The Shape of Collapse, #2: Small Town America
by Jason GodeskySteve Laguvalin seems to be in a pretty anxious mood of late. He can see what’s coming, and wants to see more activity done in response. Recently, he’s been outlining a strategy, first with “Peak Oil and Community Considerations,” whereby he encourages “Peakniks” to move into small town America (”I would guess that anything over 50,000 people will probably be too great, and anything under 5,000 people may not have enough diversity of labor”), and “retro-fit” the town into sustainability with “sustainable,” organic farming and some green conservation matters. Steve has posted a book review of The Natural Step for Communities, and points to Kinsale, Ireland as a real-life example. Of course, this isn’t the first such suggestion. Kunstler is well-known for his love of small-town America. When MetaFilter was asked, “What should I learn for doomsday?” the single most common answer was, “mostly, farming.” Indeed, the “default option” for most utopian schemes throughout history has been to head out, “get back to nature,” and begin farming. That scheme never quite works out, and in this particular case, it’s probably suicide. Let’s take a moment to consider the shape of collapse in small town America.
To begin with, Steve’s list already has 10 criteria, and an eleventh suggestion, that eliminate almost every town right off the bat. It’s interesting that Steve picks 5,000 as the lower limit for a feasible village; archaeologically, a “city” is defined as 5,000 people or more. Less than that, and it ceases to be a city–it becomes a village. Horticultural villages tend to hover around Dunbar’s number, 150 people.
But finding an older town (which tend to be more in the East), that’s far away from any major highways (which tend to be in the West), with abundant fresh water, lots of organic farming and ranching going on nearby, sharing a generally progressive mindset (which is fairly rare in small towns at all), with a diverse age range, not upstream or downwind from any major chemical plants or the like, and having a diversified economic base that isn’t reliant on any one (or even a handful) of industries (which is next to impossible; even major cities tend to be reliant on one or a few industries) … that’s a lot of criteria to consider. Of course, they’re all reasonable criteria, and the very fact that it’s so hard to find one suggests all the ways in which small towns are liable not to survive collapse.
The most significant killing stroke for most of the United States will be the fact that almost no land in North America is left that is naturally arable. We produce more food than anywhere else in the world, that’s true, but not from our soil–it comes out of a thick layer of fossil fuel fertilizers we lay down. Without that, the Great Plains are already a desert: that’s where the Dust Bowl came from.
Perhaps Kunstler’s beloved upstate New York can make a go at this, but for most of North America, it won’t be an option. Even those very few that do meet all the criteria Steve outlines will have to face the fact that organic farming is only “sustainable” compared to factory farming.
“Sustainable” is a relative term. In the long run, as Maynard Keynes said, we’re all dead. Even fossil fuels could be used sustainably, if you only used them at an even slower rate than they’re created. Compared to factory farming, organic farming looks incredibly benign. But organic farming is essentially the very same kind of subsistence farming that we were up to before the Green Revolution. It was organic farming that turned the Fertile Crescent into a blasted wasteland; it was organic farming that turned the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. Organic farming is disastrous–only slightly less disastrous than factory farming.
Small towns do have some factors in their favor; they have close-knit, existing communities, so they don’t need to create a community out of whole cloth. We may like to snicker at “rednecks,” but these are the people with the most experience of hunting, fishing, and how to live in the wilderness. They are also the least likely to actually use those skills to survive, but that is another matter.
Those very few communities with the good fortune to enjoy all the advantages Steve iterates may survive the initial collapse, but within a century they’ll most likely need to deal with the fact that their “sustainable” organic farming is completely unsustainable. Most of those that escaped the initial collapse will likely perish then. Those that survive will do so by transitioning to a new model, one that really is sustainable. They might go all the way to foraging, but more likely, they would be pushed into horticulture.
The jury is still out as to whether or not horticulture really is sustainable, and it will be a few thousand more years before we can really say for sure, but for the moment, it looks like it probably is sustainable. Permaculture also belongs under this heading. But human societies are defined by their food, and horticulture brings with it certain requirements. The community will need to scale down from the completely unsustainable 50,000 - 5,000 Steve suggests, down to something more along the lines of 150 - 300. Tribal organization will likely be necessary. Religion and ideology will need to adapt, and this is something that excites me: a syncretic religion that turns Jesus into a shamanic savior, and Christianity into an animist religion.
But notice that at each of these two transitions, the vast majority of small-town America is cut out. I would be shocked if even 1% of the communities that now exist have managed to survive in 200 years. Small towns are immobile, subject to aggression, sunk costs, climate change, etc. They rely on soil and climate conditions that are changing rapidly. They can only survive in very specific conditions. Meanwhile, foragers can survive in nearly any climate on the planet; they move with their food; they are hard to track down, and worse for the would-be bandit, usually have nothing worth taking.
The future will likely include a few horticultural villages that can trace their history back to one of today’s small towns, but most small towns are simply going to be destroyed by the collapse of civilization.
Most small towns/villages will not come close to making it. I’ve read Steve’s article & its not really realistic. Its more idealistic, and wishful thinking in my opinion.
The number of folks he mentions in these sustainable towns are ridiculous. 5,000 sounds like far too many by a long run. I live in the east, and have been through/lived in a few of these small towns & the sense of community has diminished greatly, maybe not to the extent of large cities, but far from some utopian paradise of “working-together for the common good” etc.
