Why not something in between these two extremes? Last summer I chose a small city of 165K people near prime agriculture country. This city is about 100 miles north of Seattle and 60 miles south of Vancouver. It’s an affluent hippie place so the people are to my liking.

Granted, Bellingham’s a nice town, but 165K is high for sustainability once things tighten up — though of course population decline will take care of some of that. Two years ago my spouse and I moved from Seattle to a small college town in Oregon, population 20K, located in an agricultural region with a lot of organic horticulture, 300+ miles and two mountain ranges from the nearest large city in any direction you care to name. To my mind that’s closer to sustainability.

Still, your basic point is valid. There’s a tendency to think in hard dualisms — megalopolis vs. wilderness — when there’s a lot of potential gradation between the two. Also, of course, what works in one place, or for one person, may not work elsewhere or for someone else.

–john

I’m a 20 minute walk from the mountains where I can forage if need be.

You’re lucky, but I’d still maintain that it’s your quick escape that’s your best hope, and that small city that’s your worst danger.

I’m a 20 minute walk from the mountains where I can forage if need be.

Even since Gibbon, all historians have noted that the Germanic invasions were a proximate cause of the Western Roman Empire’s collapse, but not its ultimate cause. The consensus is that Rome suffered from a number of internal problems that provided a situation where Germanic tribes were able to overcome the empire, despite having failed so many times before, even when they had greater numbers, and greater “will.”

The proximate cause of the Germanic invasions was not any kind of “renewed will” on the part of the Germanic tribes. Rather, a cursory examination of the course of the invasions shows that these were not so much foreign invasions as mercenary revolts. Hired as foederati, the Empire would regularly renege on payment after the fighting was done. Alaric, Odoacer, and nearly all the leaders of the Germanic tribes were leaders of such rebellions, where the mercenaries wanted to be paid.

Why didn’t the Empire just pay them? Roman ethnocentrism certainly played its role, but the reason they left the foederati out in the cold was because the Empire was facing a lot of problems–in most cases, the same problems that prompted the recruitment of the foederati(2) in the first place. First hired due to civil wars (1), it became difficult to pay the foederati in cash (3) or land (4).

(1) Civil wars. The Third Century Crisis was very clearly a problem of diminishing marginal returns on complexity, involving all the facets of complexity. The Empire survived primarily by Diocletion’s fissioning strategy, by creating two polities, thus creating a sort of controlled collapse where the level of complexity and problems of scale were artificially lowered to a more feasible level. By placing most of the resources in the East, and most of the defended borders in the West, this division also set the West up to fail from the start. The civil wars endemic to the Roman Empire since the major conquests of the Republic and the resulting problems of scale and complexity were a response along the same lines to that problem of scale and complexity. Civil wars moved the empire towards a more fractured state, where the problems of diminishing returns were smaller-scale, and thus, more easily dealt with.

(2) The foederati themselves were hired because of Rome’s increasing costs for agricultural production, and the increasing complexity of its legal system and entrenched aristocracy, allowing numerous loopholes by which Roman citizens could escape military service. Caracalla’s universal citizenship was a bold move that gave the Empire several more centuries by vastly increasing the scale on which the Empire’s subjects were willing to invest in complexity (in this case, by giving them a sense of Romanitas, and belonging to the Empire). This answer also made it more difficult to hire soldiers–particularly as the complexity of Rome’s agricultural systems became too much, and those citizens were more urgently needed for farming as productivity decreased. The Empire was thus forced to look outside its borders for military defense, and to rely more heavily on the strategy of foederati. While used from the earliest days of the Empire to one extent or another, it was an eventual over-reliance on that strategy that ultimately led to the end of the Western Empire. The East lasted for several more centuries, and its slow fall is even more illustrative of Tainter’s argument, but let’s stick with the West for the moment.

(3) Hyperinflation, coin clipping and other currency problems plagued the empire from the third century on. Worse, as Tainter explains, the bureaucratic cost of the empire’s increasing administrative complexity consumed larger and larger amounts of the empire’s productivity. This left little money on-hand to pay foederati, and represented something of an ongoing economic crisis.

(4) Rome was an agrarian society, where agricultural land was more valued than cash, and the Germanic tribes shared that worldview. More than cash, they wanted lands inside the empire. More than anything else, the “barbarians” wanted to be Romans. As agricultural productivity continued to drop due to the diminishing marginal returns on productive complexity, competition for the land that remained intensified, with existing citizens exerting pressure on the imperial government not to give precious arable land to “barbarians.” Though cloaked in ethnocentrism, like most ethnic conflicts, this campaign was motivated by basic material needs–in this case, the need for good, arable land to counteract the diminishing marginal returns on complexity that the empire faced.

In all of these cases, we see the root cause is, again and again, the diminishing marginal returns on complexity, operating on multiple, simultaneous levels that give rise to many different symptoms that ultimately combine to bring down the Western Roman Empire with Odoacer’s revolt in 476 CE.

