Our Village

Dmitry Orlov

A few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, I spent some time living in a
small Russian village where my wife's side of the family owns a house. There
is nothing special or unique about this particular village; I am sure that it is
just one of thousands like it, scattered over the vast expanse of Russia. It is a
simple place that caters to simple needs. Like many such places, it was only
very slightly affected by the collapse of the Soviet economy: you'd have to
know what to look for to detect changes, and none of them made obvious the
fact that elsewhere life had changed in dramatic ways.

The United States is now facing a predicament similar to the one the Soviet
Union confronted some two decades ago. There is a great deal of discussion,
among those few who try to think for themselves, about the right way to
respond to the permanent energy crisis that has already started to grip the
country. The entire American way of life is an artificial life support system
that runs on fossil fuels, and it is going to get knocked out as these fuels run
low. Of the few people who have any notion that this is happening, even
fewer can imagine what might come next, beyond the gut feeling that it will
be unpleasant.

Some people have started to entertain thoughts of returning to a rural way of

life and surviving through subsistence agriculture - like the people in our
village. This is, of course, an excellent idea. If meadow voles could talk, they
would categorically deny that their lifestyle and diet are in any way affected
by fossil fuel prices and shortages, stock market crashes, cities looted by
armed mobs, internment camps run by federal emergency goons, or what
have you. But we are not meadow voles, and when we decide to start living
off the land, as with any new endeavor, it is important for us to learn as much
as we can, and to think things through. However, given the subject matter at
hand, to be of any use, such learning and thinking must be sufficiently
concrete, simple, and down-to-earth.

There is an element to American culture that never ceases to amuse me.

Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans

attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: ecovillages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the
circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems maladaptive. I love
the new advances in organic farming, which I find fascinating and very useful,
but why do people seem incapable of doing the simplest things without
making them into projects, preferably ones that involve some element of new
technology? Thousands of years of happy composting using heaps and pits
are behind us: now we need bins - and plastic, oil-based ones at that!

Contrary to the impositions of the whiz-bang-blinded and the gadget-addled

among us, living off the land is not about projects, or systems, or
organizations, but about shovels and buckets and hoes, and it is not even so
much about skills or techniques, as it is about habits. Yes, you too can pick up
the healthy habits of growing and gathering your own food, storing it, cooking
it, eating it, excreting it, and, yes, even composting the end result. The
temporary bounty of fossil fuels has allowed a lot of the former peasants to
live like nobles for a time - residing in mansions, moving about in carriages,
and having people serve them. Once these sources of energy are depleted,
many of these former peasants will be forced to revert back. They will once
more have to live in huts, travel on foot, wield their ancestral scythes and
sickles to provide their sustenance, and do their own chores.

But we are people, not voles, and mere subsistence is not enough. Village life
is about growing food, but it is also about much more. It is about the sense of
security that comes from knowing what you need and how to help yourself to
it. And it is about the profound experience of beauty that only comes from
direct, daily contact with nature. Finally, it is about the sense of eternity, of
the timelessness that comes from knowing that nothing ever has to change
unless you want it to: great empires may rise up and crumble all around you,
but the village will abide.

A Home in the Village

When Natasha, my wife, was a teen-ager growing up in the sunset glow of

the Soviet Union, her mother, grandmother, and aunt bought a house in a
small Russian village. At that time this was an unusual thing to do, and
something of an experiment. While many St. Petersburg residents owned
vacation homes, hardly any of these were in small, remote, working villages.

More recently, there has been a virtual stampede of middle-class people from
St. Petersburg and Moscow rushing to buy houses in villages. Formerly,
however, such people preferred to spend their summers in resort
communities, which offered possibilities for recreation. Natasha's family was
the only city family, and the only family not descended from people in the
vicinity, among the population of the village.

From that time, Natasha spent at least a part of each summer living, and
doing her share of the chores, in this village. She would have much preferred
to stay in the city with her friends, and spent time there only because her
family insisted. After we met, I spent quite a bit of time there myself, and
found the place much more to my liking than she ever did. This is hardly
surprising, because I happen to like villages. From when I was five, my family
spent at least a month, in the middle of the summer, living in various
villages, in different parts of Russia, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine. Each
of these villages remains in my memory like an uncut gem surrounded by the
gray gravel of city life.

It is notable that the men of the family had little or no say in the decision to
purchase this house. Natasha's mother, grandmother, and aunt formed a sort
of matriarchal triumvirate, which ruled the family nest, generally not
bothering to solicit the agreement of her father, grandfather, or uncle in
making decisions. With the exception of her grandfather, who was elderly and
did not mind spending the summers in the calm atmosphere of the village,
none of them spent much time there, and gratefully helped gather, transport
and eat the tasty food that grew there. This approach seems to have worked
very well for all of them. Clearly, it is more important to keep men fed than to
listen to their opinions, regardless of their wisdom and originality.

The Village, Soykino

Our village is called Soykino and is located right on the border between the
Novgorod and Pskov regions. It consists of eight houses lined up in rows along
the main highway connecting the two regional capitals: six houses on one
side, two on the other. Two of the six houses stand vacant, and are used for
storage. The village is about five hours' drive from St. Petersburg, or a day's
journey by train. It is within a half an hour's walk from a somewhat larger
village, Sitnya, which has a general store, a dairy farm, a bus stop, and a post

office. Sitnya is about an hour by bus from an even larger local town, Soltsy,
which prospered during the middle ages due to its proximity to some salt
seeps, which were used to produce salt. Soltsy has several tree-lined
avenues, several stores, a school, a hospital, a train station, and a bus depot.

The houses in Soykino are surrounded by a few hectares of farmland, which is

used for potato fields, kitchen gardens, orchards, and hay fields. The houses
are log cabins, one log wide, two logs long, the narrow end facing the road.
Most of them are covered on the outside with clapboards, which are
invariably painted a fast-fading cheery yellow. Our family was the first in the
village to clapboard and paint their house, and others followed, copying us
down to the exact color. All houses are supplied with enough electricity to
power a few light bulbs, a refrigerator, a radio, and a television set. Telephone
calls can sometimes be made from the post office in Sitnya, which is open a
few hours on most workdays, but more often than not the telephone line is
down.

Heat is provided either by the traditional Russian stove, which takes up half a
room, has a warm bed at the top, and only needs to be fired twice a day, or a
tiled Dutch stove that only takes up a corner of the room. Some villagers use
propane stoves for cooking, while others have cooking stoves stoked with
firewood. None of the houses has any sort of plumbing. Each house is
adjoined by a storage shed and a cozy outhouse. All outhouses except ours
are positioned over septic pits, while ours is a technologically advanced
composting toilet, which consists of a bench with a hole positioned over a
bucket that is periodically dumped onto the compost heap, and which makes
its humble contribution to the bounty of our kitchen garden. Some houses
also have pole tents with hearths, which are used for cooking and eating
during the summer months.

Many of the houses are surrounded by picket fences. The fence that runs
along the road is generally seen as a requirement, and has a latching gate.
The fences between houses are optional; contrary to the erroneous English
saying, good neighbors make for optional fences. The back fence is often
missing.

The houses lack driveways, and are reachable from the road via planks
thrown over the drainage ditch that runs along the road. There is one car-

worthy log bridge, which serves as the driveway for the entire village, but
since only a couple of the residents own cars, it is rarely used.

The houses are surrounded by kitchen gardens and orchards. Beyond the
houses lie hay and potato fields, and beyond those, the river Sitnya, a
tributary of Shelon, which, via lake Ilmen, river Volkhov, lake Ladoga, river
Neva, and the Gulf of Finland, eventually drains into the Baltic Sea.

The People of Soykino

The permanent population of Soykino, numbering just over a dozen, consists

mainly of middle-aged or elderly people, who are often visited by their
children and grandchildren. Some of them work in the neighboring Sitnya,
which, with a larger population and a dairy farm, offers some possibilities for
employment.

Soykino has just one family that could be called a proper farming family, the
Mukhins. This because they actually produce a cash crop of sorts: fodder,
which, however, they keep for their own horse and sheep. Father, mother,
and three daughters harvest hay in the surrounding fields with the help of
their family horse and a hay-wagon, scythes, rakes, and pitchforks. Along
with everyone else, they also tend their potato field and kitchen garden, and
pick mushrooms and berries in the surrounding forests. It is common
knowledge that the hay fields around the village are for their use, although it
is unclear whether this arrangement has any official sanction. More likely,
these fields, separated from the road by a ditch and a row of houses, are
effectively out of reach of the communal farm. The other villagers approve of
the Mukhins because they like fertilizing their cucumber patches with manure
from their horse, which is considered a precious commodity.

The residents of neighboring Sitnya rarely venture out to Soykino, although

lately the links have started to expand to encompass firewood delivery, cow
manure delivery, and plowing services. There is an additional contingent of
itinerant laborers, alcoholics, and thieves, and their various permutations.
These pay sporadic visits to Soykino, and have to be negotiated with in order
to have one's firewood sawed and split and one's property left unmolested.

Of the population of Sitnya, the most visible are a few youths who buzz by
several times a day on ancient two-stroke motorcycles. These are the dregs
of the local youth. Most everyone their age tries very hard to escape at least
as far as Soltsy, where there are some jobs. Others are drafted into the army,
never to return. The ones that remain do so because they are unfit for
military service.

It was not easy for us to gain acceptance into Soykino society. After several
years of concerted effort at making contact with the locals, they at last
started to acknowledge our existence, saying hello, then bartering food and
favors, and finally even coming over for visits. This was universally
considered a great victory, because a great social divide had been breached.
Everyone who lived there had lived there for generations, and was suspicious
of newcomers. The flip side of this acceptance was a certain lack of privacy:
the typical village way to invite yourself over for tea is to show up and yell
"Hey, are you there?" across the fence. But such visits are, of course,
essential for keeping up on current events and for making arrangements.

Agriculture in Soykino

The main purpose village life for everyone there, our family included, is to
survive, regardless of economic conditions, by using the few short summer
months to grow and gather enough food to last the entire winter. Although in
better times it is possible to survive in Russia by working a job or two, and
paying cash for food in stores and at farmers' markets, during leaner years
one's cash may not amount to much at all. Overall, most people would agree
that the economy is not to be relied on exclusively, and so most people, city
folk included, try to grow and gather at least some food themselves. Should
the economy evaporate completely, as it has repeatedly threatened to do,
they will at least have enough to survive the winter.

The staple is made up of potatoes, which do not grow well in the thin, sandy
soil around Soykino. Without fertilizer, the potato harvest can amount to less
than the potatoes that were planted the spring. Fertilizer can be had for free
by picking up after the herd of cows from the communal farm which wanders
past the village twice a day, but this is considered hard work. Most people try
to arrange to have manure delivered to them by people from the dairy farm.

Second in importance only to the potato fields are the kitchen gardens, which
generally take up all available territory around each house. Cucumbers,
eggplant, and squash are commonly grown, along with some green manures.
Tomatoes are grown as well, but require hothouses in order to ripen. A typical
village hothouse is a rickety affair made up of polyethylene sheets stretched
over poles and weighted down with logs. Some of the houses also have a few
apple and plum trees, as well as raspberry and currant bushes. Since the soil
is thin, a concerted effort is made to marshal organic wastes, and most plots
sport large compost heaps, overgrown with burdocks, which can be used in
lieu of toilet paper.

Since most houses lack either wells or pumped water, irrigation is provided
for by collecting rainwater from the roofs of houses and sheds. The gutters
run into barrels or old bathtubs, from which watering cans are filled. This
makes watering the kitchen garden a bit more labor-intensive than spraying
water from a hose, but nowhere near as bad as fetching water in buckets
from the river.

Except for the one horse and a few sheep, the village is without livestock.
Milk can be had very cheaply from the herd at the dairy farm, a half-hour
walk each way, and is used to make sour cream, yogurt, cottage cheese, and
butter. Several villagers raise chickens, which are prized as much for their
wild colors as their egg-laying ability, with the normal, white chickens
definitely outnumbered by the black, red, and brown hens and roosters. Eggs
are considered a good present to take along when going to visit neighbors.
Some villagers also raise rabbits, which are the only source of meat, used in
rabbit stew. The villagers seem to lack respect for rabbit meat, and are shy
about referring to it as such, preferring to simply call it "meat".

The Ecosystem

Almost everyone in Soykino gathers mushrooms and berries in the forest. Of

the mushrooms, the prized ones are Boletes and Chanterelles, but many of
the bitter, semi-edible mushrooms are used as well, soaked and then pickled.
The mushrooms are dried and used in soups and stews throughout the winter.

Of the berries, raspberries are made into preserves, while blueberries and
blackberries are eaten fresh and baked into pies. In early summer some wild
strawberries can be found, in small quantities, but quantity is hardly an issue
when it comes to these, given their amazing aroma and flavor. Later in the
season, there are plenty of cranberries as well.

The land around Soykino consists of large rectangular plots of mixed forest
and meadow cross-hatched with drainage ditches. Much of the surrounding
land was in the past swampy, and a great effort had been made to drain it.
Out in the forest, there are some abandoned homesteads, where fruit trees
and currant bushes often continue to thrive untended, and locals who know
such places sometimes come back with baskets full of fruit.

The name "Soykino" is derived from "soyka" (the Russian word for "jay") and
there are indeed plenty of jays to be found there. There is also a family of
storks, whose nest used to majestically adorn the top of the tallest pine tree
in the center of the village, but who have recently relocated to the cemetery
some distance down the road. They can still be seen leaping about in the
fields, catching frogs, then airlifting them up to the nest. There is also the
usual rowdy family of crows, and a particularly infuriating, thieving clan of
magpies, who have developed a taste for soap, and instantly swoop down
and steal any bar of soap that is left unattended. Of the smaller birds, swifts
and swallows are particularly common, and woodpeckers are not so much
seen as heard in the forest across the road.

As for quadrupeds, the semi-feral ones consist of quite a few dogs, who roam
in packs, and whose bark is fierce, but whose bite is mostly nonexistent, and
a few cats. Properly domesticated visitors from the city quickly revert to their
wild form, showing up once a day to be fed.

Quadruped wildlife proper includes several hedgehogs, who are not the least
bit reticent, and stomp around snacking from the dog dishes with an air of
entitlement. In early summer, one can sometimes see an entire hedgehog
family scampering up and down the compost pile.

Out in the forest, there is no shortage of mink, which are hunted for their
pelts during the winter, and hares, which are hunted for meat. Wild boar,

lynx, and black bear can also be found. The wild boar are considered the
most dangerous, as they roam in packs and sometimes charge people.

Visitors & Transportation

The highway that runs on the other side of the drainage ditch from Soykino is
one of regional importance. It links the two regional centers closest to St.
Petersburg: Novgorod, a medieval capital of Russia, and Pskov, an ancient
fortress built to defend Russia against the Lithuanians. Belying their fierce
reputation, the Lithuanians never once ventured to attack Pskov, and now
amicably show up to sell vegetables and dairy products at the big farmers'
market there, while the ancient fortress stands intact and attracts many
tourists.

In spite of its regional importance, the Pskov-Novgorod highway sees no more

than a few dozen vehicles in any given 24-hour period: a few bicycles and
two-stroke motorcycles, a tractor, a few trucks, and the odd speeding
Mercedes-Benz sedan carrying a member of regional government and/or
mafia. The slower-moving ones receive escort from the village dogs. The
traffic does not interfere with the pedestrians, who like to meander down the
center of the road. Exactly once a year, a road crew passes through filling
potholes and mowing the margins.

The main means of transportation to and from Soykino is on foot, or by

bicycle, to Sitnya, from which, two or three times a day, one can catch a bus
to Soltsy. The trip takes about an hour each away. There is just one antique
bus, which has been in continuous service since the late fifties, and a single
bus driver, who drives it and maintains it. When the engine stalls from the
relentless double-clutching needed to shift the worn-out gears, passengers
file out and wait by the side of the road, while the driver resuscitates the
engine, with his heel jamming down the clutch fork, and his hand on the
jumper cable. On a recent trip, the bus died, and the driver took a hatchet
and walked off into the forest, returning some time later with a wooden part
he crafted, which he installed, and the trip resumed.

The driver knows most passengers by name, and often takes care to make
sure that elderly riders know how they are going to get home. The fare is very

modest, making the bus popular with elderly people on fixed (and very tiny)
incomes. I saw at least one elderly veteran, his threadbare jacket festooned
with medals, board the bus and calmly pay the fare using some token
quantity of Soviet roubles, which had been out of circulation for about five
years. The driver accepted the worthless bills without comment and handed
out a ticket.

