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Systemic Collapse

By Peter Goodchild

21 January, 2008
Countercurrents.org

I woke up with stomach trouble and an eye infection, and there was no electricity. When I tried to report the power failure, the automated answering service told me to stay on the line, and that I would be able to connect with a representative within half an hour or an hour. The wind was so strong that it threatened to blow my canoe off its winter platform. I crushed the snow down to make a path to the old outhouse. On my way back I picked a few kale leaves exposed by the melting of the snow. But this was January 9, 2008. What would the future be like?

The reason why we live in the Age of Peak Everything is that everything is connected: oil, electricity, metals, food, water, money. Everything depends on everything. And there is no redundancy. It is more cost-effective to have everything balanced on the head of a pin than to have ten pins for ten things. Redundancy is not cost-effective. That is why redundant people are laid off. Redundancy is sometimes permissible for warfare or other emergencies, but we live at the center of the civilized world, where emergencies can never happen.

Even the atmosphere is part of this inter-connectivity, so we now have mega-storms and droughts, mega-germs and cancer. To work in the garden in the summer, I wear a bandana draped under an old cap. People tell me I look like a terrorist. If they only knew.

We have a war that is costing trillions of dollars, and the result is nothing but death and suffering. What used to be "the world’s longest undefended border," a few miles south of here, is now decorated with machine guns. It’s a war for oil, but in our supposedly free society most people are afraid to speak plainly.

The North American economy may not be dead, but it certainly has neither breath nor pulse. Jeremy Rifkin tells us that "the bottom eight percent will have almighty problems." I walk into a variety store on the main street of a nearby town. The only person I see is the manager. He is playing solitaire. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t stop moving cards. At the end of the world, cards will be more important than books: What did books ever tell us? Tuba mirum spargens sonum. Before the big crash, everything will be owned by a merger of Walt Disney and McDonald’s: mouseburgers for the millions.

There’s no point in complaining, since nobody’s listening. The television set in the average living room looks like the high altar in a medieval cathedral, but if I intimate that what appears in the mainstream news-media is just carefully orchestrated propaganda, the whispering begins: "paranoid conspiracy theory." Humans turn into hobbits as soon as they turn on a TV: it doesn’t matter if it’s true, it only matters if it’s good gossip.

The first sign that the girders are collapsing will take the form of a simple flickering of light bulbs. Electricity comes mainly from coal, natural gas, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams, and all of them are bad choices. The grid collapsed badly on August 14, 2003, leaving 50 million people in the dark, but George Bush refused to spend the $100 billion it would have cost to repair it. Most North Americans still cannot think of a failure of electricity as anything more than a momentary aspect of a summer storm. In other parts of the world, the future is already here: the lights fade out daily after four or five hours, if they come on at all.

There is another sign that might rate as first, and that is the collapse of the American dollar. In January 1994 the Mexican peso lost 30 percent of its dollar value in three days. Other currencies have collapsed in more-recent years. The IMF has always been there to assist such countries, even if the cure was worse than the disease. But a shaky American dollar is a different matter. Roughly two-thirds of the world’s foreign exchange reserves are in American dollars. What supports it is a 1975 agreement with OPEC that oil trading would be strictly in dollars. In the last ten years, seven countries have partly or wholly backed out of that deal, and in December 2007 Iran renounced petrodollars completely.

A major run on the dollar would be irreparable. There is no institution anywhere that would have the sort of money needed to bail out the USA. So the meltdown, for American citizens, would be like that in other countries, with massive bankruptcy, unemployment, and so on, but with the significant difference that there would be no bailout, no solution. The biggest problem with a petrodollar crash is that if it happened at all, it could happen with frightening swiftness. We could wake up tomorrow and realize that the only things we possess are the physical objects inside the house.

But the collapse of money would not be an essential part of systemic collapse. Money is only a symbol. Today’s money is hardly even that: it is not a disk of solid gold but a blip on a computer screen. The collapse of money would mean only the end of the enormous tax-collecting machine that constitutes modern government. It is merely a question of which collapses first: the ability to pay that extorted money, or the viability of the government that does the extorting. If the latter, we’re all safe.

It is the material girders that really matter: oil, metals, electricity, food, and water. Without these, human deaths become more frequent. Without hydrocarbons and machinery, corn production drops from 150 bushels per acre to 30. This will be the century of famine.

We need to beware of techno-optimism. It is absurd for a backyard tinkerer to be rejoicing at the installation of a recently-purchased alternative-energy device built of metals and plastic, when it is specifically metals and plastic that will be increasingly rare as the years go by. "High-tech solution" is an oxymoron.

When the system collapses, the perimeter of safety around one’s home will be considerably diminished. Metals and plastic come from an enormous distance, and in the future there will be no way to cross that distance. If we are prudent, we will have saved a few iron tools, which will become heirlooms, but other than that we must reconsider the communion with Nature that Thoreau advocated.

The long discussions of philosophy and economics and politics in Thoreau’s Walden are not the main point. They are just the superstructure, not the substructure, which is a far more ineffable thing. And yet the words are there, as in the first sentence of the chapter "Solitude": "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself."

I’m always telling people to be prepared, but I’m often the least prepared of all. Don’t fall into the river when you dip the bucket. A foot-thick spruce snapped off and went somewhere downstream. I left some food for the fox, but of course she didn’t come out last night. A day later, there is still no electricity. The wind is gentle for an hour or so, and then it starts to build again. The automated answering service stretches across the empyrean, telling me I will be connected with a representative at some time. Angels we have heard on high. Food, water, firewood. As they say: take it one day at a time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Campbell, Colin J. and Jean H. Laherrère. The End of Cheap Oil. Scientific American, March 1998. http://www.dieoff.org/page140.htm

Catton, William R., Jr. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Champaign, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1980.

Earth Policy Institute. Earth Policy Indicators.
http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Food Outlook: Global Market Analysis, November 2007.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/ah876e/ah876e16.htm

Gever, John, et al. Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1986.

Greider, William. One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Heinberg, Richard. What Will We Eat as the Food Runs Out? http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Archives2007/HeinbergEat.html

Hupp, Jessica. 7 Countries Considering Abandoning the US Dollar (and What It Means). November 6th, 2007. http://www.currencytrading.net/2007/7-
countries-considering-abandoning-
the-us-dollar-and-what-it-means/

Leopold, Jason. Dark Days Ahead.
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101706J.shtml#

Meadows, Donella H. et al. The Limits to Growth: a Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Universe, 1982.

Middle East Information Center. War in Iraq, ‘Petro-dollar’ and the Challenge by Euro. http://middleeastinfo.org/article4398.html

Pimentel, David, and Carl W. Hall, eds. Food and Energy Resources. Orlando, Florida: Academic P, 1984.

Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 1998.

Thurow, Lester C. The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow's World. New York: William Morrow, 1996.

U.S. Puts Machine-Guns on Great Lakes Coast Guard Vessels. CBC News, March 15, 2006. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/03/
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Whipple, Tom. The Peak Oil Crisis: We Are Starting To Dim. Falls Church News Press, 17 January 2008 http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?option=
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Youngquist, Walter. Alternative Energy Sources.
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Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. He can be reached at [email protected]


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