I have lived in a heavily “redneck” area, and I disagree to an extent. There are more survivalist types in this group, then many other stereotyped groups in the USA anyway. Most will not change, or do they think in a progressive/or truly primitive manner. For most hunting is a hobby like playing video games, but with real life explosions & death. But for some Rednecks, they are more naturalists, earthy types who think a bit, rather than just ride ATV’s and drink Pabbs Blue Ribbon & Bud all weekend, in between the Skeet shoots & watching BassMasters.
Have a great weekend all, spend some time in the sun & have fun exploring the natural world, fairly soon it will become a necessity.
Comment by Bubba — 31 March 2006 @ 5:04 PM
Hey –
I expected to have more argument with you on this one Jason… but I think we are pretty much in agreement these days.
When we have discussed small towns and the crash before, I was thinking of my mothers home town: population 356 for the last forty years. Almost everyone related and knowing it, and the greatest majority of folks raised with hunting, farming, or — more often — both. Much different than 5000 - 50,000.
I do find that to be an interesting number though. Aside from the ‘not close to a highway’ bit, I think the ten characteristics perfectly fit us here. Even better, because of the University, I expect we would lose about half of our population virtually at once when the school ceased to function. Add to that the relative ease with which people will bail out and run for Chicago… we have talked about what happens if we don’t ‘get out in time’ and I think there is some possibility for us here for these reasons and others. But definately not using the same sort of reasoning that Steve has offered. On the contrary, my largest concern is whether we will be able to keep our house during the interrum depression… by the time that’s done, our population may well dwindle into triple digits…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 31 March 2006 @ 7:41 PM
Small and medium size towns may well become safe havens for a time. Those who have wealth - living in the large urban areas - will move to them when the hoards of unemployed become desperate criminals.
My guess is water will become the most important ingrediant, and assuming climate change brings drought, the Great Lakes watershed will be the next civilization zone.
Most know the southwest and Great Plains are suffering, but the Northeast may be just as bad.
http://water.usgs.gov/waterwatch/
Comment by Rick Larson — 31 March 2006 @ 11:07 PM
Rick,
Interesting comment on water–I certainly agree that water, especially in the arid West, may be a great catalyst of collapse. The US Bureau of Reclamaiton (part of the Department of the Interior) has “reclaimed” virtually all the land in the arid West (New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Western Colorado, Southern 2/3 of California, western Washington) with a series of massive engineering projects. These projects really are engineering miracles–but they are subsidized BY our curret brand of civilization. Despite the images of the massive hydro-electric turbines at places like Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee Dam, the true purpose of almost every one of these projects is water. The Colorado River System (major dams: Flaming Gorge, Glen Canyon, Hoover, Parker, Davis) exists to provide water for agriculture and cities in the southwest. BUT IT IS MAINTAINED AND PAID FOR by the revenues generated by its hydroelectric generation. If the electrical power grid collapses, if the ability of people to pay for electricity collapses, or if the distances from these generators to actually viable demand collapses creating huge transmission losses (I’m guessing that Las Vegas won’t last long…), then the ability to meet the massive maintenance requirements of their water-function also collapses. Water users are used to paying less than a penny on the dollar for the actual cost of the water they receive, subsidized by power generation. Bye bye southwest.
Interestingly, the dam/water function is a little microcosm of redistribution within civilization. The classic model: Dams perform essentially a storage function, storing several years worth of river flow to help make up for drought years and exact a surplus back to storage during wet years. They allow farmers (like the millions of acres of irrigated cropland in totally arid farmland around Yuma, Arizona) to create a reliance upon a perfectly uniform supply and cost of water, year in, year out. Without this uniformity–never mind the myriad of other potential catalysts of collapse–modern agriculture collapses.
Comment by Jeff Vail — 1 April 2006 @ 10:03 AM
Mr. Vail!
Interesting take on this particular microcosm. I would remind you of the potential for a drought to last well beyond the couple of years these engineering miracles are meant to withstand. If one were to extrapolate the graph found at the bottom of this link: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/drght_grissno.html
one could surmise we are due for the mother of all droughts to be typed into the annuals of recorded US history.
But of course, defoliating the planet and the spewing megatons of pollution to the atmosphere may hasten severe drought conditions.
Comment by Rick Larson — 1 April 2006 @ 8:29 PM
I live in Southern Ontario–with millions of people on my doorstep in the event of collapse. I’ve always thought my best move would be to get as far north as possible as quickly as possible. My wife is a survivalist…I don’t think there’s anything she couldn’t do if pressed. As for small towns, they’re better than big cities…but I think the smaller the better, at least at first: a little commune of like-minded friends. Small town life eventually, once the nasty aftereffects of collapse have been lived through, but not right away: too many big city people might have that idea.
Comment by Ken Breadner — 1 April 2006 @ 9:55 PM
The natural environment that supported our long-ago tribal ancestors is now devastated. The favorable locations that attracted human settlement have become urban wastelands. Fertile land is paved over or ruined by industrial agriculture, surface water is polluted, wildlife populations are under pressure. Global warming is just beginning to affect ecosystems in a big way.
How can we expect people to sustain themselves as noveau hunter-gatherers in this degraded post-petroleum world? I don’t think it will be possible, at least not until after earth has had a long recovery period — longer than my own lifetime and that of my children.
My bets for, say, the rest of this century are on the small villages and towns in areas where non-industrial farming is practiced.
