The Limit of F(x) As x Approaches C(ollapse)

Ooh, a storm is threatnin'

my very life today,

If I don't get some shelter,

Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away...

– The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter

I have previously stated that our present global economic and political systems are breaking, due to a declining resource base and a deteriorating natural environment. I have also stated my belief that the masters of these systems are not interested in fostering or even allowing local, resilient alternatives for ordinary people. Instead, their aim at present seems to be to maintain the present systems at all costs, and to force ordinary people to continue to rely on these systems.

The present economic and political systems are also predatory and catabolic, in that they tend to devour large numbers of ordinary people in order to enrich the masters of these systems. While the enrichment of these masters has also historically come through economic and industrial expansion, the base of natural resources necessary for this expansion has begun to contract, because many of these resources are now used up. Because the base of natural resources is now contracting, there is no longer the opportunity for large-scale economic growth. Therefore, the catabolic, thanatoeconomic character of our present systems will become more prominent, as the rich will only be able to maintain and increase their wealth by jacking increasing numbers of the poor.

I have come to believe that under these circumstances, it is not possible at this time for most people to build truly resilient, permanent communities that are immune to trouble from economic collapse. There are some sectors of the population (such as those who are very well off) that will be able to form such communities. Yet most people will be prevented from achieving this because of crippling loads of personal debt, as well as the desperate attempts on the part of banks and government at all levels to keep prices of essential assets so high that obtaining them requires taking on additional debt. In short, most ordinary people are finding that most of their resources are being taken from them by rich predators, or that most of their resources are going toward defending themselves from these predators. The best that individuals and communities can do is to achieve a sort of “relative” resilience based on having a multitude of skills and strategies for coping with a rapidly changing economic and political situation.

This changing economic situation is increasingly looking like a hard crash. Our present system is unsustainable, yet its masters will not willingly choose a sensible, orderly and equitable transition to a state of lower economic activity and energy use. Rather, they will try to maintain the status quo until they simply can't anymore, and then some things will break down catastrophically. A good question is when that breakdown will occur, and what will be the limiting conditions which force such a breakdown. We might also ask what such a breakdown will look like.

As far as limiting conditions go, there are several authoritative thinkers who have written about these things. Rather than trying to reproduce their work, I'll merely offer my summary two cents' worth. My focus will primarily be the United States and its government at all its levels. The limiting conditions I see are as follows:

1. Government debt. As debt increases without bound, so does the yearly revenue required to service that debt. (To service debt means to make the regular payments with interest that are required as part of the contract between borrower and lender to pay off the debt.) When the revenue required to service the debt exceeds yearly taxes taken, governments must default. Then, no more debt is issued, the creditors come knocking, and governments collapse or cut their spending drastically.

2. Post-Peak Oil. Crude oil production is inextricably linked to the output of industrial economies. If the world is post-Peak and oil production is falling, the global economy must contract. This is especially true of the United States. As the American economy contracts due to a declining resource base, the ability of the various levels of the American government to borrow more money or to service existing debt declines. This pushes us further toward default and collapse. (By the way, when estimating the severity of future oil supply constraints, I rely on the German Energy Watch Group's Oil Market Report predictions.)

3. Food supply collapse – due to climate change and other environmental degradation, and post-Peak Oil. There is a real possibility of food shortages in the First World within the next few years, due to the collapse of agricultural water supplies because of overuse, misuse and climate change-induced drought. (See http://www.theecologist.co.uk/News/news_round_up/293297/colorado_river_running_on_empty_by_2050.html, and http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-climate-farms22-2009jul22,0,7564338.story for instance.) Famine will also reduce economic activity and hinder the servicing of government debt.

4. The present, ongoing economic contraction consisting of business failures and hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs each month. This leads to more loss of income, more loan defaults on private debt and more bank failures. Of course, those who hold the debts of people who have been thrown out of work will not want those debts to become worthless – thus more lenders will call for more “bailouts” (i.e., transfer of bank debt to Government books). Yet the Government is getting closer to being caught in a maxed-out condition where further debt transfers become impossible.

5. The collapse of the powers of the corporate state. As government access to debt collapses, so will government ability to try to protect big business from incurring loss (no one will be able to afford to pay the bulldozers to knock down abandoned houses anymore, for instance, nor will any government be able to afford to enforce anti-competitive laws against small farms and small food producers).

6. The pledge of dis-allegiance if the Government tries to increase its ability to service debt by means of an excessive (confiscatory) tax burden on the poor and middle class. Should we tax the rich? Absolutely yes! But so much of the Government's activity of late has been to burden working class taxpayers in order to secure the wealth of the top 5 percent of the American economy. (Think AIG and Goldman Sachs, for instance.) This can go on for only so long.