Although Soltsy has a train station, a much shorter route to St. Petersburg
involves taking the bus to a railroad crossing, and waiting there until a train
comes by. Unfortunately, the only train that stops at the crossing is one that
stops at all the crossings, and averages no more than 10 km/h. At each stop,
there unfolds the seemingly endless ballet of baskets and bags and children
and live animals being handed up to the cars or down to the grade, because
there are no platforms. This makes the Soykino-St. Petersburg journey an allday affair even when all the timetables match up.

Other than the train, the bus, and the hay-wagon, a neighbor's 1950's
Moskvich has on occasion been pressed into service as an ambulance,
rushing people to the hospital in Soltsy (non-emergency cases are usually
handled by a doctor/veterinarian down the road in Sitnya).

Shopping

The only store in Sitnya, which started a cooperative during Perestroika, sells
bread, cigarettes, vodka, and a few varieties of canned food. Of these, the
first three are the most heavily purchased, with bread the only purchased
item on which the local people really depend as a staple. Lines form in
anticipation of bread delivery, which is baked in Soltsy and delivered several
times a week. When bread is delivered, it is bought up rather quickly, and the
villagers walk back with their prize, as if from a hunt. They often pinch off
parts of the loaves and eat them on the way, discussing the quality of the
bread, which is generally quite excellent - much better than can be found at a
supermarket in the U.S.

Social Life in the Village

The main elements of communal life are visits, barter of food and favors, and
use of sauna. Visits are almost universally unplanned and unannounced. Most
often, people stop by on the way, sometimes coming into the yards, and
sometimes simply talking across the fence.

The village has many benches scattered throughout, which consist of a length
of split log hand-planed smooth, flat side up, which is joined to two round
logs, which are buried vertically into the ground. These are found both next to
the houses and outside the fences, and are used to sit and chat with
neighbors. There are benches where you can warm up on sunny but frosty
mornings, and benches to while away hot mid-afternoons in the shade. There
was even a bench where I could stretch out on a clear night and watch the
myriad of stars, the asteroid showers, and the Mir space station whizzing by
periodically. I have built several of them myself, in strategic locations.

Typical examples of barter involve exchanges of rabbit meat, eggs,

vegetables and other perishable items that would otherwise be distributed
unevenly and perhaps go to waste. Staples such as potatoes are generally
not bartered.

Sauna use presents one of the more complex examples of social interaction
in Soykino. During my stays there, it was my responsibility to fire the sauna
at least once a week, but since I enjoyed doing it and had little else to do, I
fired it twice a week. It was quite a bit of work, but it made me instantly
popular.

Due to lack of running water, villagers undertake serious bathing only once or
twice a week, generally on a Saturday, in a Russian sauna. This is typically a
small log cabin, located on the outskirts of the village. The better Russian
saunas have stoves that are stoked from a vestibule rather than the room
where the actual bathing takes place. The simplest Russian saunas - so-called
"black" saunas - consist of a single sooty room with an open hearth for
heating a cauldron of water and some benches, and lack a chimney. The
saunas in Soykino fall somewhere in the middle of this range: there are
typically two rooms and a chimney, but the stove is in the main room. Due to
some common design problems, the draft is weak, and the room invariably
fills with smoke while the water is being heated.

Firing a sauna involves more than an hour of concerted effort, and the result
serves at least half a dozen people. Since firing half a sauna is almost as
much effort, neighbors take turns at firing the sauna. Although most houses
have their own sauna, everyone eventually decides which sauna is the best,
with the result that only one or two saunas in the entire village ever get used.

In order to prepare the sauna, many buckets of water are carried from the
river, about half of which are emptied into the cauldron, and the rest into a
large cask next to it. Then a fire is lit and stoked until the water in the
cauldron is near boiling. Once the fire burns itself out and the smoke clears,
the villagers come to bathe, alone or in parties. Hot and cold water are mixed
in washbasins. An integral part of the bathing process involves getting
whipped with dried birch boughs. These are believed to have great healing
powers. Although it is possible to flagellate oneself in this manner, the
preferred method involves taking turns with someone else, and thus bathing
is generally a team effort.

Churches

There is no church either in Soykino or in Sitnya. There is a large church in

Soltsy, and a smaller one in Molochkovo, about half-way to Soltsy. For church
aficionados, Pskov and Novgorod are chock-full of churches, cathedrals, and
monasteries. Some Soykino residents venture to Molochkovo or to Soltsy to
attend church for Easter, which is the main religious holiday. Although devout
religious observance is rare, most people are baptized, and make a point of
baptizing their children. This is considered a good thing to do, independently
of any belief in God or desire to belong to the church. It is doubtful that any of
the burials at the small village cemetery in Sitnya involve priests.

Life goes ever on

It was difficult to discern the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
of the subsequent political and economic upheavals, on everyday life in
Soykino. Nevertheless, the odd imported item at the village store, a foreign
license plate on a car, and television and radio broadcasts that would be
unthinkable in the Soviet times gave away the fact that elsewhere times have
changed.

In Sitnya, activity on the dairy farm had experienced a definite slowdown, but
is otherwise no different. Perhaps the only common denominator was a slow
decay of everything man-made all-around, a gradual wearing-out. As the
economy wound down, things that continued for decades faltered or stopped.
But electricity supply to Soykino was never shut off, and the bus to Soltsy
continued to run. Bread deliveries never stopped.

Even if these things were to happen, some of the villagers in Soykino, and
thousands of villages like it throughout Russia, would probably have found
ways to survive. A few would have starved or frozen to death, or simply
sickened and died. But while the future cannot be predicted with any great
certainty, this unpredictability has to do with economics and finance, which
have a lot of importance for those in the cities, but are of only very marginal
significance to places like Soykino. No matter what happens in the cities, it is
likely that the trees will continue to grow, the river will still have some water
in it, and the villagers of Soykino will continue to tend their plots, curse the
flies, and, in their idle moments, the politicians.

Progress comes to Soykino

Ten-year update: thanks to a small infusion of funds from abroad, and some
excellent local craftsmanship, the house has been outfitted with a much
better stove, a screened veranda, and a well.

Perhaps the biggest change that has occurred is the appearance of cell phone
towers. Now everyone has a cell phone, making it possible to ask for a ride, a
load of manure, a load of timber, or a horse to plow the potato field, all
without the need to walk over and negotiate in person.

The general store in Sitnya has purchased a few refrigerators, and now sells
many more items, including dairy and meat. It recently held a village festival,
setting tables out in front. Locals brought home-baked pies and sang old-time
and patriotic favorites with the help of a Karaoke machine.

Given this pace of development, I can predict with some confidence that
during the next few years we will see the introduction of wireless high-speed
Internet access for the entire village.

Conclusion

Natasha and I are very happy that Soykino exists, and that our family owns a
house there. Simple and humble as it is, it has much to offer: community,
nature, shelter, and food.

As I mentioned, the collapse of the Soviet economy was barely detectable in

Soykino. Reasoning by analogy, if some of the more pessimistic (or, as more
and more of us think, realistic) predictions come true, and the developed
portions of the United States become completely dysfunctional, much more
so than they are presently, a village such as Soykino, if one existed, would
remain similarly unaffected. And if you owned a house there, you could live
there, and be unaffected as well.

Upon arriving, you would no doubt have to explain to the other residents
what happened: "You see, the economy collapsed, and now there is nothing
more for me to do out there." And they would say: "No! Really? That's a pretty
big thing, isn't it?" And you would say: "Huge! Could you please pass the
pickled mushrooms?"

2005 Dmitry Orlov. All Rights Reserved.

Thriving in the 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 alltime 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 migrs 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 migrs, 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.

Transportation

The main use of oil in the United States is for transportation. Once the crisis
gets underway, there will be much less transportation available, of goods as
well as of people, at any price, exacerbated by the lack of public
transportation infrastructure. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product turns out to be
almost strictly proportional the number of vehicle miles traveled, and this
implies that large reductions in the availability of transportation will translate
into similar-sized reductions in the size of the economy overall. A few years
on, roads and bridges will start falling into disrepair, making travel slow and
difficult even when enough fuel for the trip can be found. People will be
forced to stay put most of the time, perhaps making seasonal migrations, and
to make use of what they have available in the immediate vicinity.

To see what that will be like for you, all you have to do is to give up driving;
not cut down on driving, but sell your car, and refuse to ride in one on a
regular basis. If this forces you relocate, or to switch jobs or careers, you
should probably do so now. You will be forced to do so, when everyone else
tries to do it at the same time. I sold my car a few years ago, and my life got
better, not worse. Now I work within bicycling distance from home. I am
physically fit because I ride for at least an hour a day, and I am saving more
money than I was before because I do not have the expense of keeping a car.
If you have children that ride the school bus to school, assume that the
school bus will not run any more. You might be able to work out a home
schooling arrangement, or find another school closer to home that the kids
can walk or bicycle to.

Food and Clothing

Consumer society, as it currently exists in the United States, is propped up by

the still relatively cheap and accessible energy, and by the fact that the
Chinese, and other nations, are still willing to dispense goods to us on credit.
This credit is secured by the promise of future economic growth in the United
States, which is already being whittled down by the high energy prices. Thus,
the energy crisis will in due course translate into a consumer goods crisis.

Therefore, as part of your exercise, assume that every supermarket and big
box store is out of business, driven bankrupt by the high cost (and low
availability) of diesel, electricity, and natural gas. Shop only at the local
farmer's markets, small neighborhood groceries, and thrift stores. Buy as few
new things as possible: trash-pick what you can, and repair items instead of
replacing them. Learn to grow or gather at least some of your food. If you do
not wish to go strictly vegetarian, raising chickens and rabbits is not so hard.
To buy staples such as rice, travel into town and buy them in bulk from small
immigrant-owned groceries you can be sure that these will be around even
after the supermarkets are gone.

Shelter

If your lease or mortgage requires you to have a full-time job in order to

afford it, find a way to change your living situation to one that you can keep
even when there is no more work. If you can cash out your equity and buy a
place that is smaller, but that you can own free and clear, do so.

Pay particular attention to how difficult a place will be to heat; do not assume
that heating oil, natural gas, or large quantities of firewood will be available
or affordable. Also, pay very close attention to the neighbors. Are they people
you know and trust? Will they help you? Do not assume that there will be
police protection or emergency services. If you live in an area with a history
of ethnic strife, how sure are you that you will be able to find a common
language and make peace with everyone there, even people whose culture
and background are vastly different from yours?

Know where to escape to in case your primary residence becomes unlivable,

either permanently or for a time. Your arrangements might be as simple as a
friend's couch, or a campsite that you rent by the season, or some land where
you know you can camp, or an unused farm, ranging all the way to an
alternative residence somewhere else in the world that you can relocate to.

Medicine

If you have or foresee significant ongoing medical needs, staying in the

United States will pose a unique set of problems; you might even consider
seeking refuge in one of the many countries that provide free basic and
emergency medical care to their entire population. The United States is a
very special case in having made basic medicine into a profit-making industry
rather than a social service. The medical system here has become a parasite,
bloated and ineffectual. The doctors are saddled with unreasonable
regulations and financial liabilities.

When it comes to medicine, almost any country in the world will be better
than one that is full-up with unemployed medical specialists, insurance
consultants, and medical billing experts. In Belize, which is quite a poor
country, I received prompt and excellent free emergency medical care from a
Cuban medic. In the U.S., in similar circumstances, I had to wait 8 hours at an
emergency room, then was seen for five minutes by a sleep-deprived intern
who scribbled out a prescription for something that is available without a
prescription almost everywhere else in the world. Then there ensued a paper
battle between the hospital and the insurance company, lasting for many
months, over whether the hospital could charge for a doctor's visit on top of
the emergency room visit. Apparently, in U.S. emergency rooms, doctors are
optional.

There are specific steps you may be able to take to avoid having to depend
on the medical system. Do whatever you can to be in good health, by getting
enough sleep and exercise, and by avoiding unnecessary stress. Avoid
processed food and junk food. If you do not feel well, get plenty of rest,
instead of medicating yourself and attempting to keep to your schedule.
Unless your life is in danger, try to do without maintenance regimens of
prescription drugs, keeping in mind what will happen when you lose access to
them. Be sure to have a living will that allows your family to have control of
your medical care. Look for alternative medicines for symptomatic relief of
minor complaints.

Money

For several decades now, the U.S. Dollar has been able to keep its value in
the face of ever larger trade and fiscal imbalances largely because it is the
currency most of the world uses when buying oil. Other nations are forced to
export products to the United States because this is the only way for them to

gather the dollars they need to purchase oil. This has produced a continuous
windfall for the U.S. Treasury. This state of affairs is coming to an end: as
more and more oil-producing nations find alternative ways of doing business
with their customers, trading oil for Euros, or for food, the U.S. Dollar erodes
in value. As the Dollar drops in value, the price of an ever-increasing list of
essential imports goes up, driving up inflation. At some point, inflation will
start to feed on itself, and will give rise to hyperinflation.

If your immediate thought is, Hyperinflation in the U.S.? Impossible! then

you are not alone. A lot of people have trouble thinking about the possibility
of hyperinflation, economists among them. Hyperinflation, they say, requires
the government to emit vast amounts of money, which, being a good,
prudent government, it simply will not do. But this government is drowning in
red ink, and will do what desperate governments have always done: opt for
inflating its debt away rather than defaulting on it, to retain at least some
spending ability in the face of a collapsing tax base and dried-up foreign
credit. The people at the Fed do have to be kept fed, after all.

Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed, has voiced the viewpoint that since oil
expenditure is such a small percentage of the overall economy, increased oil
prices will have little effect on it, and, of course, he is right. I am, however,
still a bit concerned about lower overall quantities of oil, regardless of the
price, because these would result in less economic activity. What I would like
Mr. Greenspan to reassure me on is, How is a small national economy going
to be able to support a big national debt? By the way, I have an idea: print
some money.

Others who doubt the inevitability of hyperinflation point to the weakness of

trade unions, and say that workers in the U.S. are too badly organized to
bargain collectively and secure cost of living adjustments that would propel
the economy along an inflationary spiral. These people seem to feel that the
workers will somehow continue to be able to work even as their entire
paycheck disappears as they buy gasoline for their daily commute. They
remind me of the proverbial farmer who trained his horse to stop eating, and
almost succeeded, but unfortunately the horse died first. Those who have
work that needs to be done will have to make it physically possible for
someone to do it.

There are also plenty of people in this country the ones who are closer the
top of the economic food chain, or just feel like they are who will pay
themselves whatever they require, giving themselves, and those upon whose
loyalty they must depend, any cost of living adjustment they deem
necessary. They will continue doing so until they are bankrupt. Because
wealth is distributed so unevenly, these people make a disproportionately
large difference.

Lastly, there is a large group of people who feel that such matters are for
economists to decide. But decide for yourself: in March of 1999, The
Economist magazine ran an article entitled Drowning in Oil. In December of
the same year, it was compelled to publish a retraction. Economists are
starting to look a bit ridiculous, as their predictive abilities are repeatedly
shown to be quite feeble. Moreover, the whole discipline of economics is
starting to become irrelevant, because its main concern is with characterizing
a system the fossil fuel-based growth economy which is starting to
collapse.

Perhaps the difficulty in reconciling oneself to such a possibility stems from

history and culture, not economics. Unlike the Russians or the Germans,
whose historical memory includes one or more episodes of hyperinflation, it is
hard for Americans to imagine living in a time when their paper money is not
worth its weight in toilet paper. But such conditions have been known to
occur. Savings boil off into the ether. People who still receive paychecks or
retirement checks cash them immediately, and do their best to buy the
things they need to survive as quickly as they can, before the prices go up
again.

There are some steps you can take to prepare yourself for life without money.
For a time, you might not have an income at all, or an income so meager it
will not be enough for even one meal a day, so find out just how little money
you need to stay active and healthy. Learn to rely on family, friends, and
acquaintances. Find out what you can take from them, and what you have to
offer in return.

Perhaps most importantly, assume that your retirement income, whether

government or private, will in due course become quite close to zero, and
make some other arrangements for your old age. If you have children, start

buttering them up now you will need their help to survive in your dotage. If
you do not have children, then think about having some, or adopting one or
two. If you do not have or want children, then be sure to have some good
friends who are younger than you.

For each economic arrangement involving money, try to come up with an

alternative arrangement that does not involve money. For example, if you pay
a baby-sitter, try to find a baby-sitter who is willing to work in exchange for
lessons. If you pay rent, find a caretaker situation where you pay with your
labor. If you pay for food, start growing your own food.

