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  • From: Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • To: tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [tcrp-news] Fw: Social collapse best practices
  • Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:06:24 -0500

I consider Orlov one of the best thinkers on the Worst Case
Scenario. He's entertaining, too.

Interesting that Stewart Brand seems to have gotten the message.

Jon

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Published on Energy Bulletin (http://energybulletin.net)

Social collapse best practices
Published Sat, 02/14/2009 - 08:00
by Dmitry Orlov

The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell
Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550
people. Audio and video of the talk will be available on Long Now
Foundation web site.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It's
certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American
continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the
occasion isn't a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk
about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing
that up along with everything else that's gone wrong. I know it's
a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn't you instead want to go
and eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be
time left for that after my talk.

I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and
I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious,
professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in
May, or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or
Brian Eno -- some of my favorite people, really. I am just a
tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the
sights, and then I'll fly back to Boston and go back to my day
job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then
everyone has a book, or so it would seem.

You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to
speak here tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the
limelight, because I am one of the very few people who several
years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States
as a global superpower. The idea that the USA will go the way of
the USSR seemed preposterous at the time. It doesn't seem so
preposterous any more. I take it some of you are still hedging
your bets. How is that hedge fund doing, by the way?

I think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because 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.

I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of
professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of
community service. So, if you don't like my talk, don't worry
about me. There are plenty of other things I can do. But I would
like my insights to be of help during these difficult and
confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not
entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did
when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely
lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men,
breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially
vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become
very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation,
psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and
a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.

Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have
less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or
perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those
around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case,
the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening
gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit
around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it
is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very tedious
company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are
all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that's my
little intervention.

If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is
the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains
just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly
tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet
Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe
and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic
addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening
foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning
foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients "The
Superpower Collapse Soup." Other factors, such as the inability to
provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a
systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are
certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to
collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision
course with reality. Please don't be too concerned, though,
because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.

I've been working on this theory since about 1995, when it
occurred to me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the
USSR. As so often is the case, having this realization was largely
a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The two
most important methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the
solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned
this in engineering school -- from a certain professor. I am not
that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead
of time.

I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew
up straddling the two worlds -- the USSR and the US. I grew up
in Russia, and moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am
fluent in Russian, and I understand Russian history and Russian
culture the way only a native Russian can. But I went through high
school and university in the US .I had careers in several
industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I
also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its
quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when
things there still seemed more or less in line with the Soviet
norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a standstill, and
big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there 3 more
times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet
collapse first-hand.

By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as
a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect
eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty
shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy
of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The
symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already
too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious
ever since.

The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and
history buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that
would be useful in our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the
differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be most
instructive. When the Soviet system went away, many people lost
their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were
held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation,
there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there
was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian
society did not collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to
muddle through. How was that possible? It turns out that many
aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the
face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to
function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not
lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive
even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to
thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker's
paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect
it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness.
In comparison, the American system could produce significantly
better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and
perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at
all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even
after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely
shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work
with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight
that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then
turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new
living arrangement here in the United States -- one that is more
likely to be survivable.

The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such
ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War
victory, getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to
the Stone Age, and the foreign policy wonks coined the term
"hyperpower" and were jabbering on about full-spectrum
dominance. All sorts of silly things were happening. Professor
Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a
brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for
us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made
things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses,
pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are
really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan Greenspan chided us
about "irrational exuberance" while consistently low-balling
interest rates. It was the "Goldilocks economy" -- not to hot, not
too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was actually
more of a "Tinker-bell" economy, because the last five or so years
of economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on
various debt pyramids, the "whole house of cards" as President
Bush once referred to it during one of his lucid moments. And now
we can look back on all of that with a funny, queasy feeling, or
we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo.

While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best
to keep my comparative theory of superpower collapse to
myself. During that time, I was watching the action in the oil
industry, because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles'
heel of the US economy. In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in
global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the
century. But then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at
least half a decade. Perhaps you've noticed this too, there is a
sort of refrain here: people who try to predict big historical
shifts always turn to be off by about half a decade. Unsuccessful
predictions, on the other hand are always spot on as far as
timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at
midnight on January 1, 2000. Perhaps there is a physical principal
involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while
ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known universe. So
please make a mental note: whenever it seems to you that I am
making a specific prediction as to when I think something is
likely to happen, just silently add "plus or minus half a decade."

