger to himself and to others. By far the easiest way to help is to buy the bum a drink (tax rebate checks in the mail this May). If he is well enough to make it from his mailbox to the checks cashed place to the nearest bar, we can all breathe easier. Once he feels better, maybe he'll even buy us a round.

Seems like a good metaphor to me...

Are You a Survivalist Eco-Freak?

Based on some checklist I ran across on the Internet recently, I am a certifiable survivalist eco-freak. Solar panels - check. Composting toilet - check. Rainwater collection - check. Efficient light bulbs - check. Doing all my own maintenance - check. Three months of food - check. So I thought I'd check in with my readers, and see how eco-freaky they are, and whether they aspire to greater eco-freakiness.

My eco-freak leanings are all motivated by the fact that I live on a boat. And the top reasons I live on a boat are:

1. It's a cheap way to live
2. It's a cheap way to travel
3. I like sailing

You see, the eco-freak survivalist motivation doesn't make the short list. Even looking at the specific components, their choice is motivated by something other than the eco-survivalist ethos. The solar panels are cheaper to run and quieter than a generator set. The efficient light bulbs are a must because the solar panels are not that powerful. The composting toilet is more convenient because it doesn't require regular pump-outs while living at anchor or at the dock. The food stockpile is because it is cheaper to buy in bulk. Doing my own maintenance is, again, cheaper than paying for labor. The rainwater collection system? Well, the cockpit awning drains onto the cabin top, and the cabin top scupper is right next to the water tank fill.

"So what's it like living on a boat?" people inevitably ask. Well, it's cozy, if not to say cramped, but really quite comfortable. Everything is within easy reach, and there is never any wandering from room to room in search of things. On the other hand, to cut down on clutter, everything has to be stored in lockers, and getting at any given item often requires extensive disassembly and reassembly of locker contents: it's sequential access, not random access. It is also a lot of work, because the combination of salty, moist air and constant motion causes everything on a boat to wear out faster than it would normally.

"But what's it really like?" Well, I could spin a yarn or two, in which I battle gales and fog single-handed, but let's skip that for now. There is excitement to be had, without even leaving the dock. A few nights ago was one such exciting episode. It had been blowing off the ocean quite hard all day, straight into the harbor. Eventually, a swell built up, which bounced off a shore on the other side of the river from our marina, right into the marina, and straight off our dock. By sunset we were bouncing up and down and doing figure-eights, snubbing at the dock lines. By 3 a.m. the wind clocked around (winds tend to shift clockwise in the northern hemisphere) and started pushing us onto the dock. I was awakened by the jolt. The boat was hitting the dock, so got up, got dressed, and went outside to take a look.

The boat was still bouncing around on the swell, but now it was also rubbing up against the dock. Once in a while, some combination of wind gusts from one side and wave action from the other would cause the boat to miss both of the fenders that were hanging off its side, and hit the dock. Thump! Since on the other side of our dock lies a stretch of open water, I did not have the choice of running lines to windward. The remaining good choice was having the boat chew away at the fenders. I stood on the dock for quite some time, observing and gradually repositioning the fenders for optimum protection. (It never ceases to amaze me that I can push seven tons of boat away from the dock, against the wind, with one foot.) It worked. I went back to bed, and slept through until dawn.

The next day dawned mild, windless and calm, with this annoyingly innocent way Nature often has immediately following a storm, as if looking at you and saying: "My goodness! What did you do last night?" There is probably a new spot of "dock rash" on the side of the boat, but I haven't even bothered to look for it yet. I try not to worry about cosmetics - to a point. I am not about to repaint the topsides flat black and start using old tires for fenders, because the neighbors at the marina might take an exception to that. It might label me as some additional sort of freak.

As far as being a survivalist sort of eco-freak, I might yet join their ranks some day. I have thoughts of hauling the boat out, putting it up on a couple of acres of land, and farming that land while continuing to live on the boat. (It has a flat bottom, and sits nice and level on some pressure-treated 4x4's.) But until that happens, I would prefer to be considered just someone living on a boat.