As you are learning to live with less and less money, you will inevitably find
that the money system works to your disadvantage. If you have debt, it
becomes harder and harder to make the payments. If you own property, it
becomes harder and harder to afford the taxes. The money system takes a
bite out of everything you do. But this is true only if your economic
relationships are monetized if they have monetary value and involve the
exchange of money. As you try to reduce your dependence on the money
economy, you will need to invent ways to demonetize your life, and that of
the people around you.

Savings and personal property can be transformed into the stock in trade of
human relationships, which then give rise to reciprocal flows of gifts and
favors efficient, private, and customized to personal needs. This requires a
completely different mindset from that cultivated by the consumer society,
which strives to standardize and reduce everything, including human
relationships, to a client-server paradigm, in which money flows in one
direction, while products and services flow in the opposite direction.
Customer A gets the same thing as customer B, for the same price.

This is very inefficient from a personal perspective. Resources are

squandered on new products whereas reused ones can work just as well.
Everyone is forced to make do with mediocre, off-the-shelf products that are
designed for planned obsolescence and do not suit them as well as one
crafted to suit their specific needs. A commodity product can be
manufactured on the opposite side of the planet, whereas a custom one is
likely to be made locally, providing work for you and the people in your
community. But this is also very efficient, from the point of view of extracting

profits and concentrating wealth while depleting natural resources and

destroying the environment. However, this is not the sort of efficiency you
should be concerned with: it is not in your interest.

This, then, is the correct stance vis vis the money economy. You should
appear to have no money or significant possessions. But you should have
access to resources, such as food, clothing, medicine, places to stay and
work, and even money. What you do with your money is up to you. For
example, you can simply misplace it, the way squirrels do with nuts and
acorns. Or you can convert it into communal property of one sort or another.
You should avoid getting paid, but you should accept gifts, and, of course,
give gifts in return. You should never work for money, but always donate your
time and effort charitably. You should have a minimum of personal
possessions, but plenty to share with others. Developing such a stance is
hard, but, once you do, life actually gets better. Moreover, by adopting such a
stance, you become collapse-proof.

Law

The American justice system favors the educated, the corporations, and the
rich, and takes unfair advantage of the uneducated, the private citizen, and
the poor. It would seem that almost any legal entanglement can be resolved
through the judicious application of money, while almost any tussle with the
law can result in financial penalties and even imprisonment for those who are
forced to rely on public defenders.

Many people navely believe that a criminal is someone who commits a

criminal act. This is not true, at least not in the American system of justice.
Here, a criminal is someone who has been accused of committing a criminal
act, tried for it, and found guilty. Whether or not that person has in fact
committed the act is immaterial: witnesses may lie, evidence can be
fabricated, juries can be manipulated. A person who has committed a
criminal act but has not been tried for it, or has been tried and exonerated, is
not a criminal, and for anyone to call him a criminal is libelous.

It therefore follows that, within the American justice system, committing a

crime and getting away with it is substantially identical to not committing a

crime at all. Wealthy clients have lawyers who are constantly testing and,
whenever possible, expanding the bounds of legality. Corporations have
entire armies of lawyers, and can almost always win against individuals.
Furthermore, corporations use their political influence to promote the use of
binding arbitration, which favors them, as the way to resolve disputes.

This state of affairs makes it hopelessly nave for anyone to confuse legality
with morality, ethics, or justice. You should always behave in a legal manner,
but this will not necessarily save you from going to jail. In what manner you
choose to behave legally is between you and your conscience, God, or
lawyer, if you happen to have one, and may or may not have anything to do
with obeying laws. Legality is a property of the justice system, while justice is
an ancient virtue. This distinction is lost on very few people: most people
possess a sense of justice, and, separate from it, an understanding of what is
legal, and what they they can get away with.

The U.S. legal system, as it stands, is a luxury, not a necessity. It is good to

those who can afford it, and bad for those who cannot. As ever-increasing
numbers of people find that they cannot pay what it takes to secure a good
outcome for themselves, they will start to see it not as a system of justice,
but as a tool of oppression, and will learn to avoid it rather than to look to it
for help. As oppression becomes the norm, at some point the pretense to
serving justice will be dispensed with in favor of a much simpler, efficient,
streamlined system of social control, perhaps one based on martial law.

People have been known to get along quite happily without written law,
lawyers, courts, or jails. Societies always evolve an idea of what is forbidden,
and find ways to punish those who transgress. In the absence of an official
system of justice, people generally become much more careful around each
other, because running afoul of someone may lead to a duel or give rise to a
vendetta, and because, in the absence of jails, punishments tend become
draconian, coming to include dispossession, banishment, and even death,
which are all intended to deter and to neutralize rather than to punish. When
disputes do arise, lay mediators or councils may be appealed to, to help
resolve them.

The transition to a lower-energy system of jurisprudence will no doubt be

quite tumultuous, but there is something we can be sure of: many laws will

become unenforceable at its very outset. This development, given our

definition of what is criminal, will de facto decriminalize many types of
behavior, opening new, relatively safe avenues of legal behavior for
multitudes of people, creating new opportunities for the wise, and further
tempting the evil and the foolish.

As a safety precaution, you might want to distance yourself from the legal
system, and, to the extent that this is possible, find your own justice. As an
exercise, examine each of your relationships that is based on a contract,
lease, deed, license, promissory note, or other legal instrument, and look for
ways to replace it with relationships that are based on trust, mutual respect,
and common interest. Think of ways to make these relationships work within
the context of friendships and familial ties.

To protect yourself from getting savaged by the justice system as it

degenerates into oppression, try to weave a thick web of informal
interdependency all around you, where any conflict or disagreement can be
extinguished by drawing in more and more interested parties, all of them
eager to resolve it peaceably, and none of them willing to let it escalate
beyond their midst. Struggle for impartiality when attempting to mediate
disputes, and be guided by your wisdom and your sense of justice rather than
by laws, rules, or precedents, which offer poor guidance in changing times.

Yuppies

The first personal profile I will consider is of "Chris", a professional in his

twenties, who lives in a large urban area in the Pacific Northwest. Chris earns
some $60,000 to $90,000 a year, contributes to his employer's 401-k
program, and carries massive student debt. Thankfully, he is in good health.
Among his many marketable skills, none are directly applicable to an energyscarce environment. He is a fantastic bore at parties, compulsively
attempting to hold forth on the subject of resource depletion and economic
collapse, and, needless to say, his parents, friends, and fiance do not wish to
hear any more about it, but love him just the same. Being uncertain of the
future, he rents. Chris is a regular North American workaholic, working 50 to
60 hours a week. Chris had never given politics, oil, or the looming economic
collapse much thought, until somebody handed him a copy of Mike Ruppert's
book, but now he is a true believer.

As a young professional, Chris may be able to continue in his current

profession, or shift to another one, to avoid dead-end career paths, and to
position himself in one of the professions that is sure to see substantial
growth. Clearly, many professions do not hold much promise. For example,
the demand for lawyers, plastic surgeons, psychiatrists, and financial advisers
will drop, because ever fewer middle-class people will require or be able to
afford their services. Likewise, jobs in sales and marketing are likely to
dwindle. Other professions, such as repossession, auctioneers, and
undertakers, will still be very much in demand, for a time. Whether or not
Chris decides to switch professions, he should choose something lucrative,
work hard for a while, save up money, and get out. There is no sense in
diving into these murky waters except to make a bundle, or in exposing his
wealth if he manages to accumulate any. Endlessly running on a treadmill, as
so many people do today, will no longer be a viable option.

Serve Your Country

If Chris finds that he needs to switch professions, and wants to remain within
the official economy, then he may decide to transition into the area of
government contracting, availing himself of the ample opportunities
presented by official corruption, graft, and politically sanctioned organized
crime, which are sure to continue seeing substantial growth. There will be a
great deal of government inventory of all sorts from very expensive
weapons systems to very expensive toilet seats to be sold off, sometimes at
a substantial profit. If Chris has the flair for international deal-making, then
finding foreign buyers for liquidated U.S. government assets might be
something he could ease his way into.

Although government work may be steady work for a time, it also involves
following rules and regulations (or at least pretending to), toeing the line,
turning a blind eye, and playing the politics. Also, it rarely provides the
satisfaction of getting something useful accomplished. Unless Chris manages
to position himself close to the top of the food chain, where billions in public
money regularly go missing with hardly any questions asked, it is also not
going to be particularly lucrative. Profiting from government corruption is a
high-stakes game, with only the extremely well-connected admitted to the
table.

If Chris feels that playing Catch-22 is not his style and decides against
working for the government, another excellent growth area, right in the
middle of the newly emerging food chain, is security. As the populace
becomes increasingly distressed economically, all items of value will need to
be kept out of view, or carefully guarded, preferably both. The first
requirement in any middling-to-large transaction will be to provide security.
An organization that can provide security in an unstable environment is thus
well-positioned to branch out into a multitude of other services: warehousing,
logistics, transportation, finance, and legal services.

Business Redux

Last but not least, Chris can avail himself of a role in the burgeoning cash
economy, which will grow to encompass an ever greater list of products and
services. Currently, unreported, cash-based activities in the U.S. fall into a
number of distinct categories that encompass traditional crime. I do not
recommend any of these niches, since they are already fully occupied, and a
shrinking economy will make for a highly competitive environment. For the
sake of completeness: there will always be gambling, prostitution, graft, and
murder for hire. Another large category is illegal drugs and guns. Yet another
revolves around smuggling people across borders, as well as providing them
with cash-based employment once they arrive. Yet another is moneylaundering, by moving cash through front businesses and into bank accounts.
All of these are likely to see substantial growth, with the possible exception of
money laundering: as the official economy becomes deemphasized, cash
stockpiles are more likely to be traded for gold and other valuable
commodities than to be entrusted to shaky financial institutions.

But there will be plenty of new niches opening up for Chris to choose among.
Currently, the cash economy mostly involves services and products that
cannot be obtained legally. In the future, it will expand to encompass
necessities that are no longer available or affordable through official
channels. The list will eventually grow to include transportation, food,
security, shelter, and medicine. Thus, in trying to think about business trends
of the future, Chris should first expand his definition of business. Conversely,
in thinking about the future legal climate, he should reason from the point of
view of what will be enforceable, and, if so, to whose financial benefit,
because unenforceable or unprofitable legal strictures will be eagerly

overlooked, as the entire legal framework falls into disuse.

House Calls

Black market medicine promises to be particularly interesting, although

perhaps not particularly lucrative. The cash economy will inevitably come to
include pharmaceuticals, which in the U.S. are overpriced and often not
available over the counter, but which can be manufactured in underground
laboratories, or purchased elsewhere in the world and imported in bulk. In
addition, every year there are more and more people for whom Western
medicine does not work, or works badly, and who are learning to avail
themselves of the pharmacopeia of traditional medicine. Although there are
some exotic ingredients used in traditional medicine, many medicinal herbs
can be grown in most places, do not require complex cultivation, and are, in
fact, weeds. Once Western medicine and the pharmaceutical industry on
which it depends enter a period of decline, it is likely that acceptance of
traditional medicine will increase.

If black market pharmaceuticals may be somewhat lucrative, then what about

black market medical practice? At some point it will come to include office
visits, and even surgery, at first administered as free care, but if one wants
a follow-up visit, then it would involve a gift. Currently, doctors in the U.S.
are sandwiched between layers of lawyers, insurance companies,
pharmaceutical companies, and hospital administrators, all of whom require a
profit in order to exist. Once there is no profit to be made by anyone, only the
doctors will remain, because they (and nurses) are the only ones who are
indispensable to the practice of medicine. They will once again start making
house calls, and work for whatever they can get: a bit of cash, or even for
food, or simply because they care about their patients and want to be helpful
and respected. They would be well advised to become competent herbalists
before their pharmaceutical supply dries up.

Quitting While Ahead

There will be plenty of professional opportunities for Chris to continue to

make a good living, although he may have to switch professions in order to
take advantage of them. In spite of this, Chris should not bet his life on his

ability to find a place in the new economy, and should also make sure that he
can sustain himself directly. It will be an uncertain environment, fraught with
dangers and complications, and Chris should be prepared to make a hasty
exit if circumstances turn against him.

Chris is in a good position to marshal his resources and make preparations for
a soft landing for himself, and possibly for his family and friends as well. It is
likely that he will meet new people and make new friends as he makes his
preparations, and it may be that these new friendships will be more
conducive to achieving this goal than his current ones.

Given his high income, Chris can quickly save up a considerable sum of
money by living frugally. To achieve a high savings rate, he can downgrade
his car to an old beater or give up driving altogether, move into a low-rent,
ethnically and racially mixed neighborhood, avoid buying new things, trashpicking and buying used stuff instead, shed unnecessary possessions, avoid
buying prepared or packaged food and only buy food fresh or in bulk, and
avoid going out (entertaining friends at home, or visiting them, works just as
well). With these measures in place, there is no reason why his personal
saving rate should be anywhere below 75% of his net earnings.

By using some of his savings, and by cashing out his retirement accounts,
Chris can put together a sizable sum with which to purchase some arable
land with access to water, which he can own free and clear, and on which he
can build a homestead. He should retain a reserve, preferably in gold, to be
able to pay property taxes far into the future. He is young and in good health,
and can learn the many new skills he will need to survive. He should learn
and practice these skills before he needs to rely on them for survival: once he
has built his homestead, he should try a dry run, spending an entire
summer on his land, improving it, and growing food. This experience will
teach him what he will need to stockpile, and what other preparations he will
need to make.

The longer Chris waits to start making these preparations, the less effective
they will be, because the purchasing power of his savings is likely to decrease
over time due to inflation. If he waits until after the onset of financial
meltdown to make his move, he may forfeit his savings altogether, and be
unable to make any preparations. He would then find himself in the same

sinking boat as everyone else, stuck where he is, or wherever the

government evacuates him, dependent on dwindling government assistance
and meager charity for survival.

Obstacles

Chris's biggest liability is his student debt. Student loans tend to be

guaranteed by the federal government, which is not subject to the same legal
limitations as other creditors. The government can ignore bankruptcy laws
and homestead exemptions, and can seize any property. While fixed-rate
loans are likely to be rendered irrelevant by inflation, variable-rate loans
should be taken seriously. If it is not possible to pay them off, then his other
option is to make plans to render himself indigent. This is not trivial, but quite
possible to arrange. Since a post-collapse economy generally relies on
unreported cash and barter transactions rather than reported, taxed ones,
Chris should be able to live out his days in peace, flying under the radar.

Chris's biggest hindrance in making effective preparations is lack of time. It is

impossible to carry out the necessary research, arrangements, and exercises
while working 50-60 hours a week. There are many people in his situation,
forced to concentrate on a career path that requires an inordinate level of
effort, because it is predicated on perpetual career advancement rather than
on making one's money quickly and getting out. But with just a change of
mindset, Chris can become far more creative than the average workaholic in
maximizing his short-term earnings while minimizing his effort. The effort
should be allocated towards getting jobs that pay the most but require the
least effort, and towards finding creative ways to avoid time-consuming
tasks. With this new approach, Chris should be able to work no more than 35
hours a week, at a comparable level of compensation.

Just as it is usually better to quit than to be fired, it is better to drop out

voluntarily, in stages, than to wait for one's career to end due to lack of
prospects for continued employment. In a business climate where most
companies' crystal balls are far from clear, it is much easer to secure
temporary employment than a permanent position. Contract work may not
appeal to somebody who is looking forward to a long and prosperous career,
but it may be very well-suited to somebody who realizes that the entire
economy is circling the drain.

I believe that lack of understanding from Chris's parents, friends, or

significant other is not a serious problem. It is often hard to decide just how
much effort to invest in trying to enlighten any given person, but a good rule
of thumb is to only offer answers to those who ask questions. The answers
should consist almost exclusively of references to the most authoritative
sources of information available, rather than heated expressions of personal
opinion. These may give rise to more detailed questions, and perhaps even
some guarded admissions of doubt. Whether or not the people around him
understand what is happening, they are sure to be most grateful if, when the
time comes, Chris knows what to do, while everyone around is flailing about
helplessly. On the other hand, if Chris expends effort on working his loved
ones into a paroxysm of despair while remaining unprepared, he will not
remain popular with them for very long.

The Middle Age

Next we consider the case of Mike and Mary, who are aging baby
boomers. Their combined income is around $100,000 a year. Mary has
worked as a teacher for most of her life, and expects to start receiving her
pension soon. Mike has worked a succession of office jobs for most of his life,
and is also nearing retirement. They have a mortgage on a suburban home,
and own two cars. They had planned on paying it all off over the next decade
or so, and living out their golden years just as they are. They have three
children: two are out of college and on their own, one is in college, nearing
graduation. Mike or Mary are in fairly good health, but both have minor
medical conditions that require monitoring and small amounts of medication.
Mary has some gardening skills. Mike is a bit of a handyman, and can fix
things around the house.