Comment by Lisa — 2 April 2006 @ 12:06 AM
Our small town of around 2,000 has recently had a series of meetings/lectures on food security - expressly in anticipation of changing conditions. We are also blessed with a Chamber of Commerce that introduced and supports a local currency. Still . . . surviving economic breakdown, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Comment by JN — 2 April 2006 @ 4:38 AM
My concern about sticking with small-town farming/horticulture is the very short term post collapse period. I do not view it as safe to tie myself down to a particular piece of land once all the people who’ve huddled into the cities realize that they’re commiting suicide. Some of them are likely to form gangs and go out to intimidate/steal from farmers. I agree with Jason’s view that the safest place to be during that time is not there and the safest way to live is to have nothing the mauraders would recognize as valuable. So for at least a period of a few years it is most sensible to be a forager. Perhaps after that time in the medium term, some sort of horticulture will be possible.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 2 April 2006 @ 10:05 AM
My own hypothesis is that in the early stages of a collapse, or merely bad times in the industrial economy, rural areas will suffer first and worst. There are signs it’s already happening. A lengthy article at http://www.itulip.com/reportfromthefront.htm chronicles the collapse in the housing market in a rural area 90 minutes from a large city. The boost in oil prices made long commutes and heating costs unaffordable by many, who began selling. Prices dropped, builders went broke, leaving more unsold houses on the market, prices dropped further, and now the housing market is nearly dead in the area. And that’s how a housing bubble bursts, not in sustained fall in price, but in a sharp drop followed by the disappearance of transactions. It’s not like a stock market collapse, where, since no one really needs stock, sales skyrocket as everyone tries to unload their declining shares. Everyone needs somewhere to live, so when the housing market declines and people can’t make a profit anymore, they just stop selling. This is already happening in rural areas. Housing-market declines that are based on high energy prices will move inward from rural sites, so it strikes me as a singularly bad time to be buying rural property; prices are at or just past a peak. If you live in a city and want to get out, wait a year or two until rural prices have really dropped, and you’ll have your pick. But like others here, I doubt if you’ll be safer there. Only 5% of all US ruralites farm; the rest have jobs like everyone else. So does it matter much if all your neighbors are hungry and jobless, as could happen in cities, or only 95%, as in the country?
A friend of mine points out that every village worthy of the name is surrounded by walls. He says, when the oil is gone, let’s dig up every other city street, use the asphalt to build walls around each neighborhood, and plant in the new soil (okay, you’ve gotta remove the gravel roadbase first). That opens up a lot of urban land for food growing. Then use old cars as gates at the walls. Urban marauders will pick somewhere else to raid. I’m only half serious here, but if we get to that stage, solutions are going to have to come from somewhere.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 2 April 2006 @ 5:29 PM
I think the best solution would be urban horticulture based on humanure composting. It takes only a year for one person to make a considerable amount and it enriches the soil tremendously. Plants can even grow straight out of it.
Comment by Hermit — 2 April 2006 @ 7:09 PM
Well — people will still band together, whether at the tribal level or at the village level, and even the town level after a hard collapse. I think the local fixation on hunter gatherer lifestyle seems to ignore the way people behave historically when they possess a certain level of technology.
That said, I am in agreement with the statement that organic farming is not neccesarily a “solution” to industrial farming.
There are some organic techniques which are permaculture techniques. That, plus birth control, might takes us a long way.
A return to the hunter gathere lifestyle might be little more than cultural fogetfullness. The lessons we will shortly be learning as a race are important ones, and can’t simply live on as a mythology maintained by cave humans.
Comment by Jon S. — 3 April 2006 @ 3:09 AM
It would be possible to transform the cities into green areas for foood growing (vegetables and wild plants) with as many fruit and nut trees as possible, covering all spaces and using all the knowledge we can gather at that point.
Comment by Hermit — 3 April 2006 @ 8:32 AM
I find that highly unlikely. When we’re feeling an economic pinch, we move into cities, not away from them.
I don’t think there’s any arable land there, is there?
I’ve heard this argument many times before, but I still think it’s ludicrous.
Foragers survive in the Arctic; they survive in the Kalahari. The Allegheny National Forest may be much diminished from the spectacular old growth forest that once stood there, but it’s still a paradise compared to either of those locales where foragers have survived for thousands of years. There’s been a lot of environmental damage, but so long as there’s any life at all, there’s enough to support foragers.
By the same token, small towns and farming require very specific conditions, and a great deal of resources. If the environment is too poor that even foraging cannot be sustained, then all this is moot–we’ll all be dead anyway. But there is no such thing as an environment that can support farming, but not foraging. Anything that can support a modest agricultural life would be a paradise for foragers, but an ecology becomes impossible for agriculture long before it even becomes difficult for a forager. At the moment, there is really no climate on the earth’s land surface that is so inhospitable that foragers can’t make it there.
It’s like saying your car doesn’t have enough gas to drive 10 miles, so the obvious thing to do is to try to go 1,000.
Law of Conservation of Energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. You eat something, and some of the energy is used, some of it is passed. The energy in your feces can be used by plants, which use some of the energy, and the rest can be harvested, and fed again to humans–but that’s less energy than you started out with. It’s a lot less energy.
Urban horticulture can never be self-sufficient. Cities can never be self-sufficient. To make it so, you need to reduce population density, to get it in line with your food density. Using your own manure helps, but it’s nowhere even close to enough. Nothing is enough, except reducing population density. Of course, once you’ve reduced it sufficiently, you’re no longer a city–you’re a village, at best.
I’m not sure I agree. I’m not sure any of this had anything to do with our beliefs, or what we’ve “learned.” I think that was shaped by a bizarre alignment of circumstances that occurred ten thousand years ago, and in all likelihood, will never occur again.