To make a comparison: the US regularly defeated Mexicans for generations, but in the last 20 years, Mexicans have shown greater “will” or desire and are reconquering the Southwest. There is little, I believe, that “Anglos” can do about it. And it’s prbably not because of complexity (I think, anyway).

American racism aside, I do not think there will be any Mexican “conquest” of the southwest so long as the United States government remains in power. There is migration, but that is a very different thing from conquest. The southwest will not secede to join Mexico, and the idea of an armed Mexican invasion at any point in the foreseeable future is laughable. Immigrants are, to one extent or another, “assimilated.” Mexicans migrating to the U.S., like Germanic tribes with Rome, want nothing more than to be “Americans.” Our reluctance to admit them is due to the same material needs, driven by the same diminishing returns on complexity (jobs, farmland, “water wars”) as with the Romans. We have yet to screw them over as the Roman Senate did the foederati, though, and until that occurs, they will continue trying to be American, and there will be no revolt. So, I fail to see how it has anything at all to do with “will.”

I’ve read Jared Diamond and think he’s full of nonsense. He has been discredited by someone, I forgot who, but I can look it up if need be.

Diamond has done quite well for himself, but he’s suffered the price of academic fame: “disproving” him has become a cottage industry. His main points are extremely solid, consensus views. Some of his supporting details have drawn a lot more fire. A lot of people take issue with Diamond, but it’s usually on this or that detail; rarely does it address his main point, which are generally not at issue. So, lots of people disagree with him, but all the work done to “discredit” him is of a far more academically questionable level of quality than Diamond himself. He is sometimes controversial, but he is by no means discredited.

This is where the logic falls apart for me. My mind immediately asks, “What city-type work will be left in a bona fide collapse?”

None. But people don’t recognize collapse when it’s upon them. They recognize an economic downturn, a recession, or even a depression. By the time Odoacer declared himself King of Italy in 476 CE, Rome had been sacked several times. No one thought it was the end of the empire at the time. As a catabolic collapse, ours will likely happen much more quickly, but I will be surprised if it happens so quickly that we don’t first see a surge of migration to the cities with rural folk giving up their farms and looking for work in the city. When they get there, they’ll likely find that there is no work, and perhaps be stuck there for the horrific orgy of violence to follow.

Last summer I chose a small city of 165K people near prime agriculture country. This city is about 100 miles north of Seattle and 60 miles south of Vancouver. It’s an affluent hippie place so the people are to my liking.

This is included when I mention a “city.” It’s still completely unsustainable and far beyond the limits of what the region could support without leeching resources from a much larger hinterland.

This is where the logic falls apart for me. My mind immediately asks, “What city-type work will be left in a bona fide collapse?” Think about that for a minute. Most of the work performed in cities consists of little more than shuffling paper–both actual and virtual. In a state of collapse, where people must refocus on the basics of survival: shelter, food, water, and safety, most of those big city job skills will become worthless over-night.

So what if you were a “master of the universe” Wall Street banker before the crash? If I control access to food, you may not have much to barter with after you have sold off all your furnishings and art at firesale prices in the initial stages of collapse.

The people who will survive will most likely be the ones with basic skills such as knowing how to grow/hunt food, repair generators, and salvage photovoltiac systems and other necessities.

A major currency in an energy-induced collpase will be your energy. If you need food but lack money to pay for it, then hop aboard that stationery bike connected to a generator and peddle for an hour to keep the merchant’s refrigeration systems running.

One more point: this debate always makes it sound as if the choice in residences is between Brooklyn and some isolated farm 30 miles outside of Hootersville.

Why not something in between these two extremes? Last summer I chose a small city of 165K people near prime agriculture country. This city is about 100 miles north of Seattle and 60 miles south of Vancouver. It’s an affluent hippie place so the people are to my liking.

If things get really bad, one of these farms may want to hire an extra hand with my business experience. If things become truly desperate, I’d happily work for food and a bunk-bed in lieu of a paycheck.

I don’t agree that there’s no arable land left…. It could still support people living on it but not if they want to use industrial methods to sell the produce on the market and be able to pay the mortgage.”

This is my understanding too … I reread the referenced Thesis #29 which seems to suggest that horticulture, not agriculture, will be possible for many survivors.

I expect that many people will not move to the country and grow food because they will sit around starving and moaning that they want their job and green papers back… while I will be excited to be growing green vegetables rather than getting the silly paper from punching a time clock.

I’ve read Jared Diamond and think he’s full of nonsense. He has been discredited by someone, I forgot who, but I can look it up if need be.

Will, of Nomadic Thoughts, links up a Houston Chronicle interview with the author of the now popular books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond. If you don’t know about Professor Jared Diamond’s fame, well Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Pu…

Check out this interchangeable rifle/shotgun:

http://thompsoncenter.primediaoutdoors.com/tcstory18.html

It’s lightweight and may be The tool for hunting as many calibers gives one an edge when needing to find ammo.