Mind the Ruins

Lists of things worth saving from collapse and destruction can be made arbitrarily long: the wetlands, the symphony orchestra, the public library, the public transportation system, the solar sewage treatment plant... the list can go on and on. Saving something generally means preserving it in some intact, functional state, and often involves some fund-raising activities, and political lobbying to secure the much-needed funds. But in the US there is one category that never makes the list, and it is the most important one: ruins. Without much help from anyone, ruins can tell us of our history as a species. Every year millions of people flock to the Roman Forum, the Parthenon, the ruined medieval abbeys, cathedrals and castles, the pyramids at Giza, Cholula, and Chichen-Itza, and the temples at Angkor Wat.

We need not worry about some of the more spectacular sites, such as the Mall in Washington, DC. Barring some very large and unfortunate explosions, the Capitol, the White House, and other buildings surrounding the Mall will some day make a very impressive set of ruins, to rival the ruins of other imperial fora. The Manhattan skyline will make a most stunning set of ruins to be sure. Their glass envelopes long gone, the skeletons of skyscrapers will provide nesting sites for a myriad seabirds.

But some care may need to be taken if we are to preserve the ruins of all the run-down but interesting and quirky buildings that are being knocked down in many US cities, to be replaced with faceless, temporary, relentlessly utilitarian structures, whose ruins will be of no interest to posterity. The choice need not be between finding a new use for an old building and knocking it down: a better choice is to let it mellow, along with the rest of the country.

Economic collapse should make historical preservation more or less automatic, because the resources to knock down old buildings and to put up new ones will be scarce. The historical district of Charleston, South Carolina is an excellent example of just such a happy accident, which inadvertently preserved what is perhaps the most beautiful and architecturally cohesive urban landscape in North America. The combination of antebellum prosperity, fueled by slave, indigo, rice and cotton trades, followed by a lasting depression, caused Charleston to freeze in time. Although the intervening years saw much misery, looking at it now, it is hard to conceive of a happier outcome.

It is relatively cheap to take care of a ruin, and even the poorest of countries can sometimes find the resources to clear away the debris of a collapsed roof, put up some timbers to buttress a leaning wall, spread some cement atop crumbling masonry, plant some grass inside the open space enclosed by the perimeter walls, and prune back trees that might topple an otherwise sound piece of ruin. During a more prosperous spell, a bit of effort might restore a ruin to its former glory - for a time.

Even in their natural, entirely neglected state, ruins are, in fact, useful: they can provide a picturesque spot for a picnic, an instructive site for a school outing, a refuge for wildlife, a source of employment for tourist guides, and a place for archaeologists to dig around. A good ruin right in the center of a busy city is a poignant memento mori for the hurried people who rush about it. Should any of them find an empty slot in their schedules to be still for a moment, they could gain a precious bit of perspective by gazing at a ruin, thinking, sic transit gloria mundi.

These might be good points to bring up at a public meeting convened to discuss plans for knocking down yet another derelict old building.

On The Fallacy of Reversibility

A recent article by Stuart Staniford on The Oil Drum makes two arguments: first, that industrial societies cannot evolve toward a pre-industrial state, and second, that peak oil will be good for agribusiness. Therefore, he concludes, efforts to re-localize food production are misguided. Sharon Astyk then published this rejoinder in which she critiques Staniford's coning of the term "reversalism" to describe what he sees as a fallacy perpetuated by those who speak in favor of relocalizing agricultural production. Stuart's article has pretty pictures, while Sharon's has a pleasant prose style. They are both quite long, while this post (you should be happy to learn) is quite short.

Now, we should concede Stuart's point about reversibility: complex societies have demonstrated minimal ability to evolve toward a lower level of complexity at a lower level of resource expenditure. Instead, they collapse. Jarred Diamond's book, Collapse, is full of examples of that. So, it will be a different society (or, more accurately, different societies) than this one that will be growing most of its food locally. Activists who advocate relocalization should feel free to gloss over this difference, of course, when speaking to groups of people who wish to survive social and economic collapse, or, for that matter, who just want to eat tasty food that they've grown themselves. The results of their efforts within the scope of this society are likely to be quite circumscribed, because most behaviors that will be adaptive after the collapse (such as growing your own food) would often be maladaptive under current economic conditions. I argue a similar point in this article on the feasibility of promoting sail-based transportation.

And this takes us to Stuart's second point. He argues that Peak Oil will cause high energy prices, which will cause high food prices, which will mean huge profits for agribusinesses, so forget about relocalization. He is assuming implicitly that there will be enough energy to keep the system going, but it will just be a bit more expensive. He writes:

Clearly, farmers making money like that will not be selling out to hordes of the urban poor trying to go back to the land, nor will they need to employ them. Instead, the farmers will simply outbid the urban poor for the energy required to operate the farms...