They have known that this crisis was coming since the 1970s, but did not
think it would come this fast, nor did they think that it would be so severe.
They found out about it by reading James Kunstler's article in Rolling Stone,
then doing some research on the Internet. None of their children has shown
more than a passing interest in these issues.

Old Age in Turbulent Times

The older we get, the more ossified we tend to become in our ways of
thought, our habits, and our expectations. We may be unhappy with many
things about our world, but, as we age, our ability to embrace change
decreases, until we find ourselves resigned to live out our days with the devil
we know. Some old people are quite functional when they are within their
element, but put them in an unfamiliar environment, and they become
disoriented, unsure of themselves, slow to adapt, and deeply distressed.

When confronted with cataclysmic, irrevocable change, some old people rebel
in a peculiar fashion. For many years after the Soviet collapse, one could see
a certain type of old person in the streets: miserable, dispossessed, and
protesting. Often they carried with them portraits of Lenin and Stalin, held
high for all to see: these were the devils they knew. Perhaps in future years
we will see baby boomers on the streets of U.S. cities, begging for food while
displaying their treasured portrait of Ronald Reagan as if it were holy relic, or
a lucky charm, hoping against all hope for a return to a former national
greatness, stoically withstanding ridicule from everyone around them.

Even in less extreme cases, in disrupted, crisis-ridden times, older people run
a huge risk of becoming alienated from younger people, on whom they
depend for survival. Being fixed in their ideas of right and wrong, they tend
to prejudge young people, who must survive in a world where the old rules
and notions no longer apply. In a futile attempt to hold on to what they see as
moral high ground, they make themselves into objects of pity at best, and
indifference at worst.

The Human Life-cycle

Cheap energy and the short-term bloom of humanity it has fueled have given
rise to some social arrangements that are not destined to survive the onset of
permanent energy scarcity. One of these is the notion that a few young
people will anonymously contribute a large part of their income for the
welfare of many old people they have never met or even heard of.

In the days in which most of human history has transpired, parents took care

of their children as their topmost priority in life. As with many other species, it
was their biological imperative to do so; beyond that, most of them were
conscious of the fact that if their children did not survive, neither would they:
their genes, their memories, their culture, or anything about them would be
erased by time. The care of children could be entrusted to family members,
but never to complete strangers. The education of children took place largely
in the home, through storytelling, shared labor, and through rites of passage.
The elderly, and especially the grandparents, took an active part in rearing
and educating children. It was they who watched and attended to young
children throughout the day, and who inculcated in them much of the
ancestral wisdom the stories, the myths, and the practical knowledge
through ceaseless, tiresome repetition.

At the trailing edge of the fossil fuel age, where we find ourselves, prosperous
society looks quite different. Both parents work dismal jobs, mostly away
from home, in order to keep themselves out of bankruptcy. Those who
prosper most attend to their careers with far greater attention than to their
children, abandoning them to the care of strangers for the better part of most
days. The grandparents live elsewhere, enjoying their golden years, the fruits
of their labors encapsulated in some properties, some investments, and a
merciful central government that has promised to at least keep them alive
even if all else fails. They are living on artificial life support that is about to be
shut off.

Once the joy-ride ends, human society will revert to norm, but many will
suffer, and many lives will be cut short. The elderly will get a dose of their
own toxic medicine. Adult children will take care of their helpless parents only
inasmuch as their parents had taken care of them when they were young and
helpless. Were they placed in day-care, sent off to a boarding school, or
encouraged to join the military? Well then, institutional care for the elderly
must be the perfect solution! (And no use complaining; when their children
were three years old and complained, did they listen to them?) Were they
made to work for their allowance, to learn the spirit of free enterprise at a
young age? Well then, how do their parents expect to earn their keep when
they are eighty? Shape up or ship out! These words will not necessarily be
said out loud; but they will be felt, and lived.

What will make matters worse is that most of the children are humans-lite
deprived of the stories, the myths, and the trials that human children have
been put through for the past few million years, minus a bizarre century or

two and so are gravely ill-equipped for life outside the artificial life support
system. They are an industrial product: almost from birth, they are placed in
an entirely artificial social context, where they are evaluated, classified, and
shoved through a series of institutions, to be readied for a lifetime of service
in a system whose feedstock is a commodity human product: Grade A
human, marketable skills up-to-date, properly credentialed. Even if their
parents and grandparents were intact and able to impart wisdom, their
children had not been programmed to process that sort of information.

Forever Young?

When we are young, it is easy to embrace change, to adapt, to leave our past
behind; not necessarily so as we get older. When it comes to flexibility and
adaptability, there is a broad spectrum of older people. There are ones that
seem relatively young, but are hardened and calloused on the inside. They
simply want to have what's theirs, and to be left alone. There are others that
seem old and crusty, but have really been waiting all their lives for that time
when they have to rise to the occasion, shake off the shackles that society
has placed them in, and become amazingly alive. Yet others will simply do
whatever is necessary, because that is what they have always done, for as
long as they can remember; and then one day they will stop, and become like
children. Yet others fall into despair, or act normal but convert their
psychological shock at the changed circumstances into mysterious illnesses.

Some older people I know are like giant warehouses of knowledge richer
than the biggest library. Others hold their secrets well, looking for one or two
young persons they can teach, who will deliver them one generation further.
Still others simply have a rhythm to their lives that can go on forever if you
learn it, you will be able to pass it on. But plenty of others are simply dead
weight: organic matter kept alive artificially. An oil-based life support system
that has allowed them to be fruitful and multiply is now allowing them to
persist, for a time. One more day is one more day, like fungus growing on a
tree stump.

Who knows what any of this means for Mike and Mary, our two aging baby
boomers with an income in the $100,000 per year range and a dream of
living out their retirement in their suburban home? The fact that they are
concerned about something they have read on a Web site is not significant:

there are lots of alarming, and alarmist, Web sites. The fact that they have
known that oil was going to run out some day since the 1970s is also not that
significant: quite a few people have known that for just as long, and have not
done a thing about it. The fact that their children are not the least bit
interested in these matters is to be expected. Even if their motto is do as we
say, not as we do, why should anyone expect their children to follow it?
Least important is the fact that at their ripe age they are showing concern
over something that has been unfolding over most of their lifetimes, and will
continue unfolding, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly.

Out of Retirement

Mike and Mary should brace themselves for some bad news. The first piece of
bad news is that their retirement is going to be canceled. Their investments
and savings will be devalued, and the value of their equity in their suburban
house will be negligible. They will probably continue to receive checks from
the government, but it will not be enough to live on. The second piece of bad
news is that there will not be any actual official paid work available to them
to make up the shortfall. Nor is it likely that there will be any official
recognition of their plight, or public attempts to remedy the situation, or
effective political organizations for people in their predicament. This may
come as a shock to a generation used to being a political force to be
reckoned with.

A Byzantine system of accounting has already been put in place for forging
inflation and unemployment statistics. Cost of living adjustments are always
kept at about half the level of actual inflation. The term unemployed has
been redefined to mean eligible to receive temporary unemployment
benefits. As inflation starts to pick up, retirees on fixed incomes will
gradually be driven destitute.

A Sad Alternative

If Mike's and Mary's plan is to live out their golden years in a suburban house,
driving to and fro, then they clearly do not have a plan, and will gradually
lose control of their lives. Almost immediately, their house will become too
expensive to heat. Next, it will become impossible for them to continue

driving, due to gasoline rationing and shortages. Next, electricity will be cut
off. For a time, they may continue to be supplied with food by some
community-based service.

At some point, if they are lucky, they will be evacuated to some hastily
organized compound most likely a dormitory or a barrack with cots and a
television set in the corner, which is mostly off due to lack of electricity, and
plenty of blank walls to stare at. There will be a dining hall, where they will
receive their daily portions of tea and gruel.

Perhaps one of their children will come to their rescue. But it is more than
likely that their own circumstances will be quite difficult, and that they will
have little ability to provide for their parents, especially if none of them have
made any preparations for doing so. Or perhaps they will be quite capable of
providing for their parents but will not want to.

A Happier Alternative

So Mike and Mary need a plan. But who are they, and would it not be
presumptuous of me to attempt to contrive a plan for them, not knowing who
they are? Nevertheless, let me venture a guess or two. Is there something
unique and amazing, lurking behind that vinyl-clad suburban faade and
those tinted SUV windows? Even if there is not, here are some fairly basic
ideas that spring to mind.

Maybe Mary's spirit has not been broken over decades spent teaching in the
soulless U.S. public school system. Maybe she is ready to open her own
school, in her own living room, for neighborhood kids of all ages, one that
teaches something more valuable than how to pass government-mandated
standardized tests. Maybe she could recruit some younger trainee teachers,
who need not have the worthless degree in Education? Retired American
schoolteachers are known for doing that sort of thing in other third world
countries, so why not in this one?

And what about Mike and his decades of accumulated business and
managerial acumen in striking deals, negotiating and enforcing contracts,

and inspecting financial statements? He could, for instance, put his skills to
good use in pushing through mixed use zoning, so that people in his
community could open shops in their basements and garages. When the
public water supply becomes contaminated, disrupted, or too expensive,
perhaps Mike could help negotiate utility easements for the gathering of
rainwater. He could organize rent strikes against absentee landlords, forcing
them to sell to people within the community. He could help convert the school
bus fleet to full-time use, serving the entire community throughout they day,
rather than just children, twice a day.

The best that Mike and Mary can hope to achieve is to cluster their children
around them, all living in close proximity, although preferably not in the same
house. Too close is almost as bad as too far away; next door, or on the same
street, is optimal. The bigger the extended household Mike and Mary are able
to form, the better their chances of living comfortably. It makes little
difference whether their children are aware of these preparations ahead of
time. If Mike and Mary are able to offer support and practical advice to their
children when the economy turns sour and their children's lives start to fall
apart, they will probably accept the favor, and will later want to return it.

Suburbia Forever

Am I being overly optimistic about the promise of a reformed American

suburbia? Some people are ready to declare suburbia to be at an end. But
then I know that Americans are very much driven to hyperbole, always willing
to put an end to something certifiably unstoppable (war, AIDS, cancer,
poverty, global warming), usually by making a small charitable donation, by
wearing a colorful plastic bracelet, or by going for a walk, a run, or a bicycle
ride. Below the charming, childlike confidence and optimism of such ventures
lurks a culturally ingrained inability to grasp something basic: not all
problems are solvable.

And thus I discern an element of wishful thinking in the idea that suburbia is
going to conveniently disappear, and that everyone who lives there will
simply go and live someplace else. A cabin in the woods, perhaps? Or a
picturesque desert island? How about a space colony? Nor do I find it
plausible that half the U.S. population will lay down and die shortly after they
discover that some of their cars no longer run or that their kitchen appliances

no longer work. And so I find it safe to think that most of the existing
infestations of Suburbia americans are ineradicable, but that the evolutionary
pressure of a chronic energy shortage will force them to evolve into
something much less energy-intensive. Whether, in each case, that
something will turn out to be absolutely horrible, or quite pleasant, will
depend on many things.

For instance, a suburb with many big lawns and golf courses could pass a
series of enlightened ordinances such as No grass shall be cut until it has
gone to seed, and shall only be used for forage or fodder. Then they could all
keep ponies, ride them to the market, and live happily ever after. No, it is not
quite that easy, but I am convinced that the biggest obstacle is bad habits
like keeping the grass clipped really short and putting the clippings into
garbage bags to be hauled away in garbage trucks. It should not take any
brilliant new inventions or high-priced initiatives to make suburbia survivable.
All that is needed is for people to stop doing a lot of nonsensical things and
start doing a few commonsense ones. Even if they resist, circumstances will
inevitably nudge them in the right direction.

Should Mike and Mary decide to move or to stay? Do they know, and like,
their neighbors? Do they think that their current community will hold
together? Do they have faith in their ability to adapt? Is their suburb a place
where their children will want to live? If answers to any of these questions is
no, then they have very little to lose by moving.

If they decide to move, they could move to a small town and strive towards
self-sufficiency by doing some gardening, maybe even raise some livestock.
Their children may decide to join them there, once they run out of other
options, which they will if they do not prepare. Or they could move to a city
(one of the few compact, livable ones) and hope that they will be taken care
of there.

Finally, they could decide to leave the country altogether, but for this they
would need to have quite an adventurous spirit. There are plenty of stable, if
not prosperous, places on this planet, that are far less dependent on the
international energy and financial markets than the U.S., and where the
cataclysms that will shake the U.S. will barely register.

Youth

The final profile we will consider is of Steve, who is 18 years old. He found
out about Peak Oil after one of his on-line video game buddies sent him some
links to Web sites, which he found deeply shocking. Now he is totally freaked
out. Is he about to get drafted and sent off to fight for oil in the Middle East?
How is he going to survive in a collapsing society? He works a part-time job
and lives with his parents, who take his fears to be the folly of youth, and
assume that he will be going to college, earning a respectable degree, and
entering the workforce (while going into debt at the same time).

Let us suppose that Steve's parents are correct: there will be no economic
collapse any time soon. Steve will go off to college, earn a degree in
accounting, get married, take out a mortgage on a suburban home, and have
children. Now, if Steve's parents are reasonably well-informed, can they
believe that there is more than another forty years' worth of nonrenewable
resources left at their current level of production, never mind the need for
sustained economic growth? As they watch the endless parade of recordsetting freak weather events, with fifty-year records being broken not every
fifty years, but every one or two, can they believe that none of these,
together or separately, will upset Steve's well-laid plans? Even if they feel
certain that they will live out their own lives in peace, why should they want
Steve to work hard to perpetuate a state of affairs that they know will not last
for the duration of his lifetime? Is it not the tiniest bit unethical of them to try
to push their son in such a risky direction? And is it not the tiniest bit
incumbent upon them to try to propose something better?

A Web of Lies

One of Steve's most severe and painful realizations, if he is lucky enough to

have it, will be that he has been lied to all his life, more or less continuously,
by his parents, his minders at school, and even, to some extent, his own
peers. If he does not have this realization, then he will be doomed to see all
that happens to him as the result his personal failings: his weakness, lack of
talent, inability to fit in, or bad luck. Even if he does have this realization, he
will find it difficult to live his life accordingly, because those who lack this
realization, and deem themselves successful, will try to denigrate him as a
misfit or a loser.

One part of the lie is that America is the best and getting better land of
possibility and so forth and that he can achieve his dream, whatever it is, by
being diligent, hard-working, and a team player. Of course, his dream must
be an American dream just like everyone else's, and involve a house in the
suburbs, a couple of cars in the driveway, a couple of kids, maybe a cat and a
dog, and lots of money in retirement accounts.

The other part of the lie is that Steve can live such a life and be free. He
would be free - to make false choices. For breakfast Steve will have... stuff
from a cardboard box with commercial art on it, excellent choice, Sir, well
done! And in order to get around, he will have... a disposable vinylupholstered sheet metal box on four rubber wheels that burns gasoline, very
wise, Sir, very wise! By choosing a prepackaged life, Steve himself would
become a prepackaged product, a social appliance designed for planned
obsolescence, whose useful life will be determined by the availability of the
fossil fuels on which it operates.

That these are lies is plain for all to see: with each next generation, people
are being forced to work harder and to go deeper into debt to maintain this
suburban, middle-class lifestyle. About a third of them experience severe
psychological problems. Also about a third of them do not believe that they
will be able to afford to retire. The majority of them believe that they are not
doing as well as their parents did.

And thus we have a three-tier generationally stratified middle-class society. At

the top, we have a whole lot of happy, prosperous, self-assured old people,
living it large, not willing for a moment to admit their complicity in
impoverishing their children and grandchildren. In the middle we have a
smaller number of their adult children, running themselves ragged, forced to
delude themselves that everything is under control, just to keep up their
spirits. And then there are even fewer young people like Steve, just coming of
age, and, one would think, justifiably angry with the hand they have been
dealt. Few of them are up to the Herculean task that has been set in front of
them.

Escape Plans

This society still has plenty to offer to a young person, provided that the
young person is clever enough to know how to take advantage of it. All of this
advice falls into the category of If everyone did this, society would fall
apart. Clearly, this advice is for people like Steve, and does not apply to
societies, empires, or civilizations. It has been thoroughly tested right here in
the U.S., and has a track record of successfully dodging society's best efforts
at enslavement.

First of all, it is probably a bad idea to go straight to college. It is best to avoid

getting sucked into that pipeline, which starts around the middle of senior
year and ends with post-graduate indentured servitude of one sort or
another. Apply to a couple of schools, strictly pro forma, to avoid suspicion.
Having a high school diploma is important; the grades and test scores are
somewhat important. Demonstrated excellence at one or two things is more
valuable than a good average. Most important is learning the differences
between your talents, you interests, and your expectations.