If it’s “all,” then that leaves no room for humans–which makes it no longer a city.
If we have a city of people living underneath all that greenery, then it won’t stay green for very long. That many people produce a lot of things–most basically, a lot of methane. Your implied suggestion that all that greenery could feed all the people living underneath of it is false, as well. People need to eat a lot more than can grow in the space beneath their feet–or even above their head.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 1:12 PM
I think that there is an important human element being left out of the logistical discussion above.
janene wrote:
“I was thinking of my mothers home town: population 356 for the last forty years. Almost everyone related and knowing it,”
The 356 humans occupying this town and surrounding area all KNOW each other. close knit communities are notrious for being hostile to strangers and outsiders (anectdotal evidence, i know), so it would not be a stretch to think that, after collapse, the humans in a given area are going to band together into their own “tribes/insert term here” for all the same reasons we will. unless you are a long time resident or blood relative of so-and-so, your group will be viewed in a hostile manner, and would most likely attacked by the superior numbers for your resources. especially if they all know you have a self-sustaining ecovillage.
i see it like this:
“Gods and forest monsters i can deal with. it is the humans i am worried about.”
Lady Aboshi
“Princess Monoke”
Comment by Rory — 3 April 2006 @ 1:42 PM
“New York City is the city most prepared to cope with a $100+ tank of gas.“
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 4:02 PM
NYC may well be the best suited for $100 oil, but only for a time. As agriculture and shippers grapple with these high energy costs, NYC will not be the city to be as the food supply dimishes. This is when one can project those who have the wherewithall, will leave the crime for small towns.
No doubt, without arable land, small towns will also collapse. Just my vision has the much lower population able to cope with little, as opposed to NYC having none.
Comment by Rick Larson — 3 April 2006 @ 9:06 PM
Jason,
There’s actually plenty of arable land around the Great Lakes, although not much north of Lake Superior, which is where I grew up.
The problem is that a big and growing chunk of that is under cities. The “best agricultural land” in Ontario is underneath Toronto. The landbase certainly couldn’t support as many people as there are now without fossil fuels, but in theory it could support a lot of people until the soil was gradually degraded.
Comment by Aric — 3 April 2006 @ 9:12 PM
Exactly … so if the early stages make cities the best place to be, but then the later stages kill off all the cities, then you’re going to see a contraction of the population into the cities, and then an implosion.
After having a city built on top of it, I have serious doubts about how fertile it still might be.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 April 2006 @ 9:16 PM
I’m always surprised that I never see ocean platforms mentioned as a possibility. With a bit of work, greenhouses could be established with good soil to begin with, regularly augmented with fresh-water-washed seaweed compost and manure. Honeybee hives could be located in a central location in large scale complexes (which could be created out of abandoned tankers, welded together, with a massive platform fashioned on top of them). Even a large structure could have a certain mobility with simple sails (albeit limited) enough to establish trade routes and to forage coastlines without unsustainable stress on the area. Small diesel generators could be fed pressed coconut oil gathered on “shore leave”. The possibility of slow travel would also allow for relocation to areas reporting milder weather.
At any rate, it would be a shame to let a resource like empty oil-powered ships simply sit in harbors (or abandoned as “ghost ships” at sea) when they could be put to good use, in part as mobile foraging platforms.
Comment by Jim K. — 3 April 2006 @ 10:14 PM
Our level of polarity as a people astounds me. Rather than trying to work together to create a cohesive response to the coming peak in oil production, drawing from any and all available strategies, most of what I hear are overly simplistic attempts to find the silver bullet. As with any such debate it is interesting but not very fruitful. Agriculture, horticulture, permaculture, hunting, gathering, and composting one’s own poop will all probably play some role in energy decent. I find the idea insane that a single solution will be applicable to each individual’s necessary response to the coming crisis. In light of that I find relocation guidelines more useful than the idea of walking out into the woods (wherever that is).
Comment by nulinegvg — 4 April 2006 @ 12:06 PM
How do you gel a hope of “work[ing] together to create a cohesive response to the coming peak in oil production” with something like, “I find the idea insane that a single solution will be applicable to each individual’s necessary response to the coming crisis”?
Should we all be working together on one solution–or is it insane to expect one solution?
At any rate, building a sustainable culture is going to be far too highly variable to provide any kind of guidelines. At best, we can offer examples. Humans are not, cannot be sedentary animals. Any “solution” that advocates sedentism is not a solution at all, merely a postponement.
Small towns will likely end first in great economic stress, and then, all the same gruesome cannibalism you see from the cities. If you want to be a part of that, head for the small towns.
If you want to survive, foragers can survive anywhere. “Growing your own food,” whether by agriculture, horticulture, permaculture or pastoralism, represents an extremely small sliver of the possible approaches. It’s a tiny amount of the total diversity out there. Most of our approaches are lumped together under the heading of “hunter-gatherer.” Hunting, gathering, fishing … there’s a big difference between hunting birds, hunting big game, hunting seals, etc. What mix works best for you depends on your community, and where you set up. “The woods” are anywhere you can find that has a functioning ecosystem. A desert is an ecosystem. In our case, we’re looking at a national forest. This isn’t agriculture; we’re not talking about some narrowly-defined solution, with a long list of largely mutually exclusive criteria that eliminates almost any possible location on the planet. We’re talking about a tried-and-true method, one that we’re naturally adapted to, and one that works any place that you can find any life at all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 12:16 PM
“After having a city built on top of it, I have serious doubts about how fertile it still might be”
I’ve had success rehabilitating paved-over soil in cities. We’ve dug up a number of driveways and small parking lots, removed the gravel roadbase, (for use in gravel-bag building foundations) and mulched the compacted soil underneath. It comes back fast. Granted, getting a city’s worth of mulch is not feasible, but you can always dig to decompact soil. Fungal inoculation, a la Paul Stamets, eats up the hydrocarbon toxins. The soil is compacted but still plenty fertile.