What will a breakdown look like? I have a pretty good idea of what it will look like at first in many neighborhoods, as it is already starting to happen. First, there will be a rare, small number of people who have prepared quite fully. Chief among their preparations will be the elimination of all debt. (This is why I say they will be somewhat rare. Within the last couple of years, I have met only two other people who have paid off their houses.) These people will increasingly find themselves the odd men out (or odd women out) in neighborhoods where many people's homes are getting repossessed and becoming vacant. Also, those who still have a “job” in the conventional sense will increasingly be a minority. Lots of neighbors will suddenly have lots of unplanned-for “free time.” There will also be more store closures, so that it becomes harder for people in a neighborhood to obtain the things they need. There will be an increase of homeless people as well, and as time passes, an increase of renters or squatters. Neighbor whose house is paid for, meet your new neighbor: the squatter or renter who just moved in next door. In this state of flux, there will be a great need for wisdom, tact, politeness and diplomacy in forming new relationships. For perceptive souls, these conditions may also present opportunities for “culture repair.”

What are effective strategies of personal and group resilience for such conditions? The answer depends on whether one intends to stay in a particular place at all costs, or become a migrant. “Should I stay or should I go?” That depends on what holds you to a place. “If I stay, but if I owe,” what should I do? Develop a suite of alternative gigs in case you get laid off. Make sure that whatever you do, you make enough to pay down your debt. “If you stay and you don't owe,” this gets easier – you just have to worry about utilities and property taxes, as opposed to a mortgage. If you rent, most of this still applies – develop a suite of gigs that earns enough money so that you can pay your bills. In all cases, reduce other expenses so that you have enough money for the essentials. (Note: this will involve learning a fair amount of self-reliance skills.)

Why a suite of alternative gigs? Because the official economy is no longer willing or able to guarantee an income to a person who simply pursues a single career or profession. As an example, this last week, I was riding a MAX train home when I ran into a co-worker from my office. We talked about the fact that both our departments are very, very slow right now, as well as strategies for dealing with possible layoffs. He is a piping designer by profession (as in piping for large industrial plants), but he is also a sports referee. If my office shows him the door, he's got a large number of games lined up where he can referee and get paid for his services.

But are you already out on the street – have you fallen from “respectability” due to loss of income? There are strategies you can pursue for protection and mutual aid. I will have more to say about these strategies in a future post. Some of these will be useful not only for those who are homeless, but for other groups usually targeted by our predatory system.

One thing I must emphasize: I am a Christian. Therefore I believe in an absolute moral standard. I will not therefore ever suggest turning to certain criminal or unethical deeds as a coping strategy.

Is Community Resilience Possible At This Time?

My post, "Escaping the Thanatoeconomic System," marked a change of my mood from mildly optimistic to quite sober (maybe even somber), as I came to realize the full implications of some of the societal trends I have been following. For a long time I had realized that not only is our present economic system breaking, but that it is not in the interests of the masters of that system to foster local, resilient alternatives for ordinary people. Yet I had been reasonably optimistic that ordinary people of small means could engineer local, resilient safety nets of alternative systems by which they might decouple from the official economy. Of course, this ability would depend on the presence of local resources for these safety nets, as well as a certain minimum level of access to these resources.

While I still think that some members of the populace might be able to build such safety nets, I have recently come to believe that the majority of Americans will probably not be fully able to do so at present, due to lack of access to the necessary resources. While there are some things that most people will be able to achieve, there are also things that will be beyond the reach of all but the most affluent.

One thing that may be beyond the reach of most people at present is building local, permanent resilient neighborhoods and communities. The reasons for this are obviously tied to land use and ownership. Most people rent, or they “own” in the sense of making installment payments on a loan used to buy a house. During the run-up to the 2005 peak of the housing bubble, prices of homes were continually and wildly inflated, far beyond the ability of most people to pay, while wages for most workers remained stagnant or declined in real terms. Then the economic collapse began, triggered by the rise in oil prices leading to the spike in 2008. That economic collapse has resulted in millions of jobs lost, as well as further erosion of incomes; yet there has been no debt relief for people who bought houses during the bubble years. A debtor living in a regular, modest house (I'm not even considering McMansions) is not resilient in the face of economic shocks, but is brittle, and is likely to end up out in the street in the event of a job loss or some sudden large expense.

Now one thing that could have provided opportunity for many people to build resilience is a sudden, large-scale reset of real estate prices nationwide. Had prices been allowed to fall to a level that people could actually afford in this present economic climate, more people would have been able to find homes that they could afford to stay in for the long term, and they would have been free to work on other strategies of resilience, such as gardening and energy efficiency. Indeed, there were and are places where this reset has occurred – places like Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and other cities in the Midwest. As word got out about home and land prices in places like these, forward-thinking people moved to these places in order to build a more sustainable life for themselves.

Yet these places also attracted speculators looking to get rich by playing a real-life version of “Monopoly.” I believe they also attracted the notice of the masters of the banking and finance sector as well as their friends in various levels of government. These people had a vested interest in preventing any fall in real estate prices, since most properties had been bought on credit and these properties were collateral for securities priced at an inflated value. What has therefore emerged over the last several months is a concerted effort to keep the price of housing high by artificially restricting access.