At this point in the game, gaining basic money-making skills is far more
important, especially in the trades, such as landscaping, interior restoration,
carpentry, house painting, floor sanding, mechanical repair work, and so on,
because these are all jobs that can be done for cash. Avoid dangerous trades,
such as roofing, abatement, and, in general, anything that involves toxic
chemicals or dangerous machinery. Having some business skills is important
too knowing how to deal with bosses and customers and how to supervise
people. The best approach is to work a series of short jobs shorter than a
year, learning a trade and moving on immediately, and always be on the
lookout for special, unofficial projects. Think of regular employment as good
cover, but not as the main source of income and therefore best kept to parttime. Always job-hunting, switching and learning new jobs, will help keep your
mind sharp. But be sure to read as well, and challenge yourself by reading
difficult books this will help you when you decide to go back to school.

Once you graduate, immediately become financially independent from your

parents. Move out, and work on developing a good roommate situation. Go
for the cheapest rent you can find by talking directly to landlords and offering
to take care of security and maintenance. Pick your roommates carefully and
try to get a cohesive group together, so that you can rely on each other. Do
not accept money or other sorts of financial help from your parents. Do

everything you have to so that if and when you decide to go to school, and
file financial aid forms, you are not their dependent, and they are not
expected to pay your college tuition or living expenses. If your parents
require an explanation, it is that you care about them: you do not believe that
their retirement will be enough to live on, and the money that would be
swallowed up by tuition will help. If you have a system worked out for living
frugally and making a bit of cash, on paper you can look penniless, which is
perfect, because schools will confiscate all the money that you disclose to
them. Be sure to always disclose just enough to avoid suspicion, and brush
up on the laws to make sure it's all legal.

Higher What?

When thinking about attending a college or a university, it is important to

understand what these institutions actually are. They are often called
institutions of higher learning, but the learning is quite incidental to their
two most important missions: research (government or industrial) and
something known as credentialing: the granting of degrees. In many ways,
it is a sort of extended hazing ritual, where the aspirant is required to jump
through a series of blazing hoops before being granted access to a
professional realm. An important sideline is sports, and some schools are
virtual beefcake outlets, with nary a forehead in the crowd disfigured by a
sentient impulse.

Excellent teaching does happen, but more or less by accident. Professors are
recruited and retained based on their publications and awards (to lend
prestige to the school) and their ability to attract grant money. Much of the
teaching is done not by the professors themselves, but by graduate student
teaching assistants, adjuncts, and various other academic minions.

The human mind learns best through repetition and through applying
knowledge, but college curricula are structured so as to avoid repetition, with
each course designed as a stand-alone unit. Most of the learning takes the
form of cramming for tests, and what is tested is not knowledge but shortterm memory. By the time students graduate, they have forgotten most of
what they have been taught, but with perfectly honed cramming skills, ready
to brute-force their way through any further superficial tests of their
knowledge or competence, to join the swelling ranks of America's

credentialed amateurs.

There is supposed to be a huge difference between the best colleges and

universities and the rest. The ones considered best are mostly private,
although few state schools find themselves included among them. What is
taught is generally the same throughout, and the quality of the teaching is
quite random. The best schools are thought to offer better chances for finding
good jobs after graduation, but this is debatable.

For some students, the more prestigious schools offer a certain charmed
quality: no matter how much they drink and how badly they do, they cannot
flunk out. An echelon of tutors is summoned to guide their every mediocre
step, all the way through graduation. These are the children of the elite,
whose attendance at these institutions is more a matter of tradition than
anything else. It makes no difference whether they learn anything or not: for
their breed, the pedigree counts for a lot more than the obedience training. I
have run across a few of these zombies with Ivy League diplomas, childish
handwritings, speech peppered with nonsense syllables, and an attitude that
never stops begging for a slap.

The Optimal School

This being the lay of the land, what is a young person like Steve to do? The
prestige offered by the best schools would be wasted on a desolate job
market, while the inevitable pile of student loans would be a millstone around
his neck. And yet there is no better place to learn than a university.

I recommend that Steve choose a school not based on reputation or prestige,

but word of mouth and financial advantages. The best school is the one that
offers the best financial aid package, where he knows some people in the
fields of study in which he is interested, which offers cheap off-campus living,
and where he can find jobs to make money on the side. Steve should keep his
earnings off the books whenever possible, or the school will confiscate them.
The school will force him to take out some loans, so he should save enough
money at the same time to cover them. He should try to find employment
right at the school, because such jobs often provide a tuition waiver.

State schools have an advantage: not only are they cheaper, but a lot of the
students come from the vicinity rather than from far away. When Steve
makes some friends among them, they will help him gain entry into the local
community. Ideally, this is also an area where he will want to continue living
once he is done with school, among his new friends. Deciding to settle
wherever he finds a job is not a good plan; it is much better for him to know
how to find work wherever he decides to settle.

Fields of Mud

When choosing a field of study, it is important to keep in mind that there are
disciplines that will abide and remain perennially valuable, while others are
fluff. The sciences Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Zoology, Botany, Geology
will serve you well. Mathematics, Philosophy, Astronomy, and a foreign
language or two will make you a better person. Literature and History are
invaluable, but rarely taught well; if you cannot find a truly inspired teacher,
teach yourself by reading and writing, which are the only two activities
these two disciplines require.

Then there are the pseudo-sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Political Science,

and Economics. They disguise themselves as sciences by employing
experimental techniques and statistical analysis, and, in the case of
Economics, a funky sort of math, but they are fluff, and are clearly marked
with an expiration date. The distinction is quite crisp: for any subject, pick up
a textbook older than fifty years. If it is a real discipline, there will be some
recent discoveries and technological developments missing from it (a few
elementary particles, DNA) but the rest will still look valid. If it is a fake
subject, a fair percentage of it will look a bit iffy, with a smattering of stark
raving nonsense.

Lastly, there are the conduits to the professions: Law, Medicine, and
Engineering. They have little to do with getting an education, and everything
to do with learning a trade, and, of course credentialing. In each case, the
hazing is extreme.

The legal profession is already a bit overstocked, and, law being a luxury
product, it seems unlikely that these graduates will be able to pay down their
copious student loans in the new economy. Already many of them lack the
option of becoming public defenders or taking on pro bono cases because of
their huge financial burdens.

I have already said enough about medicine; but if Steve wants to be a doctor,
there are some medical schools around the world that graduate real doctors,
rather than technocrats who practice defensive medicine and shuffle paper
half their day. After the extended sleep deprivation experiment they are put
through as interns, they get to live in stately homes, fly to pharmaceutical
company junkets, and play a lot of golf. That may change.

I am partial to engineering, having put myself through its rigors. It sometimes

creates what I feel is a good sort of person a bit stunted in some ways,
strangely passionate about inanimate objects, but capable at many things
and generally trustworthy. If Steve has exhibited the telltale tendencies
such as completely dismantling and reassembling various gadgets, and
making them work perfectly again afterward and if he looks forward to four
years of scribbling out formulas under intense pressure, then engineering
may be for him. Whether he will be able to earn a living by engineering is
unknowable, but then engineers can usually find plenty of other things to do.

The Piece of Paper

It is often hard to tell ahead of time, but for a lot of people graduating may be
quite pointless, while dropping out at an opportune moment may be quite
advantageous. I know plenty of people who never graduated; they have been
my bosses, my colleagues, and my employees. They often have an original
perspective, along with an unusual depth of knowledge. Some of the besteducated people I have ever met have been dropouts: the self-educated poet
Joseph Brodsky, for instance, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature, dropped
out of grade school aged fifteen.

It is best not announce your intention to never graduate, but behave

accordingly. While others are busy checking off boxes on their little curriculum
planning sheets and suffering through pointless required courses with

mediocre instructors, you can find out what you want to learn and who you
want to learn it from, and take your time to learn it well. Do not rush: if you
feel that you have not absorbed all the material to your satisfaction, you can
always request an incomplete and repeat the entire course free of charge. If a
good project comes along, take it, take a leave of absence from school, then
go back and study some more. Keep telling everyone that you intend to go
back and get your degree. I know people in their late 40s who are still in good
standing, always threatening to come back and finish their degree: people
find them quite charming.

Do not worry too much about grades; it will make very little difference what
grades you received, but it will matter a lot whether you have learned what
you had set out to learn. If you are on a scholarship, then by all means
maintain the average that is required of you in order to continue receiving it.
Think of the grade you get as the grade you give to the professor: if the
professor is excellent, then you should try to repay her with some excellence
of your own.

Earth, Revisited

The last, and possibly the most formative part of your education is for you to
go and see the world beyond the borders of the U.S. Learn a language, then
go and backpack through countries where you can speak it. Spanish
properly the second national language is about the easiest language you
can learn, and it unlocks a huge world, which starts right within the borders of
the U.S., and which offers a great richness of spirit, along with a level-headed
perspective on all this gringo madness that you will have to learn to escape
from.

You are at an age when parts of who you are your outlook on life, your
personality, your habits and your tastes are still forming. There is no better
way to gain a fresh perspective on the world and on yourself than to put
yourself into an unfamiliar situation: new place, new culture, a different
language. Who knows what you will find? It could be a new place to live, an
acquired taste for leading a nomadic existence, or it could be a new peace of
mind, a sense of self-sufficiency, or a unique perspective on life.

Fact or Opinion?

What will you do? No-one wants to take difficult steps, make their lives more
difficult, or withstand privations of any sort, based on mere opinion; people
want facts. What I have written here most definitely straddles the fuzzy line
between opinion and fact. I have consciously avoided quoting authorities
because I want to emphasize that this line really is fuzzy, and that no
authority can help you make it less so. Some of what I wrote here may
resonate with you, and so you would tend to consider it closer to fact than it
really is. Other things I wrote here you might disagree with, and consider
them just my opinion. Be that as it may; as far as your life is concerned, it is
your opinion that matters, not mine.

The line between fact and opinion is always moving, sometimes

imperceptibly slowly the way an entire country sinks further and further into
debt, and sometimes very fast the way several million people suddenly lose
electricity for a few weeks. It is like a shoreline on a map quite factual, and
fixed, except for the odd storm surge. If you remain dry, the shoreline shift is
mere opinion; if you are forced to spend some time underwater, it is more like
a fact. When will you decide it time to move to higher ground? When you find
yourself underwater, and have to swim there? And what if you move to higher
ground while you are still dry, and find that it is rocky and barren?

It is human nature to want to postpone making unpleasant decisions until the

last moment, and we can do so with impunity, provided we leave enough
options open for us to choose from. Every day that we live contentedly within
the status quo, we restrict our options further and further, by making
ourselves increasingly dependent on more and more systems over which we
have no control, and on which we cannot rely. But there are also small,
conscious steps we can take that break some of these dependencies, and
create new options for ourselves. If we take enough such steps, then when
the time arrives for a major, life-changing decision, we will be ready.

2005 Dmitry Orlov

The Despotism of the Image

Dmitry Orlov

(Originally published on culturechange.org.)

The ostensible goal of this Web site, and the small but enthusiastic
community that surrounds it, is to change the culture. We all recognize that
the contemporary mainstream culture of over-consumption and unbridled
growth is toxic on every level -- physical, emotional, and cultural -- and is
accelerating on a collision course with resource depletion, climate disruption,
and environmental devastation. We all want to jump off in time, or, perhaps
lacking the necessary courage, to find ourselves lucky enough to be thrown
clear.

What this means in reality is anything but clear, and the best that most of us
manage is some small display of personal virtue -- recycling plastic
packaging, bicycling instead of driving, taking the train instead of flying,
growing a bit of our own food, eating organic, using energy-efficient light
bulbs, investing in renewable energy, and so forth. These are the tokens by
which we recognize each other. How such personal virtues are defined is a
matter of personal taste: some consider driving a hybrid car sufficient, while
others prefer eliminating cars from their lives altogether. Some seemingly
necessary steps, such as learning to live without oil-based plastics and other
synthetic materials, seem beyond all of us.

It seems to be something of an article of faith that if we all did enough of

such things, whatever they may be, then the problem, whatever it happens to
be, and however we choose to define it, would in due course be solved, and
civilized life would go on just like before. Just yesterday, in company, light
after-dinner conversation happened to breeze past the topic of energy, and
how the British were lucky to discover coal just as timber was running out,
and were then lucky enough to discover oil and natural gas before the coal
ran out. And now that they have all but run out of oil and natural gas, "there
will be enough renewables to power it all!" was the swift retort. To those of us
who have the right technical background, and understand the physical
quantities involved, this claim is preposterous, but I knew better than to

object.

You see, I realize that it is a requirement of this culture that we all project an
image of unbounded optimism and faith in our technological prowess.
Anything less is automatically labeled as defeatist, fatalistic, and lacking in
imagination. What is meant by this word is not the active work of the
intellect, mind you, but the passive, voluntary acceptance of a set of common
imaginings, or images. The most important images comprising this artificial
reality, the ones at the core of this realm of enforced fiction, are the ones
that, on the surface at least, have to do with personal dignity and physical
comfort.

I sometimes have a chance to observe a clash between two competing

images: that of personal virtue (bicycling) and that of personal dignity and
personal comfort (driving). I am a year-round bicyclist in a northern city
where temperatures occasionally dip below freezing, and where it sometimes
snows. It is a liberal city, meaning that many people here share this sense of
personal virtue that attaches to tokens of eco-friendly behavior, such as
bicycling to work -- not that they would consider doing it themselves, of
course, unless the distance were short and the weather perfect. But quite a
few of them wish to experience this virtue vicariously, and, seeing me suited
up and wearing a helmet, strike up conversations with me in the elevator, on
the way to work, especially if it's hot or cold or raining or snowing. Often they
ask me how I keep my feet from freezing (I wear wool socks) or how I avoid
falling down on ice (I use studded tires) or how I negotiate those steep hills (I
push hard with both of my legs).

***

My answers, although offered quite cheerfully, are invariably greeted with

silent disappointment, and it is interesting to ask why that is. Perhaps it has
something to do with this: bicycling for me is not a matter of personal virtue,
but a way of conveying myself between places with a maximum of pleasure
and a minimum of fuss and aggravation. I do so with complete personal
dignity and physical comfort, because my experience of these things is based
on my actual emotional state (which is generally placid) and physical comfort
(which, for me, involves a healthy dose of pain, and results in good health
and a sense of well-being). My suspicion is that the dignity and comfort of my

car-dependent elevator companions does not have a basis in personal

experience, but is bound up with some other, atavistic impulses, which find
their fullest expression in the image of the automobile. They are disconcerted
to find it bested by a primitive, engineless, two-wheeled contraption.

***

It is possible to erect a virtual mountain of rational, logical, quantifiable

arguments against cars and in favor of bicycles. A most amusing line of
analysis involves computing their relative effective average speeds. First,
compute the total cost of ownership of a car, including purchase price,
financing costs, maintenance costs, registration, tolls, traffic tickets, and so
forth. Now, include all external costs: road construction and maintenance,
damage to health caused by air and water pollution, loss of productivity due
to death and maiming in auto accidents, associated legal costs, and, of
course, military budgets needed to equip the armed forces to fight for and
defend the oil.

Now, take the drivers' average income and hours worked, and find out how
many hours of labor it takes to cover all of these costs. Add to that the actual
time spent driving. Now take the number of vehicle miles traveled, and divide
it by the total number of hours spent both driving and earning enough money
to pay for cars. Rather than give you the answers, I encourage you to do your
own homework, but I can tell you that the end result of this exercise is always
the same: the bicycle is faster than the car, and, depending on one's
assumptions, driving is slower than walking.

Another amusing line of analysis involves the subject of public safety. There
are some overall practical limits on how long one's daily commute can take,
generally under an hour each way, regardless of distance traveled or form of
transportation used. Thus, the relevant safety-related statistic is still
accidents requiring hospitalization and fatalities, but per unit time rather than
per unit distance. And here, it turns out, bicycles are somewhat safer than
cars, even in congested urban areas lacking in bicycle paths or bicycle lanes.
And although everyone's health suffers from the effects of car-related air

pollution, the daily exercise of bicycling mitigates against them to some

extent, further increasing the gap.

Thus, from the point of view of public safety, bicycles win as well. Similar
types of analysis can be applied to trains, rickshaws, or pogo sticks, with
similar results. In short, there seems to be no point in looking for rational
explanations for why people prefer cars, or even to think of cars as serving a
need for transportation. Their perceived comfort and convenience is but a
culturally engineered mirage; if the convenience were real, Al Gore would
have made a film about it, perhaps titled "A Convenient Truth: Why I Drive a
Car." It is about time we acquiesced to the fact that their primary function is
to satisfy a powerful set of atavistic urges.