Not to be Pollyanna-ish (I’m with Jason on the “small towns collapse first, then the cities” thesis), but there’s a lot of food-growing space in cities. When cars are gone, we can dig up at least 80% of all the streets and parking and reduce the remainder to one lane wide. Stack the asphalt and concrete up into walls and small structures. That’s a huge amount of land freed up; probably double or triple what is already open in cities. Then we can tear down most of the stores, garages, and everything else unnecessary. I don’t think it will save us, but it will buy some time.
I’m not optimistic about heading for the national forests to hunt and gather. Where I lived in rural Oregon, hunting season was a Big Deal. Nearly everyone I knew shot a deer and an elk every year; the woods were like a war zone for most of the fall: gunfire just everywhere! A fair number of people had excellent woods skills, particularly all the many bow hunters. And I knew plenty who were self-loaders, making their own bullets and gunpowder from huge bulk stores that will last them for decades. Thus they won’t run out of bullets when the shops go under. I would not underestimate the skill and sophistication of rural people in hunting; many of them live off of their elk and deer for much of the year (and out here they smoke and dry salmon, too). There are going to be a lot of people out in the woods hunting. Millions. Including all the well-educated city folk who have gotten used to retraining themselves repeatedly for economic survival, and who will do the same in woods skills when things get ugly. If you and I have thought of it, you can bet that a lot of other people will, too. Sure, some will be foolish and buy rural land and try to farm all alone, and some will join short-lived ecovillages that collapse since we don’t know how to live together. But I suspect that there will be enormous numbers trying the forager strategy, too. And killing an awful lot of game. Remember that just a small population eradicated the passenger pigeon in a few years, so how long will elk, deer, and gamebirds last with 50 million full-time hungry hunters? Being flexible and mobile will be very important if it all comes apart; if one strategy isn’t working, shift to another. I’m ready to stay in my progressive city neighborhood while the small towns collapse, do a rural ecovillage with my already-skilled buddies when the cities get ugly, and head for the hills when they enslave my ecovillage after most of the hunters are dead. Or whatever variation it takes.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 4 April 2006 @ 1:02 PM
I live in western PA. Something like a quarter of the NRA’s membership lives withn 300 miles of my home. I’ve had more contact with the rural hunter than most liberal city-folk–in fact, a good number of them make up my family. But I can say this: I have never met one of them who sees hunting as anything but a pasttime. In an economic downturn, they’ll give up hunting and work longer hours, move closer to the towns and cities to find better-paying jobs, and stay in and committed to “The System” until the bitter end.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 1:32 PM
“I have never met one of them who sees hunting as anything but a pasttime.”
Maybe this is an East Coast/West Coast difference. Many of the hunters I know in Oregon, Washington, and northern Cal see their annual deer (and the others they poach) as a crucial part of feeding their families for many months, as well as a way to thumb their noses at the supermarket and “the system.” Although the government was fairly successful at eradicating the populist, antiauthoritarian farmers that nearly revolted in the 1930s, that spirit still thrives in the rural West (witness the “property rights” movement). There seem to be two kinds of rural people. The majority left the cities sometime after the sixties for “rural quality of life.” They don’t have a rural tradition. In a crash, they’ll try to go back to the cities, although with the already-beginning decline in rural housing prices, and the high price of city housing compared to rural, it won’t be easy for many of them to move unless they do it soon. It was very expensive for us to move to Portland, even though we sold at the rural peak. The rest may be stuck in the country and forced to make do. I suppose some will abandon their houses or be forced out by banks (if there are banks) and will squat in cities.
The other kind of rural person, maybe 20-30% of them, have always lived there. These are the people who will do relatively better in a crash. They hate the government, hate the System, know how to hunt, remember the Depression or have parents who do, and won’t move to the city under any circumstances. They already know the woods. I was amazed to find that, even with the huge expanses of national forest in the West, there are few places that aren’t already hunted and well known by various old-timers. They already know the land. Those are the people who, post collapse, will shoot you when you poach in their favorite hunting area.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 4 April 2006 @ 2:25 PM
We get a lot of that here, too. I know plenty of folks who would likely starve in the winter if not for their annual kill. Even so, they always approach it as a supplement–the idea of living that way never occurs to them. That’s exactly what Giuli was getting at with “In Praise of Appalachia,” when she wrote:
As Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I think more people will die for a lack of imagination, than a lack of knowledge. The skills are not so difficult to learn, if you ever get the idea in the first place.
We don’t have too many of them hippies this side of the Rockies. Here, it’s a lot more than 20-30%, in fact, I’d say it’s almost all. But when demographers talk about “rural flight,” those are the people they’re talking about. Those are the people who, when the economy takes a downturn, always head into the cities. They may resent the system, but they’re also the most dependent on it. They know how to seperate themselves from it, but ultimately, their beleifs are a paradox. They believe the system is evil, but they also believe it’s evil to abandon the system. When the system dies, I don’t know of any that would even think to outlive it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 2:34 PM
Cohesive response does not equal single solution.