In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the
time was ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn't too far off. In
June of 2005 I published an article on the subject, titled
"Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century," which was quite
popular, even to the extent that I got paid for it. It is
available at various places on the Internet. A little while later
I formalized my thinking somewhat into the "Collapse Gap" concept,
which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of
2006. The slide show from that presentation, titled "Closing the
Collapse Gap," was posted on the Internet and has been downloaded
a few million times since then. Then, in January of 2008, when it
became apparent to me that financial collapse was well underway,
and that other stages of collapse were to follow, I published a
short article titled "The Five Stages of Collapse," which I later
expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in October
of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I announced on my blog that
I am getting out of the prognosticating business. I have made
enough predictions, they all seem very well on track (give or take
half a decade, please remember that), collapse is well underway,
and now I am just an observer.

But this talk is about something else, something other than making
dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You
see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they
have come true. It's like looking at last year's amazingly
successful stock picks: what are you going to do about them this
year? What we need are examples of things that have been shown to
work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we
are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the
title for the talk -- "Social Collapse Best Practices" -- and I
thought that it was an excellent idea. Although the term "best
practices" has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little
more than "good ideas," initially it stood for the process of
abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in
the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control
risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive
outcome. It's a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and
deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works.

In organizations, especially large organizations, "best practices"
also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching
colleagues trying to "think outside the box" whenever they are
confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any good at
thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn't feel so compelled
to spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an
office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside the
box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that
box. So perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive
again is if someone came along and gave them a different box
inside of which to think -- a box better suited to the
post-collapse environment.

Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse
happens, nothing works. That's just not the case. The old ways of
doing things don't work any more, the old assumptions are all
invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become
irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures
of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the
better. But enough generalities, let's go through some
specifics. We'll start with some generalities, and, as you will
see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are
positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter
of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are
positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse
occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having
high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have
to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time
inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very
useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and
they can't easily get more because they don't have any
credit. Prior to collapse, it's good for a business to have the
right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After
collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that
can't unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through
sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want
is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After
collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with
shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have
been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing
around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.

If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any
bearing on what is commonly understood as "economic health." Prior
to collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding
economy. After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the
overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an
imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The
situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly
worse than expected. We are always either months or years away
from economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or
later, because some television bobble-head said so.

But let's take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are
the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air
coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course!
Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge
spike in commodity prices, so let's just try it again. That calls
for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let's see how high
the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve
hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions:
getting banks lending -- that's important too. You see, we are
just not in enough debt yet, that's our problem. We need more
debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage
jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs
we've been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with
low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security
or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate
at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their
jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as
well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much
more of that, and quickly!

So that's what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is
rising, and the captain is shouting "Full steam ahead! We are
sailing to Afghanistan!" Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge,
or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy
the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of
uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and
economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will
find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic
straws even sillier. Except that it won't be funny: what is
crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and
institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don't recommend
passively standing around and watching the show -- unless you
happen to have a death wish.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on
their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to
invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke
of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to
cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will
soon be over, and they don't have any idea what to do next.

So, what is there for them to do? Forget "growth," forget "jobs,"
forget "financial stability." What should their realistic new
objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation,
and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these
necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning
economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access
to imports, and to make them available to a population that is
largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely
intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of
cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a
gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of
resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity
and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and
dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in
a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed
of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted
resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its
history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the
Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration
punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to
supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers
many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many
economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us
consider each one of these in turn.

The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent
underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the
disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s,
which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and
herded people into collective farms. Collectivization undermined
the ancient village-based agricultural traditions that had made
pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was also the
breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was
caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy
farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while
dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the
biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn to importing
grain from countries hostile to its interests -- United States and
Canada -- and eventually expanded this to include other
foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and
other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used
to raise livestock to try to address this problem.

Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods
available at the government stores, the resulting diet would have
been rather poor, and so people tried to supplement it with food
they gathered, raised, or caught, or purchased at farmers'
markets. Kitchen gardens were always common, and, once the economy
collapsed, a lot of families took to growing food in earnest. The
kitchen gardens, by themselves, were never sufficient, but they
made a huge difference.

