I. Contents of Issue #2: "Navigating the Age of Collapse"
Ninety-one pages (8.5 x 11), with four articles:
"Thriving in an Age of Collapse"
by Dmitry Orlov
"Peak Oil: A Survival Guide, Part I" (Reprint from Museletter #161)
by Richard Heinberg
"Mapping Out the Age of Collapse, Part I: The Effects of Urbanization"
by Mattthew David Savinar
"Mapping Out the Age of Collapse, Part II: Industrial Civilization at Night"
by Matthew David Savinar
II. Excerpts
Excerpt #1, from "Thriving in an Age of Collapse"
by Dmitry Orlov
A while ago Matt Savinar proposed that I write an article that specifically addresses the situations and concerns of some of the visitors to his Web site. He was also kind enough to provide me with three profiles, each of which is a composite of many people. One profile is of a young professional, another is of a middle-aged couple, and a third is of a high school student. My task was to adapt my knowledge of the circumstances in which people in Russia found themselves after the Soviet economy collapsed to the needs of diverse people in the United States. This I have tried to do. Keep in mind, however, that these are not real people, and that although I sometimes offer them detailed advice on subjects such as education, law, finance, and medicine, I do not practice any of these professions, and what I express here is mere opinion.
My premise is that the U.S. economy is going to collapse, that this process has already begun, and will run its course over a decade or more, with ups and downs here and there, but a consistent overall downward direction. I neither prognosticate nor wish for such an outcome; I just happen to see it as very likely. Furthermore, I do not see it as altogether bad. There are some terrible aspects to the current state of affairs, and some wonderful aspects to the post-collapse environment. For example, the air will be much cleaner, there will be no traffic jams, and people will have plenty of time to devote to their children and to people within their immediate community. Wildlife will rebound. Local culture will make a comeback. People will get plenty of exercise walking around, carrying things, and performing manual labor. They will eat smaller and healthier diets. I could go on and on, but that is not the point.
Since such a scenario might seem outlandish to some people, I would like to sketch out why I find it entirely plausible. There is an ever-increasing amount of mainstream media attention being paid to the looming energy crisis. At this point, very few people still argue that there is not a problem with the energy supply, immediately for natural gas, eventually for oil. There is also a viewpoint, which is ever more closely and persuasively argued, that what we have to look forward to is a permanent energy shortfall, which will cause economic and societal dislocations that will be monumental in scope, and will transform the patterns of everyday life. The current, consumer-friendly economy would be no more, replaced with a subsistence economy characterized by a good deal of privation and austerity.
This viewpoint is usually served up under the rubric of “Peak Oil” - the all-time global peak in the rate of extraction of conventional crude oil. The connection between the inability to goose up oil production beyond some already icecap-melting number, and the immediate trotting out of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is not immediately obvious. But apparently the U.S. economy is a sort of pyramid scheme, based on nothing more than faith in its growth potential, and can only continue to exist while it continues to expand, by sucking in ever more resources, particularly energy. Even a small energy shortage is enough to undermine it. So Peak Oil is hardly the problem – it is the foolish notion that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is possible. Collapse can be triggered when any one of many other physical limits is exceeded - drinkable water, breathable air, arable land, and so on – and so the limit to sustained oil production is only one of many physical limits to growth.
I do not feel the need to argue for the inevitability of a permanent energy crisis, not only because others have already done so quite persuasively, but also because it involves arguing with people who do little more than shout slogans. The slogans that are heard most often range from the simplistic “There is plenty of oil!” to the ideologically hidebound “The free market will provide!” to the somewhat more nuanced but technologically implausible “Technology will provide!” to the perennially hopeful but unrealistic “Other sources of energy will be found!” There is even the refreshingly irrational “People have said that oil would run out before, and they were wrong!” repeated endlessly by Daniel Yergin, an oil historian who believes that history repeats itself endlessly, even the history of nonrenewable resource extraction. Facile notions of this sort will remain popular for some time yet, but I feel that it is already quite safe to start ignoring them.
It bears pointing out that most of us would prefer to remain blissfully unaware of any and all such arguments and notions, perhaps choosing to concern ourselves with topics less likely to depress our libido. Awareness of topics of global import is certainly not compulsory, and may not even be beneficial. Why worry about disasters we can do nothing to avert? Why not just enjoy our day in the sun, come what may? Also, large groups of people can be dangerous when panicked, and so I do not wish to panic them.
As for the few of us who are concerned, my message to you is a cheerful one, because I believe that you can still exercise some measure of control over your destiny. So, if you want some help thinking things through with a positive attitude, read on. If not, do not concern yourself unduly. Instead of reading this, you could lift your spirits by going for a drive, or going shopping, or taking a nap. Rest assured that these are all good things for you to do, the nap especially. Rather than you being menaced by some issue of global importance, any number of other unpleasant eventualities could bring about your untimely demise, on which you should likewise refrain from dwelling morbidly. Your participation in this program is optional.