We should all be working together on solutions appropriate to the parameters of our immediate environment. What is local? What is small town? 150 people? 151 people? 300? 3,000? 30,000? Also, what is the level at which you want to effect change? Personal? Neighborhood? City? Nation? This affects your discussion on the issues.
There were functioning towns and cities before this incredibly input of energy was made available by petroleum. Yes there were also slaves. Actually there are still slaves but now I’m off topic. There are other interlaced issues: massive soil erosion, air and water pollution, human growth and carrying capacity, etc. Instead of funneling down all our options until we settle on one strategy like farming or hunting/gathering or any single solution how about utilizing what is most useful to our local surroundings. I grow annual food. I eat perennial fruit from my peach trees. I don’t think peaches grow in PA but I don’t think cranberries do well where I live. I don’t grow blueberries or mushrooms because I can collect all I need from the forest near by. I don’t eat meat in part as a response to what I believe the future holds but I raise rabbits and I will surely increase there production and use them as a food source if I can’t get enough protein from other sources. I like what Toby said about flexibility. I think it’s the key. I fear for anyone (like the Norse for instance) who thinks that there is only one way to do things.
Urban agriculture is an ancient practice only recently abandoned as the cities grew and the industrial revolution paved over the spaces traditionally set aside for this practice. To continue to abandon this opportunity as we address other issues seems counterproductive. Modern day Hong Kong produces 45% of its local vegetables on only 6% of its land. Should they stop, pack up and move out into the woods to gather? Are they doing it sustainably? I don’t know. Take a look at the Cuban response to artificial peak oil during their “special period� in the early 90’s. One of the many responses was to grow food everywhere. This response came in the form of individual gardens, community gardens, company gardens, city-wide food production networks, changes in government strategies, etc. They didn’t abandon there entire way of living and learn to live in a completely different manner. They adapted in a somewhat painful manner to a new way of doing thingS. Not just a shift in lifestyle from A to B but a collage of diverse and often unusual ways of meeting needs. This allowed for the continuation of their culture. No doubt it included lively discussions such as this one.
Comment by nulinegvgv — 4 April 2006 @ 3:03 PM
That doesn’t make any sense. How can I work together with someone in Brazil on solutions appropriate to the parameters of our immediate environments? What works well for him would be disastrous for me, and vice versa. If there are many solutions, then we all need to pursue our local solutions on our own. Cooperation and localization are mutually exclusive options.
There were–but they had the benefit of agriculture, something that we won’t have this time around. We were always escalating before, jumping to the next rung of energy consumption right before the previous one collapsed behind us. Now, there’s no more rungs to jump to, and this one’s giving way, and all the ones below it gave way long ago. This time, we’re going to fall all the way back to the stone age, because you can’t farm dead sand.
It’s not about funneling down to a single solution, but taking realistic stock of how this is likely to unfold. If you plan to head for a small town, you are going to die. The cornerstone of everything we’re talking about here is Daniel Quinn’s mantra, “There’s no one right way to live.” Right now, everyone’s living the same way. Permaculture isn’t a very radical change; it’s still more or less living the same way as everyone else. So, when that possibility collapses because everyone’s been doing it so intensively, such minor flourishes on the theme as pastoralism or permaculture are going to suffer the exact same fate. Growing your own food is one way to survive, but I don’t think it has much of a chance to continue on much longer. Everything else is lumped under the category of “hunting and gathering,” so saying that “there’s only one way” is just a symptom of our ethnocentric definition of terms, where we’ve invented afew dozen categories to define the way we do things, and we lump “everything else” under foragers. There were equestrian foragers, aquatic foragers, desert foragers, Arctic foragers–forages account for the vast majority of our species’ cultural diversity. This isn’t a question of the “one right way”–this is a question of trying something–anything–else.
People will definitely start doing a lot more urban agriculture. They’ll have to. The Maya did urban agriculture, too. But it won’t be enough. It never was. Cities always need a hinterland to suck resources out of, and if cities don’t have the energy to threaten the hinterland, they’ll die.
Yes, and now Havanna produces 30% of its own food. That’s very impressive. That also means an immediate 70% mortality rate if they’re ever left to their own devices, with the rest succumbing to the violence that would follow.
The very fact that so few people will be willing to try living in an entirely different manner is precisely why the mortality rate is going to be so catastrophic–and why those of us who do try it will have almost no competition.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 3:22 PM
“Those are the people who, when the economy takes a downturn, always head into the cities”
When I made the claim in an article, based on my readings of Lewis Mumford, that in bad times cities do better than the countryside, I got some challenges. Aric McBay at inthewake.org/urbrursustain.html quoted William R. Catton’s “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change” which said that “the farm population in America ceased declining (as it had been doing) and increased between 1929 and 1933 by more than a million. The long-term trend of movement out of farm niches and into urban niches was reversed during the Great Depression.” And an archaeologist in Missouri described to me his inventory of thousands of Depression-era camps in the Ozarks made by escapees from Kansas City and St. Louis. So it turns out that in bad times, the cities have a net loss, not the gain that “rural flight” would require. And the Depression wasn’t a collapse, just severe unemployment.
“But when demographers talk about “rural flight,” those are the people they’re talking about.”
Rural flight is a long-term trend forced by farm mechanization, deliberate economic policy, and other social factors. But short term, the data say that in bad times more people flee to the country.