***

In its anatomy, the automobile is clearly descended from a certain quadruped

of the equine family, cross-bred with a buggy. Along the way, it gained some
predatory genes, giving it a rather vicious disposition, and an often vicious
aspect to its facial expression (headlights and grille). It has two eyes
(headlights) and four legs (wheels). It likes to run in herds, but resists being
overtly constrained, either in direction or in speed. It obeys foot-signals from
spurs (gas pedal) and hand-signals from reigns (steering wheel).

There is a large variety of breeds, most of which are prized for their ability to
run fast, although they rarely do so. Their main function is to impart a certain
sense of nobility to those who own them, whether by giving a gentleman-onhorseback aspect to the driver, or a lady-in-a-carriage aspect to the
passenger. As with horses, their sometimes overpowering flatulence does
nothing to degrade this sense of nobility.

The car's secondary function is to allow its owner to wield power over life and
death. If it were regarded strictly from a public safety perspective, private
ownership of cars would have been banned long ago. In fact, what makes a
car so enticing, and makes it such a powerful image within the public
imagination, is that it is "an inherently dangerous instrumentality," as a

lawyer once put it. Unlike a horse, which has two eyes and a brain, and, left
to its own devices, will avoid running into things, a car is only too happy to
collide, and requires constant vigilance.

This trivial but active supervision, which, to avoid sudden death or serious
injury, must be maintained at all times, is at once intensely boring and
exciting. Iggy Pop once captured the spirit of this contradiction: "In the death
car, we're alive!" In a car-dependent society, millions of people are at all
times actively involved in the act of avoiding instant death. In due course,
cars and the carnage they produce come to be regarded as forces of nature.

***

One periodically hears of plans to create "smart highways," and, looking

beyond the obvious implication that the current highways are indeed
"stupid," it becomes obvious that the cars that travel them are "stupid" as
well. Redesigned purely with transportation in mind, an automobile would
look quite different.

Three wheels is quite enough, and four is quite excessive, as evidenced by

many examples, from race-winning solar cars to Buckminster Fuller's
Demaxian vehicle. The drive wheel, front and center, would steer, but would
also be designed to run in a groove, eliminating the need to steer except
when maneuvering. Hitches front and back would allow cars to be linked
together into trains for improved efficiency. When not hitched to the car in
front, a simple infrared sensor would regulate the speed so as to keep the
proper braking interval. Minimum and maximum speed limits would be barcoded onto the pavement, and the car would obey them automatically. The
engine would be an outboard, lowered onto the front wheel using a hoist and
clipped in position, to make it easy to switch out for maintenance or
replacement. The bottom of the car would be sheer and watertight, and its
drive wheel would have paddles on its sides, allowing it to traverse bodies of
water. For storage, it would pivot and stand upright within a small footprint.

But such design exercises are futile: they are a rational approach to an

irrational set of requirements. Stupid cars, and the people for and by whom
they are designed, will be with us for a long time. Their image is indelibly
imprinted on the public imagination whenever little boys roll their little toys
around the playroom floor, murmuring "Vroom! Vroom!"

Conversely, it is the downfall of our current public transportation systems

that they are designed strictly with transportation and public safety in mind,
and fail to satisfy the atavistic urges of their ridership. In adhering to the
image of a safe and foolproof public service, they fail to deliver either the
thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, and the unsatisfied commuter must
make do with impatience, unease, and boredom.

A properly designed streetcar would have either no doors at all, or doors that
shut definitively and with great force after a peremptory warning. It would not
stop at stations but only slow down just enough to allow passengers to jump
on and off. It would be equipped with running boards and external handrails,
allowing passengers to display their acrobatic skill by riding on the outside,
saving themselves the cost of a fare.

To keep the lawyers at bay, all passengers would be required to sign a waiver
absolving the streetcar company of all liability, and traffic laws would be
amended to give streetcars absolute right of way in all circumstances and to
place all other traffic automatically at fault in case of collision. The fronts of
streetcars could then be equipped with plows to sweep aside any object
blocking the tracks, eliminating delays due to accidents. The inevitable
carnage would provide a constant stream of public safety lessons, courtesy of
the tabloid press.

Not only would such a system be cheap and efficient to operate, but it would
also, in due course, breed an agile and alert ridership, whose daily displays of
bravery and physical stamina would produce a camaraderie and an esprit de
corps that is so sadly lacking in the effete and pampered commuter of today.
Of course, such a service is an impossibility, for it would go against the image
which public transportation is called upon to fulfill: the image of a public
charity, serving the young, the old, the poor and the unwell; in short,
something called upon to exist for the benefit of those unlucky few who can
not drive.

***

In more and more places, public transportation is made untenable by a

condition known as "suburban sprawl," which, more than anything else,
fosters car-dependence. The cause of suburban sprawl is the suburban house,
and, just as it would be a mistake to look at the car strictly as a form of
transportation, it is a mistake to look at the suburban house strictly as a form
of housing. Although it provides a set of modern amenities, it must also
conform to a certain image, and, just as with the car, we will find that it is this
image that best explains both its typical location and its typical form.

It is a common misconception that the main function of a suburban home is

to provide shelter, when it is quite obviously and clearly to provide parking. In
a car-dependent society, access is controlled by limiting and controlling one's
ability to park. Public parking is always limited and often not available, and
semi-public parking -- at stores, malls, office parks, and other private
institutions -- is limited to those who have money to spend or otherwise have
some business to transact there. While the car confers freedom of movement,
it is the freedom to move, via public roadways, between places where one is
not free but must fulfill some specific social function, be it working, shopping,
or some other socially sanctioned activity. Even if you wish to escape the
oppressive strictures of society for a while, and spend time in a wilderness
area, you will find that, in a car-dependent society, even wilderness keeps
business hours, and closes its parking lots shortly before dark.

In short, the only freedom the car confers is the freedom to drive to and fro
between places where you are not free, and the only true exception to this
rule is your own driveway. No proper suburban home can be without one: it is
your own private highway that leads to your own private house. This image
dictates that it be expensively and unnecessarily paved, and not with paving
stones, for then it would be a walkway rather than a driveway, but with
asphalt. Suburban driveways are not paved for the benefit of the cars, which
can handle dirt roads, and clearly not for the benefit of the now commonplace
off-road vehicles, but for the benefit of satisfying some innate drive within
their drivers: the urge to own a piece of the road.

The symbolic function of the suburban home is to serve as the final resting

place at the end of the long drive home. Peace and quiet are considered to be
its most essential features, and although the overt preoccupation is with
safety and security, its source is an irrational urge for ultimate peace. If a
suburban dweller were to trade both the car and the house for an apartment
within city limits, the increased chance of becoming a victim of violent crime
would be more than offset by the decreased chance of dying in an auto
accident, and so the choice is not a rational one from the standpoint of safety.

The real concern is not with safety but with the embodiment of an abstract
image of peace. Zoning regulations and bylaws restrict noisy hobbies and
deviations from community standards, for it is a sacrilege to violate the
eternal slumber of the suburbanite. The ideal suburb features an unbroken
expanse of manicured grass dotted with little neoclassical monuments, all
slightly different yet all essentially the same. This is the essential dcor of a
cemetery: the house is in fact a family crypt. Not surprisingly, the final
destination of the death-car is the death-house.

***

All other functions of the death-house, save one, are superfluous, since
people can, and do, eat, sleep, and have sex in their cars. As cars grow larger
and commutes become longer, more and more of the living is done inside the
car, with the sepulchral dwelling only used to unwrap fast food, keep beer
cold, and fall asleep in front of the television set. But the death-house has
one room that is essential, because it offers services a car cannot provide.
This is the bathroom, and it contains the shower, and, of course, the toilet.
And not just any toilet: a chamberpot or a bucket of sawdust simply would
not do. No, it must be a most unlikely contraption that allows one to defecate
directly into a pool of drinking water (which may be deodorized according to
taste) and flush it down with copious amounts of more drinking water. How
curious it is that while other carnivores have an instinct to bury their feces, to
avoid spreading disease, these ones insist on mixing theirs into their drink!
Various expensive artifices, none entirely successful, are then needed to keep
the drinking water and the sewage apart.

If the urge to defecate into drinking water seems irrational, then what of its
ultimate purpose, which is to deny that the body smells? The flush toilet is a

tool for denying that the body smells on the inside; the shower, with the help
of enforced daily ablutions and chemical deodorants, does the same for the
exterior. The urge to deny that humans smell like humans is very strange,
because these same people happily tolerate the smell of their cats and dogs,
who rarely bathe and smell precisely as they should. In fact, humans do
smell, no worse than dogs or cats, and the healthier specimens generally
smell just fine, although a junk food diet makes for a rather unpleasant funk.
The obvious suspicion is that these people, who drive death-cars and live in
death-houses, make every day a bath day because they feel compelled to
present an odor-free facade, out of fear that the subliminal stench of death
they cannot help but sense wafting all around them might be emanating from
them.

***

Contemporary mainstream culture of over-consumption and unbridled

growth, which we would so much like to change, to save ourselves, or to save
the planet, or a little of each, is not now, and was never a rational
proposition. It is the realization of dark, irrational, self-destructive urges,
which were programmed into us through some evolutionary accident, and
which are now, and for a short time longer, being given their fullest
expression by the availability of cheap and abundant energy.

Appeals to rationality or good sense are futile, because the motive force is a
set of indelible, immutable images, which are imprinted on simple minds and
at an early age. These images are easy to ridicule, and although ridicule can
be powerful, its effectiveness is restricted to those few who have the capacity
to understand it. Voltaire was quite thorough in his treatment of the Catholic
church, and yet these priests are still with us today, blessing things
indiscriminately and fondling altar-boys, because the average churchgoer
never had any use for Voltaire.
A much more promising approach is to create new images, of great seductive
power, and still simple enough to leave a deep impression on a simple mind.
This is the stuff of dangerous politics and revolutionary change: a path rife
with unintended consequences, and certainly one to avoid. All that remains is
the possibility of an individual effort to free yourself from the despotism of
the image.

As for the rest of the consumers who are sold on the images of death, dignity,
and comfort, we can be sure that the free market will meet their demand.
Those with deep pockets will receive a truly luxurious death that may include
a personal museum of transportation and library set amid formal gardens,
while those at the opposite end will only be able to afford death in a brown
paper bag, but is that not the essence of consumer choice? We should hope
that their culture of death dies with them, and, being numerous and diverse,
we should hope that this happens long before our species becomes an
endangered one.

Copyright 2007 Dmitry Orlov, All Rights Reserved.

-

Getting Prepared for the Great Collapse: Dmitry Orlov

February 14, 2009

Culture Change
by Dmitry Orlov
Politics & Globalization, Environment & Climate, Organic Transitions
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 fullspectrum 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 lowballing 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 oftrepeated 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 AK47s, 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 usversus-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

*****

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012

Perfectly Comfortable

I don't particularly like cars. I don't like the way they smell, on the inside or
the outside. I don't like the feeling of being trapped in a sheet metal-and-vinyl
box, my body slowly warping to the shape of a bucket seat. I don't enjoy the
visually unexciting and inhospitable environment of highways or the boredom
of spending hours gazing at asphalt markings and highway signs. I
particularly dislike the insect-like behavior that cars provoke in people,
reducing their behavioral repertoire to that of ants who follow each other
around, their heads in close proximity to the previous insect's rear end. Nor
do I enjoy having a mechanical dependent that I have to feed and house all
the time, even though I rarely have need of it. I do sometimes need to use a
car, and then I rent one or use one from a car-sharing service that charges by
the hour. The most enjoyable parts of that exercise is when I pick it up and
when I drop it off. Cars end up costing me a few hundred dollars each year,
which is a few hundred dollars more than I would like to spend on them.

I do like bicycles. They are about the most ingenious form of transportation
humans have been able to invent so far. I especially like mine, which I bought
second-hand, from a friend, for something like $150. That was about 20 years
ago. It still has a lot of the original parts: frame, fork, chainrings and cranks,
bottom bracket and hubs. The spokes and rims were replaced once; the
cables twice; the freewheel and chain five or six times; the tires a dozen
times or more; I've lost count of the inner tubes, which don't last long thanks
to all the broken glass on the road from cars smashing into each other.

Over time, I've upgraded various bits. Nice titanium break levers from a used
parts bin at a local bicycle school set me back $10. One of the down-tube
shift lever mechanisms fell apart (it was partly made of plastic), and I
replaced it with an all-metal one from a nearby bin at the same
establishment. The original rear derailleur was by Suntour, which no longer
exists, and so I replaced it with a Shimano part, for $60, I recall. Ruinous
expense, that! (The front derailleur is still the original Suntour.)

The frame is made of very high quality chrome-molybdenum alloy of a sort

rarely encountered today. Chrome and molybdenum prices have gone up by a
lot since then, and steelmakers have found new ways to cut corners. It
survived a ride up and down the East Coast aboard a sailboat, exposed to the
elements, without a problem. It looks like a beat-up, rusty old road bikenot
something bicycle thieves normally find interestingand that's exactly how a
bicycle should be made to look even when it is new.

I ride something like 7 km just about every weekday of the year. Sometimes I
ride quite a bit farther, spending half a day meandering through the
countryside or along the coast. I've ridden as much as 160 km in one day;
that was a bit tiring. I rarely take the shortest path, preferring meandering
bike paths that go through parks and along the river. I do ride through traffic
quite a bit of the time, and have developed a style for keeping safe. I pay
minimal attention to traffic signals and lights (they wouldn't be needed if it
weren't for cars) and mostly just pay attention to the movements of cars.
(Traffic lights are sometimes useful in predicting the behavior of cars, but not
reliably, and not so much in Boston.) I also tend to take up a full lane
whenever a bicycle lane is not available (cars are not a prioritized form of
transportation, to my mind). A person who is in a hurry, here in Boston, would
get there sooner by riding a bicycle. I understand that this annoys certain
drivers quite a lot, raising their blood pressure. Perhaps the elevated blood
pressure will, in due course, get them off the road, along with their cars,
freeing up the space for more bicycles.

In the summer, my riding attire consists of a tank-top, shorts, and flip-flops.

I've tried various combinations of pedals with toeclips, clipless pedals and
bicycle shoes with cleats, and eventually settled on the most basic pedals
available and flip-flops. I've also experimented with padded bicycling shorts
and jerseys made of Lycra, and found them too confining. Also, I just couldn't
get over the feeling that I shouldn't wear such outfits, no more than I should
be going around in tights and a tutu, and so I went back to wearing hiking
shorts. But it can be a fine show when Balet russe comes rolling through
town. When it rains, I put on a Gortex bicycle jacket that evaporates the
sweat while keeping the rainwater out. The hood goes under the helmet,
keeping my head dry as well.

The bicycling outfit gets more complicated in wintertime. The Gortex jacket is
still there, but underneath it is a hoodie, under that a wool shirt and thermal
underwear (microfiber works best). The shorts are replaced with jeans, with
Gortex zip-on pants over them for messy weather. The flip-flops are replaced
with insulated, waterproof half-boots, with two layers of wool socks. Add ski
gloves and a ski mask, and the outfit is complete.

Oddly enough, bicycling on a frosty but dry winter day is even more
enjoyable than on a balmy summer day. Firstly, in the winter cooling is not an

issue, so I can ride as fast as I want without breaking a sweat. If I start feeling
too warm, I can unzip the jacket partway and get all the cooling I want.
Secondly, there is the realization that bicycling in wintertime is more
comfortable than walking, since I can generate as much heat as I need to
keep warm simply by going faster. The one somewhat unpleasant part of
winter riding is the wind: cold winter air is a lot denser than warm summer
air: a 20 km/h headwind is hard to pedal against in the summer, but much
harder in the winter. (I recently rode across town in a gale, and it was not
unlike a mountain climb, grinding away in the lowest gear. The ride back was
all downwind, and I was flying, riding the brakes the entire way.)

Snow and ice present an interesting set of challenges to a two-wheeled

vehicle. I've experimented with studded tires, fat cyclocross tires with deep
treads and regular road tires. Road tires won. Studded tires on both front and
back are a huge performance killer, making a fast road bike into more of a
stationary exercise bike. Putting the studded tire just on the front (which is
where it is really needed the most, since the rear can fishtail all it wants
without compromising stability) helps quite a lot. But overall, studded tires
create a false sense of security; it is better, I have found, to keep the regular
road tires on and simply learn to recognize and adjust to the conditions.