The first step in this program is admitting that what is looming on your horizon is economic collapse – that the economy, as you are used to thinking about it, will cease to serve your needs. You will not hear about it on the evening news, and there will be no signs in shop windows that read “Out of business due to economic collapse.” The traditional array of experts will be on hand, claiming that prosperity is just around the corner, and offering this or that short-term fix, which, for all we know, might even work for a little while.
An economy collapses one person, one family, one community at a time. First, the dreams evaporate: the future starts looking worse than the present, and ever more uncertain. Then people are forced to withstand ever greater indignities and privations, which they tend to accept as their personal failings. The resulting stress causes them to experience a variety of physical and psychological symptoms. Our pride, our habits and expectations, and our unwillingness to adapt, can kill us faster than any physical hardship. But eventually something has to give, and even if life does not get any easier, one morning we wake up, and not only has life all around us been transformed out of all recognition, but everyone we encounter recognizes that times have changed. And we realize that none of this is about us personally, and feel better.
I feel qualified to write on this subject because I had the opportunity to observe an economic collapse firsthand. I did some of my growing up in the Soviet Union, and the rest in the United States. I have visited Russia repeatedly, on personal trips and on business, during the years of Perestroika, the ensuing collapse, and the lean years of the 1990s. I feel equally at home, or, on occasion, lost, in both places. Unlike most Russian émigrés who witnessed the collapse, I was fascinated rather than traumatized by my experiences there, and have not tried to blot them out of my memory, as many of them have. Also unlike most émigrés, I know quite a lot about the United States, its society and its economy, see its fateful weaknesses, and care about what happens here. When peering apprehensively into the unknown, it is useful to have as your guide someone who has already been there. Since no such guide is available, you will have to make do with someone who has been someplace vaguely similar.
Excerpt #2, from "A Peak Oil Survival Manual, Part I"
by Richard Heinberg
Most readers of my books, or long-time subscribers to MuseLetter, will not have needed the few paragraphs of introduction above in order to be convinced of the need for action. But I hope the exercise was helpful in any case (if you are a Peak Oil convert, you may wish to share this essay with friends).
So: what to do?
The first thing I would suggest is to get some idea of what to expect. This can only be a general idea at best, as the behavior of large chaotic systems is hard to predict, and the world is both very large and very chaotic. Yet if we don’t know what to expect, it's hard to prepare.
Of course, fuel will cost more, but so will food and just about everything else that has inherent value. Unemployment will increase, as will bankruptcies and foreclosures. These sorts of trends will likely lead to social unrest and, most likely, government repression.
Once you have thought through some of the mutually catalyzing implications, next begin to adjust your worldview to this future reality. Do some thought experiments: place yourself in the post-peak world and imagine what you could do, what you would like to do, how you would be challenged, and how you might contribute.
Here, as in so many instances, a little history is helpful. The past is never an exact guide to the future, but it may be possible to get inklings about life in our energy-starved future by identifying and examining other periods of shortage or privation, or other societies that have faced similar challenges. Past object lessons include the Great Depression of the 1930s (and some of the nearly-great depressions that are less often mentioned—such as those of 1893, 1919, ?????), and the Cuban "Special Period" (1990 to 2000). Of course, we needn’t necessarily look to the past for examples: Readers who have traveled to poor areas in Third-World nations will already have some personal knowledge of what it is like to live with much less energy, or in a country where unemployment figures are several times what we have been used to in post-World War II America.
The first lesson we are likely to take away from any such thought exercise is that dire conditions bring out both the best and worst in people. Some individuals seek unfair advantages; others tend to crumble psychologically, especially when privation comes on suddenly. However, many others quickly learn to cooperate, or discover unsuspected resources of creativity within themselves. Indeed, in hindsight times of extreme social stress are often searingly memorable, as Chris Hedges documented in his book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, and as also becomes clear from the interviews collected in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.
So if this is the case, one of our main goals in approaching “times that try men’s souls” must be to make sure that we are among those who are psychologically prepared to respond to stress positively. Here you, the reader, should take heart: the fact that you are willing to contemplate the likelihood of a deeply challenging future and to prepare yourself for it—rather than to sink into denial or distraction—is strong evidence that you are the type of person who is likely to respond well under stress, and who will likely be a leader and catalyst for positive responses within your community.