Of course, the difference now is that only 1% of all Americans farm. Even in rural areas most of them (95%) don’t farm. In 1930, says USDA, 25% of Americans farmed. So all those people who once had farm relatives to flee to, don’t anymore. And Jason is right in saying that most ruralites are totally dependent on the city-based economy. I have a feeling that there will be people flooding both ways in search of survival, all of them wrong.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 4 April 2006 @ 3:57 PM
Certain solutions to the coming crisis will be applicable in multiple locations. The sharing of useful information concerning the successful strategies of response with others elsewhere is what I mean by “We should all be working together on solutions appropriate to the parameters of our immediate environment.� I’m reading you right now because either I think I will learn something useful or I think I’ll be entertained. It varies paragraph but paragraph but mostly it’s a mix. Seriously though I have to ask you a question. In response to my statement,
“There were functioning towns and cities before this incredibly input of energy was made available by petroleum.�
You replied,
“There were–but they had the benefit of agriculture, something that we won’t have this time around.â€?
My question is when exactly will we not have agriculture? I believe we will have agriculture for as long as humans exist. Now that time period might be limited. Although I think it’s unlikely every single one of us will die out in the future barring asteroid strike or maybe total nuclear war but if we’re talking just about the decline in available resources I don’t see a complete end to the human race and I don’t think you do either. Perhaps a long time from now tribes of nomadic people will completely abandon all forms of agriculture and hunt and gather only. But even many native North Americans grew some of their food. The ability to grow at least a portion of your food, however small, will always exist if you are willing to stay in one place for a growing season. We can argue about how much can be produced using this system or that system but agriculture will not go away part and parcel. Also for better or worse the energy rungs below us have not completely collapsed. Watch as the U.S. and other nations begin to use more coal as a response to the decline in available oil. I do not endorse this strategy but it will happen and for what it’s worth it will cushion the fall. I think the focus should be on the only energy input we receive from outside this planet namely solar but all available energy sources will be utilized by enterprising individuals.
In some ways I wish for a shock to the system like the one felt in Cuba. While I’m sure it was painful to experience, it solidified the people and it provided the necessary catalyst for change. I expect we will retract more slowly- slow boiling the frog. It might be volatile at times but outside of nuclear winter I see human existence continuing in some form or fashion and I see people planting beans for food along the way.
Comment by nulinegvgv — 4 April 2006 @ 4:05 PM
Toby–I guess we’ll find out all too soon, won’t we?
I’m a big fan of that kind of open source approach. It’s why this website exists, rather than just the Tribe of Anthropik going quietly on its way.
I guess you never read the Thirty Theses? That was thesis #29. Basically, in the short term, there’s no arable soil left. The only reason we have agriculture now is because of all our fossil fuel fertilizers and petrochemicals, without which, the Great Plains are already a desert. In the long term, by the time the soil has regenerated, the Holocene will be over–whether it’s global warming or a renewed ice age, the specific climate required for agriculture is about to fall through. Growing your own food is always a precarious situation, requiring a very precise set of domesticable species, climate, soil, etc. Those elements all aligned with the Holocene, but it was never a stable foundation.
Agriculture emerged at several places within a relatively short period of time–because the unique alignment of factors provided by the Holocene provided the first opportunity for it. In the short term, the resources they needed have all been used up. In the long term, that constellation of factors is over.
And there’s the key, because only under extraordinary circumstances can people stay in one place that long. “The birds of the air have their nests, and foxes have their dens, but the son of man has no place to lay his head.”
As they try. The coal that’s left is too deep. We need specialized machinery to get to it–machinery that requires oil.
Not really. They like to brag about centuries’ supply, but that’s only at current levels. If you increase usage to help make up for oil’s losses, then the supply drops to a few decades at most.
If it doesn’t happen quickly, and soon, then it will happen quickly only slightly later–only, it will kill us all off. See, “Timeline of Collapse.”
Besides being shortly impossible, it’s also horrible for you in terms of health and requires a great deal more energy. Why, given the choice, would anyone work harder, in order to be less healthy and have less food?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 4:24 PM
A miscommunication here:
“We don’t have too many of them hippies this side of the Rockies.”
When I wrote that a lot of people left the cities during and after the sixties, I didn’t mean the “back to the land” crowd. Far more of the recent ruralites are mainstream folks escaping crowded cities, too-expensive suburbs, declining urban regions, etc. Most of the recent ruralites are middle-class Americans. And you bet, they will try to get back to the city when things get hard.
Comment by Toby Hemenway — 4 April 2006 @ 4:29 PM
Capitalism is a flexible system and number of dead people is irrelevant. When the oil is sucked up, the solar electric energy will replace it finaly, and there will be more than enough of cheap labour for that project to succeed. From mass die-offs a new elites will emerge, and a new technologies that will allow the civilisation to suck up all the resources (maybe even the iron from the core) and destroy the biosphere. Then, humans will simply leave the planet in gigantic spaceships leaving the barren (Mars-like) planet behind.
That’s what I believe to be the most realistic scenario. Now, it might be possible for some self sufficient communities to appear here and there, during that hellish proces, but majority of people will be under system’s control, being under the spell of technocracy. They will just work harder and longer and die younger like they did before. Minority of us primitivists and survivalists won’t be able to influence others, we won’t have tme nor chance.