The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to
score something edible. I remember one particular joke from that
period. Black humor has always been one of Russia's main
psychological coping mechanisms. A man walks into a food store,
goes to the meat counter, and he sees that it is completely
empty. So he asks the butcher: "Don't you have any fish?" And the
butcher answers: "No, here is where we don't have any meat. Fish
is what they don't have over at the seafood counter."

Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never
collapsed completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread
continued even during the worst of times, partly because has
always been such an important part of the Russian diet, and partly
because access to bread symbolized the pact between the people and
the Communist government, enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary
slogans. Also, it is important to remember that in Russia most
people have lived within walking distance of food shops, and used
public transportation to get out to their kitchen gardens, which
were often located in the countryside immediately surrounding the
relatively dense, compact cities. This combination of factors made
for some lean times, but very little malnutrition and no
starvation.

In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily
industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical
fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly,
financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers' access
to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is
efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In
fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a
bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil
fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as
food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated
diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of miles to
resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it
takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket
shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are
not within walking distance of stores, not served by public
transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they
are no longer able to drive.

Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation's nutrition
needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and
convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts
of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is all
that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to
extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs.

Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs,
and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic
collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for
food security, because they too depend industrial
agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup,
genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers,
factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived
from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer
made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business
longer, supplying food-that-isn't-really-food, but eventually they
will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply
chain. Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that
aren't really burgers, like the bread that wasn't really bread
that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the
Nazi blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour
added for flavor.

Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The
Russian example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could
gauge how fast the economy was crashing, and, based on that,
decide how many rows of potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do
something similar? There is already a healthy gardening movement
in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make
small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation
by individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square
feet. The ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to
rivers and streams for irrigation. Provisions would have to be
made for campsites and for transportation, allowing people to
undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during
the growing season, and haul the produce back to the population
centers after taking in the harvest.

An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba:
converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to
raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in
vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil,
compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be
closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in
any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and
balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of
other agricultural uses.

How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were
actually helped by their government, but the Russians managed to
do it in more or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so
we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones. The
government could theoretically head up such an effort, purely
hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence that
such an effort is being considered. For our fearless national
leaders, such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the
economy and get the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply
grow themselves. All they need to do is print some more money,
right?

Moving on to shelter. Again, let's look at how the Russians
managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own
their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live,
which was recorded in a person's internal passport. People could
not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they
drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place
of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal
apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent
housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three
generations living together. The apartments were often crowded,
sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had
to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to
exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long
waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got
married, and had children before receiving a place of their own.

These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all
this: the high population density made this living arrangement
quite affordable. With several generations living together,
families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided
day care, freeing up their children's time to do other things. The
apartment buildings were always built near public transportation,
so they did not have to rely on private cars to get
around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and
municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the
short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the
economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost
their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid
for months, and when they were the value of their wages was
destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no
evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes
even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their
families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate,
people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they
tended to know all the people around them. After the economic
collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it
very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren't strangers, and
who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist,
the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final
windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized,
and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some
very valuable real estate, free and clear.

Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many
people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their
house is not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already
know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling
it, or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few
people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are
going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much lower?
A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a
"realistic" price. This thought is connected to the notion that
housing is a necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to
live.

Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a
necessity, be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a
barrack, a boat, a camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a
shipping container... The list is virtually endless. But there is
no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is
in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural
preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban
houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public
transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because
of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of
additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway
maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other
nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural
land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of
urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead
downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no
longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out.

As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned,
it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities
will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity,
road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful
gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings
will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result
will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more
survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier
ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it
would be very helpful to improvise some solution.

One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant
office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to
dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have
kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture,
and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just
not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to
generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the
current large population of office plankton. The businesses that
once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as
well find new and better uses for them.

Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and
that can be repurposed for new communities is college
campuses. The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious
merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in
12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As
fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is
likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation
will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will
provide the impetus to do something about the public education
system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but
eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards.

College campuses make perfect community centers: there are
dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the
more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that
can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally
contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed
to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze
cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and
faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions
flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for
government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don't we.

Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that
people don't get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then
we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people
can grow, catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places
where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or
going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight
will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers, as
well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing
in the remaining habitable dwellings.

All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all
hinges on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems
very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive
and in short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the
middle of 2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to
grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a
"bumpy plateau." An all-time record was set in 2005, and then,
after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in
2008. Then, as the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and
other commodity prices crashed, along with oil production. More
recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether
different "bumpy plateau": the oil prices are bumping along at
around $40 a barrel and can't seem to go any lower. It would
appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it
does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price.

Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment,
but there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the
money-printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and
$40 could easily become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly
pricing US consumers out of the international oil market. On top
of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading
their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start
insisting on payment in kind -- in some sort of tangible export
commodity, which the US, in its current economic state, would be
hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil
production is in permanent decline, and can provide only about a
third of current needs. This is still quite a lot of oil, but it
will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread
oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a lot of
gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from
various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will
disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted
driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of
gas that's needed for some small but critical mission.

I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be
in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I
found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and
distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle's wife,
who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge
belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10
liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time
came. No dice. The pat answer was: "Everybody is 8 months
pregnant!" How can you argue with that logic? So 10 liters was it
for us too, belly or no belly.

So, what can we do to get our little critical missions
accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious
idea, of course, is to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes
in particular, are an excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good
idea too: not only do they hold large amounts of cargo, but they
can cover huge distances, all without the use of fossil fuels. Of
course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the navigable
waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to
the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to
open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient
maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to
solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced.

Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here,
again, some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my
book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the
US during World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older
cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the
massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more
highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the
shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building,
marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more
maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of
mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade
deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating
automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, higher passenger
occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of public
transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow
the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as
the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars
just as we run out of gas.

Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to
see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the
process of shutting down. On the other hand, the government's
actions continue to disappoint. Instead of trying to solve
problems, they would rather continue to create boondoggles. The
latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new cars. The
idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars
is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel
efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few
laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing
shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25
mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel
and wouldn't be safe with so many people in the back. And there
you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20
or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this
area, with excellent results.

Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not
to pick up hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down
and matched up with people who need a lift. Yet another idea:
since passenger rail service is in such a sad shape, and since it
is unlikely that funds will be found to improve it, why not bring
back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring
rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the
hobos. The energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the
hobos don't require stops because they can jump on and off, and
only a couple of cars per train would ever be needed, because
hobos are almost infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the
roof if needed. One final transportation idea: start breeding
donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very
cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a
donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during
World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but,
as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a
subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so
that's what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any
kind of cellulose, even when it's loaded with communist
propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street
Journal.

And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia
suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant,
veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for
themselves, there were numerous contract killings, muggings,
murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general, the place
just wasn't safe. Russians living in the US would hear that I am
heading back there for a visit, and would give me a wide-eyed
stare: how could I think of doing such a thing. I came through
unscathed, somehow. I made a lot of interesting observations along
the way.

One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it
becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special
occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even
possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you
run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things,
it's often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have
something valuable that you don't want to part with. If you can't
afford their services, then you should try to be friends with
them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their
demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to
do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might
at some point insist that you and your family move out to the
garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting
at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live
in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running
around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your
house, so that they have a base of operations from which to
maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.

A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political
solution to collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the
so-called Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I
didn't think there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming
part of the national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to
be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars,
and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed
that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has
the world's largest prison population, and will not be able to
afford to keep so many people locked up. It is better to release
prisoners gradually, over time, rather than in a single large
general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the US
invaded. And, lo and behold, many states are starting to implement
my proposal. It looks like California in particular will be forced
to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand people it keeps
locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we dismantle
all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them)
and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like that is starting
to happen as well, except for the currently planned little
side-trip to Afghanistan. I also proposed a Biblical jubilee --
forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let's give that
one' half a decade?

But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring,
just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal
government and the state governments all go broke, will transform
American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run
out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police
still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good
use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the
world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will
be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled
prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament.

And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former
prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some
violent tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with
various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many
of them borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are
a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are
not "on the force" and most of them develop an us-versus-them
mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer
from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer
from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will
sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but
rather political. This will make it impossible for society to
continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making
good use of their weapons training and other professional skills
to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important
point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not
anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them.

I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good
or bad per se; everything has to be considered within a
context. And, in a post-collapse context, not having to worry
whether or not something is legal may be a very good thing. In the
midst of a collapse, we will not have time to deliberate,
legislate, interpret, set precedents and so on. Having to worry
about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system is the last
thing we should have to worry about.

Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can
be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners' association might,
say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for
not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or
for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don't own,
without first getting a building permit, or some municipal
busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain
derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic --
you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is
aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally
unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police
uniforms, for old time's sake, then they probably won't give you
that ticket or seek that court order.

Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make
and distribute, a new agricultural implement. It's a sort of flail
studded with sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is
highly cost-effective, and reasonably safe provided you don't lose
your head while using it, although people have taken to calling
the "flying guillotine." You think that this is an acceptable
risk, but you are concerned about the issues of consumer safety
and liability insurance and possibly even criminal liability. Once
again, it is very helpful to have a large number of influential,
physically impressive, mildly psychotic friends who, whenever some
legal matter comes up, can just can go and see the lawyers, have a
friendly chat, demonstrate the proper use of the flying
guillotine, and generally do whatever they have to do to settle
the matter amicably, without any money changing hands, and without
signing any legal documents.

Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things
and people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much
of a cut from commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or
your town decides to conduct its own foreign policy, and the
federal government sees it fit to interfere. Then it may turn out
to be a good thing if someone else has the firepower to bring the
government, or what remains of it, to its senses, and convince it
to be reasonable and to play nice.

Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that
you can provide some relief to people who wouldn't otherwise have
any health care. You don't dare call yourself a doctor, because
these people are suspicious of doctors, because doctors were
always trying to rob them of their life's savings. But suppose you
have some medical training that you got in, say, Cuba, and you are
quite able to handle a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to suture
wounds, to treat infections, to set bones and so on. You also want
to be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan
periodically send you, to ease the pain of hard post-collapse
life. Well, going through the various licensing boards and getting
the certifications and the permits and the malpractice insurance
is all completely unnecessary, provided you can surround yourself
with a lot of well-armed, well-trained, mentally unstable friends.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very
important. Maintaining order and public safety requires
discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people,
requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready
to come to each other's defense, take responsibility for each
other, and do what's right. Right now, security is provided by a
number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which
inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense
not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the
world's highest prison population. They are supposedly there to
protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is
not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and
those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources,
there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be
forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice
will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal
department.

I've covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and
what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot
of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if
in fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to
think that way. The danger there is that you will miss the
opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then
you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be made:
you can accept the failure of the system now and change your
course accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay
the course, and then you will probably have to accept your own
individual failure later.

So how do you prepare? Lately, I've been hearing from a lot of
high-powered, successful people about their various high-powered,
successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like
this: "My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or
c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his money in gold,
b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker
under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this
normal?" And I tell them, yes, of course, that's perfectly
harmless. He's just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that's not
really preparation. That's just someone being colorful in an
offbeat, countercultural sort of way.

So, how do you prepare, really? Let's go through a list of
questions that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly
respond to each of them.

OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles?
What on earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and
right, and if we calculate unemployment the same way it was done
during the Great Depression, instead of looking at the cooked
numbers the government is trying to feed us now, then we are
heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to think
it'll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is
around the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but
retirement savings are also evaporating. The federal government is
broke, state governments are broke, some more than others, and the
best they can do is print money, which will quickly lose
value. So, how can we get the basics if we don't have any money?
How is that done? Good question.

As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter,
transportation, and security. Shelter poses a particularly
interesting problem at the moment. It is still very much
overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents that they
can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The
solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But
then you might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I
mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant properties
around. Finding a good place to live will become less and less of
a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get
foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties
will only increase. The best course of action is to become a
property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property
rent-free, and keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you
can't find a position as a property caretaker? Well, then you
might have to become a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant
properties that you can go to next, and keep your camping gear
handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are, the
people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property
caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you
become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property,
but you also look out for all the squatters, because they are the
reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand is
worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord
might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter
friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so
much better than living in a ghost town.

What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious
answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any
moment. It really doesn't matter which one of these it turns out
to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the
process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by
spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes
away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as
possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible
burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and
jump off.

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what
do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up
inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails
will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful
stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds
of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and
providing transportation. If you don't own a patch of dirt free
and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a
storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it
until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you
to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just
described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to
change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous
inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change
the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and
each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences,
and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on
some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by
refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance
of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to
yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise
not exist. Content on this site is subject to our fair use
notice. Source URL: http://energybulletin.net/node/48082

Links:
[1] http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
[2] http://www.longnow.org/
[3] http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
[4] http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/3991




  • [tcrp-news] Fw: Social collapse best practices, Tompkins County Relocalization Project, 02/14/2009

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