Excerpt #3, from "Mapping Out the Age of Collapse, Part I"
by Matthew David Savinar
Earlier this year, From the Wilderness Publications (an outfit some of you may be loosely familiar with) published an article by Dale Allen Pfeiffer entitled "Footprints." The article consisted of about half a dozen maps of planet Earth as seen from outer space at nighttime, which Dale used to vividly illustrate the "ecological footprint" concept. The maps were quite stunning and prompted me to go looking for additional, similar maps.
Ultimately, I found absolute gold mines of maps with Peak Oil-related information, mostly at various NASA sites. Those maps will form the foundation of this series, "Mapping Out the Age of Collapse", which I plan to publish over the course of five-to-six issues of the The Post-Oil Bulletin, with the first two installments published in this issue.
That I would find so much information relevant to Peak Oil on NASA sites came as somewhat of a surprise to me as I had blithely assumed NASA did little more than shoot stuff into space. The reality is that of any US government agency, the one that likely best understands the scope of the problems we are facing in relation to Peak Oil, climate collapse, overpopulation, industrial pollution, etc. is NASA, not the DOE or EPA. The reason NASA has the best understanding of the challenges confronting humanity is because, as you will see in the pages that follow, NASA has the best maps.
Armed with such great maps, perhaps it should come as little surprise that some NASA scientists demonstrate a surprisingly nuanced understanding of issues related to Peak Oil. For instance, on November 1, 2000 NASA published an article authored by John Weier entitled "Bright Lights, Big City" which starts off as if it were written by William Catton, author of the classic text on overpopulation, Overshoot:
When most animals in the wild multiply to the point where they require
more food than is available in their habitat, they eat what they can and
then starve in droves. From dinosaurs to present-day deer populations,
this basic rule of nature has held fast for nearly every animal species with
one notable exception—us. Many anthropologists believe that 10,000 years
ago, when the human population reached its natural limit of 10 million
people (Imhoff et al., 2000), the agricultural revolution began so that the
hunter-gatherers could ensure their survival. Ever since, we humans have
been growing in number, precariously and diligently avoiding what seems
to be a Malthusian fate by engineering new ways of reviving our soil,
changing the flow of the Earth’s water, and even genetically altering our
crops.
Now that the number of people on the planet has surpassed the six billion
mark, it is more important than ever that we actively protect our natural
resources. Yet, many researchers fear we may be doing the exact
opposite. As our population continues to swell, our self-made urban and
suburban habitats have begun to consume enormous tracts of once rural
landscape. What is worse, some researchers believe, a majority of this
landscape is prime farmland.
Tracking this phenomenon, however, has always been difficult.
Urbanization moves relatively fast and its outlines are often hard to
discern. Recently, a group of researchers at Goddard Space Flight Center,
led by climatologist and remote sensing specialist Marc Imhoff, came
across a solution. Using satellite images of city lights at night, they
constructed a map of the urbanized areas of the United States and
several other countries. They then integrated this map with a soil map
that the United Nations prepared. These NASA researchers found that
while the residents of these countries are not going to starve tomorrow,
they may indeed be destroying their best soils and putting future
generations at risk.
While the above excerpt echoes Catton’s Overshoot, there are other articles on NASA sites that echo James Howard Kunstler’s "Clusterfuck Nation" web-log. Take, for instance, the following excerpt from "Urbanization’s Aftermath", an article originally published on the NASA Earth Observatory website:
In developed countries such as the United States, the flight towards the
cities occurred during the first half of the last century. But the increase in
population and the unerring belief in a two-story, aluminum-sided American
dream has led to further expansion. Between 1982 and 1992, 19,000
square miles of otherwise rural cropland and wilderness were urbanized in
the United States (World Resources Institute 1996). This is the equivalent
of covering half of Ohio with one big subdivision. All of this takes its toll on
vegetation. "We are simply converting more and more of the most fertile
land areas to a non-productive state by covering them with parking lots
and buildings that spread out over a larger and larger area," says Imhoff.
For most of us who live in the cities or suburbs, the aftermath of "converting fertile land areas into non-productive states" is difficult to truly understand as it is so omnipresent. Since we spend so much of our time in and around the parking lots and office buildings that form the heart of modern cities, our perspectives tend to get stuck somewhere in between "narrowly myopic", "grossly distorted" and "flat-out clueless." I think many folks who count themselves as "Peak Oil aware" feel a bit disoriented. We know we’ve been grossly "mis-dis-and-under"-informed about the true nature of our world, we crave more accurate information, but we aren’t sure where to go to get it. As my friends over at FTW have explained:
Inside a continuous haze of hypnotic advertising, corporate propaganda,
and government indoctrination, one can only see a few pixels into the near
distance, and one yearns for a synoptic grasp of the larger picture.
Hopefully, the maps I’ve compiled in this article will help you come to a better "grasp of the larger picture." I know they did mine.
---------------
Map #7/38: Los Angeles
Source: NASA/JPL/NIMA