I agree completely, but why focus just on the urban poor? Why not throw in the suburban poor as well - all of those hapless suburbanites currently being foreclosed out of their suddenly worthless "little cabins in the woods"? Then again, why not throw in everyone else? These ever-higher food and energy prices, coupled with rising unemployment and stagnant wages, is inflation, and it will make most Americans poor. Supposing them to be politically powerless, they would be relatively easy to "simply outbid." But, in their distress, they will probably pose an ever larger security problem, requiring an ever more invasive police state and an ever-larger prison-industrial complex to keep them down.

Now, let's look at it from the point of view of the rich farmers, who will be about the only ones left with the wherewithal to pay the high taxes needed to support the police state and the prisons. Wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just dole out bits of land and let people grow their own food, should they be so inclined?

Lines in the Sand

About a week ago I took a bike ride to a place called "Southern Lumber" to pick up a couple of sticks of white oak I am using to build a new dodger onto my boat. We've been living aboard in Charleston, South Carolina, to get away from Boston winter weather, which makes living on a boat quite miserable this time of year. Southern Lumber is up King street, in the wastelands and badlands that lie north of the city. A few blocks past Calhoun Street the gentility and architectural splendor of antebellum Charleston stops rather abruptly, turning into a run-down clapboard ghetto. A few miles of bad pavement later even that peters out into a wasteland of highway, rail track and industrial shacks, among which sit the silos of Southern Lumber.

The fellow behind the counter knew all there is to know about lumber, even to the point of knowing the important distinction between red and white oak as it applies to boatbuilding. But when the time came for him to write down my name on the sales slip, he bogged down:
"O-R-L-O-V."
"Huh?"
"Oscar-Romeo-Lima-Oscar-Victor."
"Huh?"
Clearly, my last name was not one of the ones that he was familiar with, so I handed him my Massachusetts driver's license, and said:
"Just copy it from this."
He looked at my license, and said: "What country is this from."
"Same one, I hope."
"Well, if it's north of the Mason-Dixon line, then it's a whole different country, you know," he stated grandly, unwittingly segueing into a speech I had already prepared for just such an occasion.

"Have you heard of Global Warming?"
"Yessuh!" he said, scoring a point for South Carolina public education.
"Well, due to Global Warming, the Mason-Dixon line is moving further and further north every year. It now runs through New Jersey. In another decade or two, it will be running through New England."
He didn't buy it, and neither should you. Amusing to think about, though...

Imagine: Christian rock piped in on the Acela high speed train between New York and Boston... civic and community leaders in the Five Boroughs attending a prayer breakfast, praying unto someone called "J-Zeus" (a pagan rapper-god, judging from the name)... Bostonians finding themselves at the meat counter in a Piggly Wiggly supermarket surprised to see gigantic cuts of meat labeled "Boston Butt"... the traditional northern second person plural pronoun "Youse" becoming edged out in favor of the southern "Y'all."

But is it really so fanciful to think of the old Mason-Dixon line picking up from N 39º 43' 20" where it has sat for almost two and a half centuries and walking north? After all, other supposedly fixed boundaries appear to be on the move. The US-Mexican border appears to be shifting north, with the entire southern tier of the US turning into a Spanish-speaking zone. The US-Canadian border seems to have jumped north as well: during the Vietnam war, Americans who had a problem with risking their lives for nothing could flee north, but now soldiers and National Guardsmen who have issues with being called up for yet another tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan need to look further afield to find a safe haven.

In other parts of the world, the border between Russia and China seems to be slowly dissolving, with more and more Chinese nationals to be found north of it. To compensate, Russia's northern border has recently made a great leap northward, and now encompasses the north pole. (Anyone who doubts this fact can take a trip in a submarine and look at the Russian flag planted on the sea floor.) This is an example of politics racing ahead of nature. With respect to most other lines that are creeping north as the climate warms up, politics is the laggard. But is it not all, in the end, just a matter of time?

As the tropics turn into a belt of lifeless, sun-baked rocks and sand blown about by hurricanes, populations, both animal and human, will be forced to shift north, and fine political lines, like the various North American borders, will turn out to be of little consequence. In the end, you may not know what country you are from, but it may not matter.