Will Fear of Money Destroy
Peak Oil Preparations?
The Pacific Northwest —the area of the country stretching along the west coast from approximately the North Bay area of San Francisco up through northern Washington State—has emerged as "ground zero" for Peak Oil preparations. Many communities in the Northwest have gotten local civic leaders involved in preparations, and have founded numerous Peak Oil groups to address local issues of collapse. People in the Northwest are teaching themselves permaculture techniques; organic farming; how to make, use and repair hand tools; how to grow food and medicinal herbs in their backyards, and all manner of things that will be exceedingly useful after collapse.
I lived in Portland, Oregon for a long time. I left there to return to Pennsylvania for university, and have until recently planned on going back. I consider Portland to be my “other hometown” and I was proud of Portlanders’ attention to Peak Oil and their preparations efforts. I joined a couple mailing lists and began networking with the Peak Oil community there in anticipation of my return.
My personal great concern over collapse is the economic hardship that awaits us all, and that is even now peering over the horizon. We will all face economic problems much sooner than we will face blackouts; we will lose our jobs and our homes long before the lights go out.
Addressing these issues is, for me, priority. They also require discussing economics, markets, and money. Each time I attempted to broach the subject on the mailing lists, I was generally ignored, or occasionally met with hostility. I tried to establish a separate mailing list to keep economic issues off the main lists so as not to offend anyone. No one joined.
In time I began to get the picture. The subject of money was taboo among the list participants, so taboo that it was beyond discussion even in the context of a massive planetary die-off.
I began researching other Northwest communities to see who was dealing with money issues, if the folks in Portland would not. I found lots of information about permaculture, organic farming, and the like, but literally nothing about money. (Actually, the Willits Economic Localization’s PDF of its presentation to the Rotary Club does include the word “financial” on its last page. So I guess that makes one thing.)
This discovery scared the hell out of me. “Ground zero” of the preparations movement is actively refusing to address the most immediate problem we face. This approach is sowing the seeds of community violence, and creating a magnet for external violence.
I will not be returning to the Northwest. I believe I am safer here, less than a tank of gas from the whole East Coast megalopolis. Northwest-style preparations are going to fail, spectacularly, anywhere they are implemented.
Peak Oil awareness: enter, stage Left
Peak Oil awareness owes its existence to our political-lefty friends on the west coast. They are the ones who first embraced Mike Ruppert’s post-9/11 message, rebroadcast his lectures on local independent radio, began sharing their battered copies of From the Wilderness with each other. I know this because I was there. I originally learned of Peak Oil in October, 2001, when Ruppert came to town for his first major Peak Oil lecture. (And god bless KBOO for their great work in getting Ruppert’s message out back in the beginning.)
I believe it is because of the Left’s ability to grasp environmental and Earth-related issues that Peak Oil made immediate sense to them, where others have difficulty with the concept. It has been a slow process educating people, but environmental and social-justice activists have been diligent. If Peak Oil is now kind-of on the map, it is because of the grassroots efforts of these folks in bringing the work of people like Mike Ruppert and Richard Heinberg to public attention.
But for all its excellent hard work, the Left has an acute blind spot when it comes to money. The general consensus among the Left seems to be that the collapse of industrial civilization is ultimately a good thing, because it means the collapse of capitalism. The Left views money as a weapon of oppression against the less fortunate, and anything related to money is dismissed out-of-hand as inherently evil. Those who learn to operate money are held in deep suspicion, if not overt contempt.
A cliff with an organic garden at the bottom
I believe that preparation efforts which ignore economic issues will actually put any given community in a worse situation than had it not prepared at all.
The immediate problems we face are entirely economic: loss of jobs, hyperinflation and dollar collapse, loss of local manufacturing capacity, loss of local distribution infrastructure, home foreclosures and apartment evictions. These are the issues for which people need to prepare right now. Learning to grow a backyard organic garden is a distraction from learning what one must do to hang on to one’s house after the next round of layoffs. Prioritizing the use hand tools is a distraction from taking in freelance work to get out of student-loan debt.
Moreover, by ignoring money issues, Northwest-style preparations are laying the foundation for an inversion of the "haves vs. have-nots" equation. Those hit hardest by economic collapse will be those who are now relatively well-off. They will become what James Howard Kunstler calls, “the formerly middle-class.” They will not have known that Peak Oil was imminent because they are not inclined to participate in politically left-leaning activities—like vegan pot-luck Peak Oil movie night—and there is no mention of Peak Oil in the corporate media. They will have been blindsided, and they will be on the streets.
Meanwhile, the "peakniks" will have developed a network of community gardens, small farmers just beyond the city limits, and other physical infrastructure. They will be the new haves. The formerly middle-class will be the new have-nots.
This might not be so unfortunate a situation if some economic infrastructure had been developed to support the physical one. The new have-nots could potentially work to earn community currency notes, or turn metal scraps into useful items to sell, or find some other way to scrape together some money. At least the possibility exists. But with no money system, the have-nots have no way to purchase the peakniks’ goods. They are reduced to either thievery or begging to obtain them. Even if a barter system emerges, the new have-nots will have nothing with which to barter except time and muscle power, which will put them in a feudal relationship to the peakniks.
In this situation, it will be very difficult for these folks not to feel that the left-leaning preparations community is being punitive in withholding goods from those hated capitalists of pre-collapse life.
The establishment of a centralized distribution network would be even worse. There is no possible way people will be able to operate one of those, given the dire economic conditions befalling us, without shaving a little extra off the top for one’s own kids. Even if someone is honest enough to let one’s own child go hungry in order to be fair and equitable, no one will believe it is the case.
If this is not a recipe for civil conflict, I don’t know what is.
And that doesn’t address the issue of external conflict. With a functioning, market-based economy in place, outsiders would come to find work, or to buy and sell what they have—constructive participation that would benefit the community as a whole.
Without a functioning local market, a physical infrastructure of organic farms, neighborhoods of backyard organic gardens, and the means to create and use hand tools, become magnets for the ruthless. If a particular community has what someone needs, but gives him no way of obtaining it other than murder and theft, then that’s what he will do if he is desperate enough.
For all its faults, a market-based economy provides the means for people to obtain what they need from each other peacefully, without resorting to violence. This is one of the reasons why money evolved into existence in the first place. The vast majority of people in the world would sooner work to earn money than steal it, whether they sell what they make themselves or whether they work directly for someone else. Were it not the case, all societies would be in violent chaos all the time.
But, nearly everyone will steal if no other choice exists.
Ignoring economic issues as they relate to collapse preparations sows the seeds of community violence, both from within and from without. A community that sinks its energies into preparing for what comes after collapse, without considering the 15-20 or more years of economic hardship between now and the time when hand tools become necessary, is essentially committing suicide.