High-pressure road bicycle tires have tiny contact patches, and apply
tremendous pressure to the road surfaceenough to indent packed snow,
creating side-to-side traction. It's still not possible to bank steeply, but it is
quite possible to keep balance by slowing down. Fore-and-aft traction is not
quite as good, making rapid acceleration and braking unlikely. On a slippery
surface, the game becomes to avoid breaking friction between the road and
the tire. Tires with a deep tread seem to work well on mud, but do not seem
to help at all on snow, because the tread becomes packed with compacted
snow, causing a lot of rolling resistance but not much traction. With regular
road tires, the only truly frictionless surfaces I have found so far are smooth
ice covered by water and oiled steel plates. When I encounter either of these,
I get off and walk, having once wiped out quite badly on an oiled steel plate,
in the middle of summer, in fine weather.

If any of this seems strange to you, then there may be something funny going
on inside your head and you should get it checked out. Around the world, for
over a century, people everywhere have used the bicycle to get around in
every kind of climate and weather. There are year-round bicyclists in the
Sahara, as well as in Edmonton, Alberta. Bicycling year-round is very much a

solved problem everywhere. Here in Boston I know dozens of people who

commute by bicycle year-round, and I see hundreds of people out on bicycles,
every day, at all times of the year.

And yet with just about any random group of people I encounter the idea of
bicycling through winter is regarded as very strange: somewhere between
suicidal and heroic. (The fact that driving a car is far more dangerous, and
suicidal on multiple levels, does not seem to register with most people.) What
can I say? To each his own. As for me, I am perfectly comfortable riding a
bicycle year-round.

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40 COMMENTS :

Steve From Virginia said...

Spreading like wildfire: John Michael Greer now D. Orlov, killing the cars, the
idea of cars, the car 'mystique' the car spam.

The cars are on their last legs, good riddance.

(I prefer walking to biking, btw. What's the rush?)

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012 AT 6:26:00 PM EST

Allie said...
Nice post Dmitry. I use the Deco Bike rental program down here in South
Beach to get around if I'd rather not walk. I really enjoy only having to drive a
car once or twice at most in a week and sometimes only every other week (if
I'm lucky!).

I used to live in Boston and your description of people's blood pressure rising
because of some *expletive* biker taking up the whole lane reminded me of a
buddy of mine. While your love of bike riding reminded me of another buddy
living up there. And we used to all live under the same roof! To each his own
indeed.

Hope your 2012 has started off productive and enjoyable. Looking forward to
your posts this year.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012 AT 8:19:00 PM EST

Candice said...
Thanks for this post. I agree with you whole-heartedly. There are more pros
than cons to bike riding and it is certainly a lot safer than driving.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012 AT 8:25:00 PM EST

steck said...
Do you ever ride your bike on the T?

When I lived in Boston, I found that some T personnel and some riders were

not so friendly to cyclists.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012 AT 8:37:00 PM EST

Sixbears said...
My only question isn't about the bicycle. I get it. What I don't understand is
why a person who lives on a sailboat wouldn't sail to warmer climates in the
winter?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012 AT 8:42:00 PM EST

kollapsnik said...
I am still in Boston because of a joba pretty good one. Yes, warmer waters
would make a huge difference right around now.

I have plenty of experience riding the T with a bicycle, having spent a couple
of summers in East Boston. The only way out (other than a rutted-out
circuitous truck route) is via highway tunnels or the Blue Line. A major
breakthrough occurred last summer, when bicycles were allowed on the Blue
Line from 9AM and then from 6PM. I don't remember how many public transit
officials I had to convince to look up the damned policy and let me onto the
platform or the train; quite a few.

The city is putting in more public docks, so running a bicycle ferry between
East and West Boston (yeah, that's who you are!) will be viable in a few
years.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012 AT 10:02:00 PM EST

casperhooey said...
Thanks for this. The picture looks just like me, except I had heavier pants and
a sock over the right leg to keep it off the chain. The ski mask is definitely the
way to go. Of course, in just one winter of commuting and rather enjoying it
this way, I killed half the parts on the bike, whereas the ladies who merely
commuted just put on their winter clothing, changed nothing about their
bikes or their relaxed pedaling, and always got there just as much on time as

I did and probably more safely too. I'll put in a good word for the studded tires
though. When you brake, good ones tend to grip the ice again even if they
slip a little. They've saved my life a few times, ironically at low speeds and
when I've been very attentive and careful.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 2:19:00 AM EST

BillSeitz said...
When I moved from NYC out to the burbs, I thought I'd finally get into
bicycling. Instead I found that you can't get anywhere without going on a
road with cars going 45mph+ but having no shoulder.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 7:44:00 AM EST

Unknown said...
I was a bicycle courier for ~3 years in Vancouver, and I completely agree with
the statement - "I pay minimal attention to traffic signals and lights...", much
better to watch the cars.

I don't mind the added resistance from studded tires (quite useful in the
Canadian prairies), the problem with winter biking are the cars that inevitably
are slipping and sliding around.

The best wipeout I had was when I tried to get through a snow drift by going
as fast as possible before I got to it. That method worked for the previous
drift, not so much for this one. My front tire stopped instantly, and over the
handlebars I went. The landing was soft though.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 10:42:00 AM EST

Unknown said...
I donated my last car to one of those charities in 2006, when gas first started
costing more than I was willing to pay. I bought a nice Kona 24 speed "hybrid"
city bike and rode the 4.5 miles each way to work each day. It doesn't get too
cold here in N California but it can get down to 24 or so degrees. Overall it's
more fun and I feel better at work.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 11:26:00 AM EST

SilentOtto said...
a bicycle/human power economy is positive in so many ways and would help
us attain a zero ghg output in short order!

boston needs a few of these on the water:

http://www.granvilleislandferries.bc.ca/

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 12:53:00 PM EST

hapibeli said...
Having had a very serious accident on my bike @ 60 years old this past
summer, I'm reluctant to return to it, but hope to do so this Spring. But with
aging comes real worry about bodily damage. I've had a few bad accidents
bicycling when I was younger and the healing was pretty quick, but now...I'm
thinking of 3 or even quadracycling as a future means of transportation. We'll
see.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 2:34:00 PM EST

Bob Spencer said...
04040

I especially like passing big SUV's with their favorite progressive political
bumper stickers. Personally, I really like my cyclo cross bike because it is so
versitile. I can cut across unpaved places and go down gravel roads, etc. You
bike sounds especially cool.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012 AT 5:27:00 PM EST

Rhisiart Gwilym said...

Dmitry! Brother!

Only difference that I find here in Britain is that we don't get proper winters
any more, to make the snow and ice riding more interesting. Just go from a
long, dawdling autumn to a long cold spring, with the odd spot of frost, and
half an hour of sleet now and then.

I too, like you and John Michael G, have no dealings with cars, beyond
avoiding them on the road.

And like Jim Kunstler, I marvel at the obsessive way that even
environmentalists seem to think that a top priority in our time is to find ways
to keep the cars running. Ridiculous!

BTW, even without a bike trailer, a heavy-duty home-welded rack, on a

heavy-duty ATB, is a remarkable freight carrier; up to the weight of an adult
passenger. With a trailer I can move boat diesels. Done it.

Just working right now on some re-tweaks of my home-built, all-weather

recumbent velo bike (not trike; two-wheeled velos CAN work, even in crosswinds, if you profile them right). On such a bike, shirtsleeves riding in any
weather, winter or summer, is realistic. Karl Georg Rasmussen's veteran
Leitra trike velo led the way, from years back. All-year, all-weather riding with
no special clothing, even in Dansker winters. KG has clocked up several
million kms. on his Leitras; as have many other users. Who needs cars!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 1:49:00 AM EST

Robin Datta said...
Products similar to Slime (inside the tubes) and Mr. Tuffy (between the tubes
and the tires) to reduce the incidence of flats are probably known to you: a
comment on them from one with your level of experience would be helpful.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 4:52:00 AM EST

Jason Heppenstall said...
Great post Dmitry.

Bikes are pretty much a central part of my life over here in Copenhagen.
Whenever I am without one I find myself immobilised.

Pretty much anything goes here, bikewise. Cargo bikes are getting more and
more popular and I even saw someone transporting a grandfather clock on
one recently.

I wrote a bit about bike culture in Denmark in relation to peak oil here on the
offchance that anyone is interested in it.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 11:21:00 AM EST

Mister Roboto said...
I've lost count of the inner tubes, which don't last long thanks to all the
broken glass on the road from cars smashing into each other.

If you live in a working-class or underclass area, there are also the drunks
who are fond of smashing their empty bottles on the ground here and there.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 11:26:00 AM EST

Karl Franz Ochstradt said...
Robin,

The best protection against flat tires is to do these things:

1) always run enough air pressure to avoid tire "bottom-outs" -- which cause

pinch flats

2) use tires with thick enough casings to avoid sidewall tears

3) use rider skill and awareness to not run over or into anything that will
puncture your tire & tube, or cause a tire bottom-out/pinch flat.

In my experience "Slime" and other gooey injectables for tires are useful only
for off-road riding in areas where there are lots of "goat-head" puncture
vectors everywhere. These are mostly desert regions, or arid sub-alpine
regions. You're not going to find goat-heads riding in Manhattan, or in
Chicago.

A bicycle is a very simple machine and there's no need to think that the
solution to something as minor as a flat tire would involve technological
devices. Rider awareness and bike preparation will take you much further.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 11:35:00 AM EST

CitizenOfTheClouds said...
This is the second time this week I find myself in the awkward spot of
defending cars! Weird. I'm usually in the role of the walking/biking crank
telling my friends/family that they shouldn't drive so much while they are
rolling their eyes.

Anyway, the car is a tool. The bike is a tool. They are not interchangeable. If I
need to get to work and have 30 minutes to do it, I walk/bike. If it's -15
degrees outside and I have to transport my children to daycare, you better
believe I'm driving, and am thankful that I have that privilege.

The problem with cars is not that they exist, it's that they are improperly used
for any and every transportation situation. We, as a culture, have made our
infrastructure such that owning a car has become an expectation and a right
rather than an option and a privilege.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2012 AT 2:52:00 PM EST

weeone said...
I read stuff like this and I think why bother? I live in north central Vermont. In
the summer when it isn't raining I gladly commute to work (6 miles) on my
bicycle. But am a going to bundle up and risk injury and death bicycling on
busy roads in the winter? For what?

The oil is going to get used up. And a good case can be made for using it up
as quickly and inefficiently as possible since the population is growing and
already way over carrying capacity.

Next weekend I'm going to Maryland to visit family and take in a basketball
game. Yes, I'm driving. Might as well enjoy ourselves before WW3 gets
started.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2012 AT 6:35:00 PM EST

kleymo said...
The theme today is transportation. Well, just back from Snow Days at Navy
Peir here in Chicago, I can inform everyone as to how goods are going to be
hauled around in town medium term.

All of us, from grandmother to wee tyke, had the opportunity to pet those
wonderful huskies Mr, Orlov had the opportunity to read about before leaving
the USSR. Lots of hobbyists here in the burbs keep huskies as pets, and bring
them together on weekends to haul sleds, etc.

Turns out those dogs love to pull wagons, don't mind the heat at all, and eat
like those donkeys Mr. Orlov's grandfather had during the war. One dog can
pull 300 pds. a considerable distance, then eat a pound and a half of food.
Seems like an answer to our coming horse deficit.

Seems like a bit of good news to me.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2012 AT 6:52:00 PM EST

Fry10cK said...
Winter cycling in New Hampshire is tremendous fun if not always reliable
transportation. It's more of a sport than a dependable conveyance. Wear
goggles and be prepared to fall down.

But fatbikes are looking mighty tempting. Google the term if you're
unfamiliar.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2012 AT 8:10:00 PM EST

Nathan said...
Last year I walked into a bike retailer here in Adelaide South Australia and
asked if they had any basic single speed backpedal brake steel frame bikes.
They did, but they started from $380. I said my budget was half that. Then
the owner said he had his grandfather's bike in the shed and would I be
interested in that for $150. It was a 1940 Super Elliot with 28" wheels,
completely original apart from a saddle from the 1960s. Even the dynamo
lights work. I bought it on the spot, pumped up the tyres and have been
riding it around to customer meetings and for errands ever since. People in
the office used to laugh at me on my old bike, but now a few other people
have copied the idea and we're loving it. Adelaide is pretty flat
topographically and has a dry mediterranean climate, so there aren't really
any excuses for not biking everywhere.
Keep up the excellent example Dmitry! I'd also love to hear more detail about
how to build a square boat like yours, and even love to see some schematics
and pics of your boat. Every thought of writing a book specifically about what
you've done and are still doing to achieve your collapse proof living
arrangement? I'd buy a copy!

MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2012 AT 7:51:00 AM EST

flipjack said...
BORING!!! More sailing / economic posts please!

MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2012 AT 10:36:00 AM EST

Bakhirun said...
When I came to Jakarta in 1988 the city was struggling to rid itself of pesky
pedicabs, which slowed traffic and was for many nationalist Indonesians an
unpleasant reminder of the equality that lingers from a colonial past. The
becak riders (Google-Image it) were the lowest of the low, usually slept in
their pedicabs and were often dead before their fiftieth birthday, from
pneumonia.

Stern city authorities (latter-day Suharto era) ordered the police to peform
sweeps where becaks were impounded and dumped into Jakarta Bay... where
some enterprising soul (probably a Chinese) fished them out and sold them
again.

Eventually the city ridded itself of them (although you can still find millions
around the country, performing a vital infrastructure function).

Instead you have horrendous traffic jams, exacerbated by anarchic behavior

on the part of motorcyclists (I'm one too) and cheap credit - which has led to
floods of cars and bikes.

I take my low-end Giant mountain bike from home in Condet, East Jakarta, to
the 'Golden Triangle;' CBD, using main arteries (including sidewalks). I've
timed the difference between being choked up on a hot motorcycle in a traffic
jam and zipping through any nook and cranny, portaging the bicycle over
pedestrian bridges, slipping the wrong way down a one-way street: sports
motorcycle = 40min. sports bicycle = 55 min.

The only condition of course is that one has to have a place to shit shine
shave and shower, and get into fresh office attire. That's often not easy.

I'd surmise that once the oil runs out Jakarta is going to get its pedicabs back
- including transport ones. Ditto for all other monster third-world

megapolises.

MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2012 AT 4:32:00 PM EST

Justin Kase said...
Here in "rural" New Hampshire I haven't seen a bicycle on the road for about
three months. The roads, including most state "highways", are about wide
enough to allow two logging trucks to pass, so that is not surprising.
Shoulders (if existant at all) are usually soft sand and seldom properly
cleared. Not many think themselves lucky or skilled enough to deal with
these conditions. The demise of cars could change things for a short while,
but, unless it gets a lot warmer, or the plow trucks (appearing less frequently
already) keep running somehow without the cars for support, I don't see
winter biking happening here.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012 AT 11:11:00 AM EST

Janne said...
Really nothing more to add. Nice!

Hey, over here in Sweden I usually shift to winter tires around this time of the
year. You know those with steel spikes in the rubber - but this year there's not
much snow yet - so I'm waiting with this. Although we have minus 12 Celcius
the roads are still dry. I too ride the bike I bought when I was at university that's 17 years ago now. Still doing its job riding to work and beeing parked
outside every day.
But when ice and snow are coming these spike tire surley do an excellent job.
Kepp on biking!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012 AT 3:44:00 PM EST

William McCracken said...
To avoid the road ice issue, I ride a recumbent trike. To avoid winter windchill,
I wear a rain suit, gloves and a visor for my face. No gas, no insurance and no
need to pay for parking! I haven't blogged about it recently since there's not
much to say. It just works. IMHO bikes and trikes are the town runabouts of

the future.

http://wintertrike.blogspot.com

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012 AT 5:10:00 PM EST

Dithers said...
Cars arent for transport; they are used as a place to go where you can be
alone. Driving a car and listening to music has become a way of relaxing and
escaping for a lot of people, maybe most people.
To ride a bike is to be alert, to be 'on', and it places you in the world, just
where most people don't want to be.

Dont underestimate the desperation that people feel in this world, and don't
imagine that a bike (or a car) can fix that.
Sometimes bike riders portray themselves as saviours of the planet - thats
wrong and also irritating.
Single-issue thinking is foolish and full of unthinking narcissism. Don't do it.

Also, the roads you bike on are there because of cars.

There is no silver bullet solution for anything except vampires...