Now, what’s the problem with self sufficient ex-urban communities that gorw their food? Assuming that their population is falling down, that they have a lot’s of space (and in town where I live, not in US but in Croatia, there are not so many tall buildings and there is a lot of space, lot of parks and grasslands inside), that they are using compost which includes dead humans and a tons of shit, I guess they will be able to survive quite a while. Ok, agriculture is never a part of closed energy circle, so what, nothing’ s going to last anyway. At least there will be enough people for organised defense of anarchist village.
Comment by Hermit — 4 April 2006 @ 7:04 PM
The thing that’s keeping photovoltaic cells from taking off isn’t labor–it’s all the petroleum and petrochemicals and oil-based plastics. Estimates vary as to whether or not your average PV even produces as much energy during its lifetime as there is consumed in its creation.
“All chiefs and no indians”? Who’s doing all this labor after the die-off? Ostenisbly, not the new elites. How are you going to feed these oppressed masses, without agriculture? And … what resources? Metals, fossil fuels, all the resources our civilization depends on are too deep now. We don’t have enough energy to get to the earth’s core now, but in the future when we have less energy it’s going to be feasible?
I don’t think it even makes for terribly realistic fiction. Forget likely; I’m not even sure how such a thing could be possible.
We don’t have to. I have no doubt they’ll work longer and harder, but you’ve heard of getting blood from a stone?
In the transition from “completely unsustainable,” to “small horticultural village,” they have to pass through the massive die-off. It’s unlikely to be 80% with nothing to eat at all, and 20% fat, dumb and happy. It’s more likely to be everyone getting only 20% of what they once got. When people get desperate, they look around to see who’s not suffering. This is when you typically get a revolution, and a bloody purge of the elites. While the foragers will appear to them as the only people on earth who have it even worse than they do, a sustainable, well-fed community in their midst is an excellent target for a little raiding, maybe a little cannibalism.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 4 April 2006 @ 9:25 PM
Jason, you’ve brought up this cannibalism thing a couple of times here … Though I consider myself a rather realistic “doomer,” I’m hoping I don’t really have to fear cannibals? Any chance they’ll all die quickly from diseases caught be eating their own species? Or cannibals eating cannibals? Wouldn’t that quickly build crazy food chain toxicities?
Comment by Ryvr — 4 April 2006 @ 11:19 PM
Not as quickly as they’d run out of food. Cannibals eating a person or more a day makes for a vicious quick extinction curve. Cannibalism is an option of first resort for most of us–we’ll try eating each other long before we try eating dandelions. The Donner Party resorted to cannibalism in the middle of a pine grove, after all.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 7:52 AM
I’m curious. If foragers can survive nearly anywhere, and if there were many forager tribes in pre-colonization North America, then why were so few of them able to maintain their lifestyles, even after being displaced? Some reasons I can think of were that decimation from disease and battling with settlers probably did a number on their populations and cultural stabilities, and that they used a lot of energy fighting with other tribes in addition to the settlers. But - apart from perhaps disease - how do we know we won’t face the same problems? Is it that the Indians were faced with a constantly increasing settler population, and a population that had a wealth of resources and was increasing in complexity, whereas collapse-era foragers will be facing a decreasing population with reduced resources and decreasing complexity? I still think that collapse-era foragers will have the larger obstacles of cultural establishment and cohesion and lack of immediate precedence with respect to their pre-colonial forbears, although disaster does tend to inspire cohesion and cooperation among small, familiar groups.
Comment by Raku — 5 April 2006 @ 11:13 AM
Because the umbrella term “forager” is ridiculously broad. An Inuit can’t go on living in the Kalahari, even though the !Kung do just fine. When displaced, North America’s foragers were taken from the ecology they knew, into an ecology they didn’t. Foraging as a strategy is incredibly broad, and for us, it’s more or less the same–we’re equally alienated from all lands. But once you start to become a forager, you form a relationship with that ecology. Having that suddenly taken away is a trauma too great for the culture to bear.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 11:19 AM
That kind of goes against what you’ve said about basic wilderness living skills being able to be picked up in a weekend. In any case, I guess then post-collapse foragers will face the same obstacles if they end up being displaced.
Comment by Raku — 5 April 2006 @ 11:51 AM
No, it’s the difference between surviving and living. Obviously, displaced Native Americans survived. Their culture no longer lived. The things that made them unique were the things they had accrued and perfected, adapted to a specific niche that was closed.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 April 2006 @ 11:54 AM
Jason, you are so convinced that modern technology and capitalism are doomed because the fossil fuels and other reserves (metals, coal, uranium, whatever) are being sucked up. It is true that we can’t re-synthetize naphta from water and air after it is gone, but there are alternatives that can be exploited until the Earth’s surface is destroyed completely. Biodiesel for example. Genetic engineering is progressing, new materials are being created, and not petroleum based. We already have a palete of materials from bio-sources, natural plastics, that can be modified and strengthtened, and there are a lot of alternative possibilities that are being explored. Too many patents are not utilized right now because of the oil dominance. Who knows what can be developed? Maybe we’ll have farms full of some bugs that excrete chemicals useful for making some new superior material. There are alternatives, even those we consider to be sustainable on the small scale, that could give capitalistm a shot in the arm. Yes, there will be a major crisis when the oil is gone, third world will starve, a lots of people will die, but not all of them. A decent amount of work slaves will stay under control of the elites, and a crisis will provide the opportunity for developing alternative techno -ways. Elites will have enough oil in reserve to power the bombers and tanks to keep the poor away from their riches, for long enough to start production of bio-fuel. Scientists will gather around the power and work hard to come up with temporary solutions, like they always do. It’s very improbable t