[permaculture] 5 Stages of Collapse by Dmitri Orlov
Marjory
forestgarden at gvtc.com
Thu Nov 6 06:43:08 EST 2008
Thank you Keith for posting this information. I am getting more and
more technologically behind, and I couldn't figure out how to see the
whole text of the speech at the google website. I did see the slide
presentation, which is good, but I would like to read the entire text.
Could you either post the whole text, email it to me
(forestgarden at gvtc.com), or tell me how to get it? Orlov has some very
interesting things to say and an eye of an outsider with insights into
our own country that are worth reading.
Thanks again,
marjory
Keith Johnson wrote:
> Dmitri Orlov <http://www.cluborlov.blogspot.com/>, author of Reinventing
> Collapse <http://astore.amazon.com/booksptp-20/detail/0865716064>, spoke
> this previous weekend about the at the 5th Annual Peak Oil and Community
> Solutions Conference <http://www.communitysolution.org/conference.html>.
> You can read his presentation, and view the slides, here
> <http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dtxqwqr_76dcp7bxcr#>. I found it
> to be the most powerful talk of the entire conference. I recommend it
> highly. Be forewarned...it's time to get VERY serious about preparing
> for shaky times.
>
> Here's the beginning of his speech:
>
> Hello, everyone! The talk you are about to hear is the result of a
> lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and,
> unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I
> watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with
> the details of the situation in the United States, I can make
> comparisons between these two failed superpowers.
>
> I was born and grew up in Russia, and I traveled back to Russia
> repeatedly between the late 80s and mid-90s. This allowed me to gain a
> solid understanding of the dynamics of the collapse process as it
> unfolded there. By the mid-90s it was quite clear to me that the US was
> headed in the same general direction. But I couldn't yet tell how long
> the process would take, so I sat back and watched.
>
> I am an engineer, and so I naturally tended to look for physical
> explanations for this process, as opposed to economic, political, or
> cultural ones. It turns out that one could come up with a very good
> explanation for the Soviet collapse by following energy flows. What
> happened in the late 80s is that Russian oil production hit an all-time
> peak. This coincided with new oil provinces coming on stream in the West
> - the North Sea in the UK and Norway, and Prudhoe Bay in Alaska - and
> this suddenly made oil very cheap on the world markets. Soviet revenues
> plummeted, but their appetite for imported goods remained unchanged, and
> so they sank deeper and deeper into debt. What doomed them in the end
> was not even so much the level of debt, but their inability to take on
> further debt even faster. Once international lenders balked at making
> further loans, it was game over.
>
> What is happening to the United States now is broadly similar, with
> certain polarities reversed. The US is an oil importer, burning up 25%
> of the world's production, and importing over two-thirds of that. Back
> in mid-90s, when I first started trying to guess the timing of the US
> collapse, the arrival of the global peak in oil production was scheduled
> for around the turn of the century. It turned out that the estimate was
> off by almost a decade, but that is actually fairly accurate as far as
> such big predictions go. So here it is the high price of oil that is
> putting the breaks on further debt expansion. As higher oil prices
> trigger a recession, the economy starts shrinking, and a shrinking
> economy cannot sustain an ever-expanding level of debt. At some point
> the ability to finance oil imports will be lost, and that will be the
> tipping point, after which nothing will ever be the same.
>
> This is not to say that I am a believer in some sort of energy
> determinism. If the US were to cut its energy consumption by an order of
> magnitude, it would still be consuming a staggeringly huge amount, an
> energy crisis would be averted. But then this country, as we are used to
> thinking of it, would no longer exist. Oil is what powers this economy.
> In turn, it is this oil-based economy that makes it possible to maintain
> and expand an extravagant level of debt. So, a drastic cut in oil
> consumption would cause a financial collapse (as opposed to the other
> way around). A few more stages of collapse would follow, which we will
> discuss next. So, you could see this outlandish appetite for imported
> oil as a cultural failing, but it is not one that can be undone without
> causing a great deal of damage. If you like, you can call it
> "ontological determinism": it has to be what it is, until it is no more.
>
> I don't mean to imply that every part of the country will suddenly
> undergo a spontaneous existence failure, reverting to an uninhabited
> wilderness. I agree with John-Michael Greer that the myth of the
> Apocalypse is not the least bit helpful in coming to terms with the
> situation. The Soviet experience is very helpful here, because it shows
> us not only that life goes on, but exactly how it goes on. But I am
> quite certain that no amount of cultural transformation will help us
> save various key aspects of this culture: car society, suburban living,
> big box stores, corporate-run government, global empire, or runaway finance.
>
> On the other hand, I am quite convinced that nothing short of a profound
> cultural transformation will allow any significant number of us to keep
> roofs over our heads, and food on our tables. I also believe that the
> sooner we start letting go of our maladaptive cultural baggage, the more
> of a chance we will stand. A few years ago, my attitude was to just keep
> watching events unfold, and keep this collapse thing as some sort of
> macabre hobby. But the course of events is certainly speeding up, and
> now my feeling is that the worst we can do is pretend that everything
> will be fine and simply run out the clock on our current living
> arrangement, with nothing to replace it once it all starts shutting down.
>
> Now, getting back to my own personal progress in working through these
> questions, in 2005 I wrote an article called "Post-Soviet Lessons for a
> Post-American Century". Initially, I wanted to publish it on a web site
> run by Dale Alan Pfeiffer, but, to my surprise, it ended up on From The
> Wilderness, a much more popular site run by Michael Ruppert, and, to my
> further astonishment, Mike even paid me for it.
>
> And ever since then, I've been asked the same question, repeatedly:
> "When? When is the collapse going to occur?" Being a little bit clever,
> I always decline to give a specific answer, because, you see, as soon as
> you get one specific prediction wrong, there goes your entire
> reputation. One reasonable way of thinking about the timing is to say
> that collapse can occur at different times for different people. You may
> never quite know that collapse has happened, but you will know that it
> has happened to you personally, or to your family, or to your town. The
> big picture may not come together until much later, thanks to the
> efforts of historians. Individually, we may never know what hit us, and,
> as a group, we may never agree on any one answer. Look at the collapse
> of the USSR: some people are still arguing over why exactly it happened.
>
> But sometimes the picture is clearer than we would like. In January of
> 2008, I published an article on "The Five Stages of Collapse," in which
> I defined the five stages, and then bravely stated that we are in the
> midst of a financial collapse. And ten months later it doesn't seem that
> I went too far out on a limb this time. If the US government has to lend
> banks over 200 billion dollars a day just to keep the whole system from
> imploding, then the term "crisis" probably doesn't do justice to the
> situation. To keep this game going, the US government has to be able to
> sell the debt it is taking on, and what do you think the chances are
> that the world at large will be snapping up trillions of dollars of new
> debt, knowing that it is being used to prop up a shrinking economy? And
> if the debt can't be sold, then it has to be monetized, by printing
> money. And that will trigger hyperinflation. So, let's not quibble, and
> let us call what's happening what it looks like: "financial collapse".
>
>
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