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012 AT 8:16:00 PM EST

Bill Totten said...
Delightful post, Dmitry. I agree that cycling is the second best way of getting
around, second
only to walking. I have two mountain bikes and a heavy old steel bike for
hauling things and
pulling a rather large cart for hauling more things or bigger or heavier things.
But I haven't used them for several years because I find they don't give me
enough exercise. I'm now in my sixth year of walking at least ten kilometers,

at a little over six kilometers per hour, every day of the year. I don't actually
walk every day but always have a surplus built up so my cumulative average
never drops below ten kilometers per day. An achilles injury kept me from
walking for six weeks last year but I had already stocked up nearly seventy
days surplus in advance, so I easily was able to maintain my daily quota. I
switched to MBT shoes to prevent a recurrence. In the winter, when days are
short and cold, I can walk fast in my business suit without breaking up a
sweat. In the summer, when days are long, hot, and muggy I walk early
before showering for work or late after returning home. Haven't owned a car
in the 43 years I've lived in Japan and only rented cars a few times for g
etting around in very remote areas. But, as you say, to each his own. Happy
cycling. Bill Totten

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012 AT 2:30:00 AM EST

aka: said...
Good to see some writing on this topic. A bike has to be the perfect
compliment to boat living.

Long time cyclist here, but alas an aging one, so power assisted bicycles have
been a boon to my creaky body. I still pedal a lot, just not all the time.

http://alttransbikes.blogspot.com

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012 AT 5:41:00 PM EST

Adrian Skilling said...
Good article. I too am a year round cyclist here in the UK. The previous 2
winters have been tough. In the UK its often cold+wet and I've needed to use
cycling overshoes to stop me getting chillblains.

I've really enjoyed getting the kids to nursery in a bike trailer through the
snow! (able to stay on v. quiet roads) when going in the car was probably
more dangerous. I found the mountain bike a necessity then though
otherwise I'm on a touring bike.

I've found not having the option of using a car makes you mentally prepared
for biking in bad conditions.

People here think it odd that I might cycle to the swimming pool in rain. But
the whole point of the trip is to get wet and exercised isn't it!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2012 AT 10:59:00 AM EST

matt picio said...
Regarding tubes and tires: if you're not in a tremendous hurry, and willing to
spend a little extra, get kevlar-lined tires like the Bontrager Hardcase,
Specialized Armadillo, Schwalbe Marathon or similar, and line them with a
puncture-resistant tube. (PR tubes are about 3x the thickness of a regular
tube, and correspondingly heavier) The PR tubes are about $10-$15 a tube,
and the tires about $45-$60 per tire, but the combination is nearly
bulletproof. I rode 4,800 miles across the USA with that combination with a
total of 3 flats - and one of those flats was after I'd ridden one of the tire
treads completely bald.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2012 AT 4:05:00 PM EST

Alex said...
I live in a California town, in the rural outskirts actually, a heavily Hispanic
area, no bike lanes, no road shoulder to speak of, and yet, the drivers are
really nice about going around cyclists, who tend, if they're wise, to ride on
the painted "fog line" on the edge of the road because if you venture off the
road at all, you're going to collect many goat heads! Slime is a way of life out
here.

I changed out a tube that was hopelessly punctured by goat heads, despite
the Slime I'd installed, and of course saved the old tube, bicycle inner tube
rubber has a million uses. But, I noticed the stock tires on my Electra 7D
cruiser are very soft, and so easy to put on and take off I hardly needed tire
levers. Bikes tend to come with fairly low-budget tires and this is fine, but I
see a pair of Schwalbe Marathons in my future.

Where I live, if I want to get to the nearest metropolis, "Silicon Valley", a term
that's quickly being forgotten, all I have to do is ride a bike to the train station
and then take the train. The bike car is congenial and there are often some
very good conversations.

Just pretend petrol is $20 a gallon. (In actual fact, it will probably be $4 a
gallon but the average person will make $40 a week.)

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 AT 1:26:00 AM EST

Robert Gladwell said...
Interesting coincidence that Dmitry Orlov brought up cycling.

Last year, 2011, after a months of stress and phone calls, I finally ordered a
tricycle with electric-assist. I did this because I became (still am) terrified of
global peak oil, which is now 7 years in the past. I worry that every bit of oil
burned to push me around in a car will raise my food prices. That, and of
course Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) which will also raise my food
prices.

Of course, since 1980, I have lobbied governments to outlaw meat and

outlaw reproduction by mandating vasectomies for men. Going vegan and
not having kids are the most important practical immediate things anyone
can do for anyone else on this planet. But I digress.

The last time I cycled anywhere regularly was 2 years in graduate school
1988-1990, before I bought my first car. Due to disabilities I have developed
since then (2 total knee replacements, 1 write replacement, due to
rheumatoid arthritis), I no longer have the balance for a bicycle. Plus, I am
not interested in pleasure riding. I bought the electric tricycle as my
workhorse, as my replacement for a car. Hence, I needed a basket.

My e-trike arrived in August 2011, and after cycling with it, I finally gained the
courage to give up the auto insurance on my car in November and use only

the e-trike.

While I have experienced SOME thrills riding, and while I do this partly to see
if I CAN do this, to see if I can overcome the challenge, I would NOT
recommend others give up their cars for cycles.

The biggest problem is - one is not allowed to ride on the road itself, but must
ride on the edge. It is a constant nightmare of unswept broken class, rocks,
and trash on the edges of roads in New Jersey. And being exposed to wind,
cold, and rain does not help the experience either.

Yes, I am glad *I* have tried it.

But, for the population at large, and in particular for truckers, electric
vehicles, powered by as many solar and wind farms as possible, is an
absolute necessity for the world to survive the end of oil and minimize AGW.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2012 AT 10:09:00 AM EST

Lukiftian said...
Yes, it was fun riding bike in Edmonton, although I usually didn't in colder
than about -15c. And although it's illegal to ride on the sidewalks there, the
cops are fairly tolerant of it especially in the wintertime, because there's
more paperwork in scraping a cyclist off the street than there is giving them a
ticket.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2012 AT 3:01:00 PM EST

signalfire said...
Ivan Illich wrote a neat little treatise in the 70s where he established that you
never really go faster than a bicycle. Once you factor in the hours spent
working to pay for a car, a plane ticket, a space shuttle or anything else, the
bike the way to go.

I'm not sure if he thought about sailing, though. :)

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2012 AT 5:57:00 PM EST

Matti said...
I drive year around. I live in eastern Finland near Joensuu city. I drive 22km
every day. All roads are covered with ice and snow. When temperature drops
below -30C(-22F) cycling is not pleasurable anymore. Snow becomes hard as
grains of sand. Every drop of grease in your bicycle becomes thick as toffee.
Oil becomes thick as grease. Every part of your body should be covered. Big
part of your pedaling power will be used to winning friction of snow and
frozen parts of your bike. When you move you will sweat. If you stop, you will
freeze pretty quickly.

-20C is not fun either. Pleasurable winter conditions for cycling are warmer
than -15C in my opinion.

When temperature moves near 0C studded tires becomes really good to

have. Roads becomes really slippery and bumby. You can move lot faster with
studded tires than without studs. Without studs you had to drive too careful
and slow. Otherwise you will slip and fall.

I have tested some kevlar tires (without studs). On normal winter situation
(temperature about -10C, ice covered road and snow on it) those kevlar tires
becomes dangerously hard and slippery. Kevlar tires are only for summer use.
In winter there is no use for kevlar anyhow. Most glass shards and pointy
objects are covered with thick ice and snow.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2012 AT 3:57:00 AM EST

Theodore said...
Interesting-- I was reading Reinventing Collapse the other day and got
interested in the comment about how an old 3-speed bike would be much
more valuable. I can see how modern derailleur gears will break down. So I
tried to find a good old Pashley or Raleigh or Columbia, but everywhere I look,
I see imitations. The Sturmley-Archer 3-speed hubs went through a period of

poor quality workmanship and the new Taiwanese company that bought the
brand is making it with some plastic parts inside. The new Pashley Roadsters
have plastic chain guards, which I doubt will last many years, and they're all
pretty expensive. I'll be hitting the used bike stores next, hoping to find a
really old model to fix up.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2012 AT 6:40:00 PM EST

Bakhirun said...
I wonder whether the Russians are not making this type of primitive, heavy
but unbreakable bicycle - along the lines of the Ural or the Planet
motorcycles: crude but sturdy and long-lasting.

The Japanese used to, with brands like Meguro (favoured by farmers) but
they've gone to hell like everyone else, with flimsy plastic bits and electronics
on just about every modern machine.

No one seems to expect to have to keep a machine ten or twenty years any
longer (goes the reasoning), so why build them to last? They'd have to be
heavy as well, which in this era is a major strike against them. Everything is
designed sleek, fuel-efficient, with minimal durability. Alas.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2012 AT 7:20:00 PM EST

Post a Comment
Review: The Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov
44
13
by Frank Kaminski, originally published by Resilience.org | OCT 9, 2013
The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit
By Dmitry Orlov
281 pp. New Society Publishers May 2013. $19.95.

At some point, those of us who accept the inevitability of a complete societal

collapse, driven by resource depletion and rapid climate change, have to
wonder what more can be gained by our continued attempts to persuade the
masses.
Granted, our efforts do succeed in enlisting a steady trickle of new recruits
into the ranks of the walking worriedto quote a term used by
collapsitarian Julian Darleybut the public at large still dismisses our appeals
out of hand. What reason is there to believe that further efforts at spreading
the truth will bring different results? More and more, its starting to seem like
the sensible approach is to get out of the awareness-raising business entirely
and focus our energies instead on providing practical guidance to those who
are willing to hear it.
This is certainly the view of collapse thinker and writer Dmitry Orlov, whose
latest book, The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit, was released by
New Society Publishers in May. As indicated by its subtitle, this muchanticipated offering from one of the best authors on the subject seeks not to
convince readers that a collapse is imminent, but to suggest approaches and
strategies for managing it when it comes. [T]his is not a We must... book or
an Unless we... book, or even a We should... book," writes Orlov. There is
no agenda herejust the assumption that collapse will happen, the
conjecture that it can be analyzed as unfolding in five distinct phases and,
based on quite a bit of research, the conclusion that each phase will require a
different set of adaptations from those who wish to survive it.
The idea of a five-stage taxonomy of collapse first suggested itself to Orlov in
early 2008. It came to him as he noticed that a number of commentators
were aptly using Elisabeth Kbler-Ross' five stages of grief to describe the
process of coming to terms with humanitys ecological predicament. In
February of that year, he posted a piece on his blog, ClubOrlov, titled The
Five Stages of Collapse, which became the germ for the book. In it, he
proposed that societies that have been pushed beyond the point of
sustainability tend to move through a set sequence of collapse stages. He
identified these as financial, commercial, political, social and cultural
collapse. And he argued that the United States, with its grave crises related
to energy, runaway military spending, foreign debt and a worsening foreign
trade deficit, seems poised to bring about its own hasty descent through the
five stages.
An migr from Russia, Orlov had already seen one collapse firsthand. He
witnessed the Soviet Union's fall during the early-to-mid 1990s, and in the
process accumulated a vast store of wisdom on collapses in general and how
best to proceed when caught in one. It didn't take him long after that to see
that America was headed for a similar, if more severe, crash of its own.

However, he kept his observations to himself for years, sensing that there
was not yet enough of a receptive audience. While he bided his time, he
settled with his wife in Boston, where he earned a living as an engineer,
made his way around by bicycle and, in his spare time, pursued a love of
sailing that was more than mere pastime. (Indeed, he would go on to explore
the potential of sail as a mode of transporting food and other cargo in a fossil
fuel-depleted future.)
Financial collapse, writes Orlov in Five Stages, is invariably the first and most
sudden to occur, because finance represents a mere concept rather than
tangible wealth. It can be kept up for only as long as growth and the
expectation of future growth are maintained, and when these falter, it fails
catastrophically. Right now were seeing an end to the growth of just about
every essential industrial input that has fueled our civilization. The
widespread realization that growth is over spells death for global finance,
meaning that the nations of the developed world are poised on the brink of
financial collapse. (Orlov points out that one country, Greece, is already well
past the brink and is mired in financial, commercial and political collapse all
at once.) The author sees each of the Western nations headed for a
deflationary spiral followed by a quick but painful bout of hyperinflation
thrown in at the very end.
The next phase, commercial collapse, occurs when a countrys physical flows
of consumer products and services become disrupted. The mass bank failures
brought about by financial collapse cause international trade to stop, which in
turn halts global supply chains. People find themselves facing shortages of
basic goods, while manufacturers run short on materials needed for their
processes. It doesnt take long for the global economy to pass a point of no
return, in Orlovs words, beyond which recovery is impossible because all
the requisite supply networks and trading relationships have been lost. In
short, people cease believing in the notion that the market shall provide.
As a society passes through the final three phases in the cycle, people
progressively lose faith in its remaining institutions. During political collapse,
national governments become irrelevant as they prove incapable of providing
for their citizens. Local forms of governance spontaneously spring up, often in
partnership with organized crime, to fill the void. As for social and cultural
collapse, Orlov writes that theyre mostly preventable, and indeed that the
Soviet Union managed to stop short of both of them. When they do occur,
theyre characterized by a loss of trust in one's fellows and in the goodness of
humanity, respectively.
This book includes case studies to illustrate the different collapse stages,
each one emphasizing a particular set of skills and attitudes most conducive
to survival. Iceland following the financial crisis of 2008 is presented as an

exemplar of successful financial crash mitigation. The main lesson to be

learned from its experience, writes Orlov vehemently, is Let The Banks Fail.
As for weathering commercial collapse, Orlov points to the Russian mafia,
which, despite its reputation, actually observes a strict ethic of honest
dealing and restraint in the use of violence. For his example of successful
adaptation to political collapse, Orlov considers an even more uncomfortable
case: the Pashtun people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, who accounted for
most of the Talibans membership. Theres also a fascinating study of gypsies,
and how they can thrive in times of social collapse because theyve mastered
the art of conning to the point of a high art.
By far the most disturbing portrait is that of an African tribe called the Ik.
Orlov uses their experience to show how humans can endure even after
they've been stripped of the very virtues that are assumed to be
prerequisites for humanity, such as love and compassion. The Ik were driven
off their native land in Uganda 55 years ago when it became a game reserve.
The only land left to them was desolate mountainside that was difficult to
farm, and the result was chronic famine. Survival didnt mean merely putting
one's own needs above those of others, it meant making oneself a ruthless
adversary of everyone else in sight. The Ik were shockingly cruel to one
another, and no bondsnot even those between mother and childwere
sacred. The anthropologist who first studied the Ik, Colin Turnbull, seemed
traumatized by the experience. His book about it, The Mountain People, was
deemed by one reviewer to be a terrifying book, a quick but well-illuminated
look under the sewercovers of the human psyche.*
Orlov views the story of the Ik as a cautionary tale, one that forces us to
confront the uncomfortable notion that survival at all costs may be a fate
worse than death. Regarding the subjects of his other case studies, however,
he offers in-depth discussions of how their approaches could be useful to
people in todays doomed industrial societies. Above all, he emphasizes that
adapting to the difficult future ahead will require rejecting everything weve
been schooled and socialized to believe about the world and our place in it. It
will also necessitate learning to be poor, something that Orlov says takes
practice, since people who are suddenly thrust into destitution have neither
the skills nor the psychological preparation for a life of subsistence and
bartering.
One of the core assumptions that this book challenges is the belief that
notional wealth, in the form of paper currency or numbers in a computer,
makes one rich. Having witnessed the Soviet Union destroy its currency by
hyperinflating away its debts, Orlov knows better. He realizes that real wealth
exists within hard assets like the precious metals in jewelry or the lead ballast
in a sailboat, which hold their value over time regardless of what happens in
the specious realm of finance. Another theme repeatedly visited by Orlov is

the importance of family. Orlov shows how the dereliction of family ties by
people living in todays industrial nations is both unhealthy and at odds with
the role that families have played throughout most of history. He believes
that the societies in which family has been neglected the most will fare the
worst in times to come.
It was in December 2006 that Orlov began making a name for himself as a
writer on collapse. His breakout article, Closing the 'Collapse Gap': The USSR
was better prepared for collapse than the US, ran on the energy news site
Energy Bulletin (now Resilience) on December 4, and it rapidly became one of
the site's all-time most popular posts. His first book, Reinventing Collapse,
came two years later. Both the article and the book brimmed with
intelligence, worldly experience and a droll, clever wit that has been Orlovs
trademark ever since. Though he still has his day job as an engineernow in
the field of software engineeringOrlov continues to actively blog and speak
on collapse. As he recounts in the new book, [s]topping, beyond a certain
point, would have disappointed far too many people. Well, I think I speak for
all his fans when I express my wish that he not stop anytime soon.
* Mary Daniels, "The Ik; a study of The Loveless People," Chicago Tribune,
Nov. 5, 1972: M3,
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/doc/170334387.html (accessed
Oct. 1, 2013).