Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse

February 20, 2009

Dear All,

Besides being very humorous at times, this article contains some

great data and even greater advice.

Worth a read!!! Worth reading again!!! Very Real Solutions!!!

Yours in Knowledge, Health and Freedom,

Doc

Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse: by Dmitry Orlov

Social Collapse Best Practices

By Dmitry Orlov

Culture Change, February 14, 2009

Straight to the

Source

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 on industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs,

such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified [foods], 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.

* * * * *

Dmitry Orlov is author of Reinventing Collapse, New

Society Publishers (2007). His articles on Culture Change include The

New Age of Sail , The Despotism of the Image, and That Bastion of

American Socialism. His website is cluborlov.blogspot.com

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February 21, 2009

Can this be found in mp3 format, I looked and was not able to find it, I'd like to forward it on to some people that would probably not take the time to read such a long article.Thanks, Doc, for more good info, we're getting ready.-Leah--- On Fri, 2/20/09, Doc <docshillington wrote:Doc <docshillington{Herbal Remedies} Getting Prepared for the Great Collapseherbal remedies (AT) Groups (DOT) comDate: Friday, February 20, 2009, 10:54 AM