Thus we have seen cities bulldozing abandoned properties; cities foreclosing on people who can't afford to pay their property taxes; the withholding of foreclosed houses from the market by the banks that own them; and cities creating “land banks” consisting of abandoned properties which the cities either demolish or remodel in order to collect revenue and bring housing prices back up. (Sources: “Unpaid Property Taxes Hit Cities, UPI, 30 July 2009, http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/30/Unpaid-property-taxes-hit-cities/UPI-99581248962645/; “Land Banks Gain Popularity As Way To Fight Urban Blight,” USA Today, 9 July 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-07-09-landbanks_N.htm; “Flood of Foreclosures: It's Worse Than You Think,” USA Today, 23 January 2009, http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/21/real_estate/ghost_inventory/index.htm)

Many of these strategies were anticipated in the United States Housing And Economic Recovery Act of 2008, signed into law by President Bush, which, among other things, set aside $4 billion for the establishment of land banks and the redevelopment of abandoned, foreclosed or “blighted” properties, in order to boost real estate prices. These strategies continue to be supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed into law by President Obama. These strategies are part of a broader effort to protect the rich from a loss of the notional value of their assets, yet they continue to put basic resources such as houses and land out of reach of ordinary people of limited means. Any regular person trying to buy a house nowadays is still likely to be subjected to an unsustainable burden.

And the attempt to reinflate the housing bubble is only one example of the imposition of unsustainable burdens on the American working class. Another glaring example is the continued bailouts of the banking sector, bailouts which now number in the trillions of dollars, just to cover the losses of bank “assets” which had been built on loans that are now unrepayable. Lest anyone take this as a signal to become stupidly partisan, let me remind any readers that this mess is bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans are to blame. The net effect of the bailouts will be to saddle ordinary Americans with yet another unsustainable burden – that of being turned into collateral for a huge mass of bad loans.

These are just a few examples of the way in which our predatory system is taking from ordinary people the very resources they need in order to foster resilience. These examples illustrate the extent to which the masters of our present system will go in order to maintain the status quo. It was considering these examples that made me increasingly pessimistic about our prospects for a “soft landing,” an orderly and equitable transition to a state of lower economic activity and energy use. I don't think we will achieve a “soft landing,” because the masters of the present system will do their best to keep things as they are until they simply can't any longer, and then some things will break down catastrophically.

What will such a breakdown look like? I can't say with any confidence. There are people much cleverer than I who have thought about these things. I've read Dmitri Orlov; now I may get my hands on a copy of Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. Is now the time for communities and neighborhoods to try to foster resilience? I think it may not be possible at this time. (But if anyone can prove me wrong, feel free. I'd welcome it.) It may only be possible for individuals to foster resilience, and if communities try for such a goal, it may only be possible for groups of nomads or migrants. Building permanent, local resilient communities might have to wait until our present system has gone a little further down the road of collapse. In the meantime, allow me to recommend Jeff Vail's blog (http://jeffvail.net), where he tackles some of the same questions (although he does a much better job, in my opinion). His latest series is called “The Rise of the Diagonal Economy and the Transition to Decentralization,” and he's just getting started. There is also a post on the internet titled, “"Peak Civilization": The Fall of the Roman Empire,” by a man named Ugo Bardi. Note especially what he says about the emperor Diocletian.

“What advice do you have, then?” someone may ask. Unfortunately, I don't have any right now. I need time to think about this some more. These thoughts have definitely changed the character of the upcoming interviews I was planning to do for this blog; now I'll have to approach things from a different angle. Someone else might be asking, “Do you see any other examples of large-scale hindrances to community resilience?” My answer is that if I tried to think of all the potential hindrances, I'd be here typing until midnight, and I'm trying to cut down on that sort of thing... ;)

Escaping The Thanatoeconomic System

“For if they do these things in the green tree, what will be done in the dry?”

- Luke 23:31, World English Bible

Thanatos: death (Greek).

Let me begin with some insightful comments made by blogger Stormchild on my recent post, “Airlines And Moral Systems Failure.” That post dealt with the financial squeeze now being experienced by the major airlines due to Peak Oil and economic collapse, and my belief that airlines are now resorting to cost-cutting measures that are beyond the bounds of reasonableness, measures that put the flying public at risk.

Stormchild observed that, “...we live in an economic system that rests, ultimately, on human sacrifice, and almost none of us realize either this fact or its implications.” She also observed that, “In order to function, our system actually requires a permanent underclass, AND needs a certain number of people to be deprived of their livelihoods at regular intervals. [Consider the obscene fact that a company's stock price goes up when it indulges in mass firings.] This same system places little or no value on preserving human lives; business schools in this country will actually teach you how to determine when liability exceeds profitability – a.k.a., how many people you can afford to kill before it gets too expensive.”

These observations are quite accurate. The fact that our present official globalist economy functions in this way speaks volumes about the motivations of the masters of this economy. Our large-scale, energy- and capital-intensive industrial economy is a predatory machine run by predatory masters, and those of us who are not rich enough or well-placed enough to be its masters are its prey. That means that the majority of people on earth are prey. Over the duration of this economy, the conditions imposed on us who are prey have oscillated between moderately decent and horrible, against a backdrop of industrial and economic expansion due to the acquisition of ever larger quantities of natural resources and labor which served as feedstocks for this economy.

Now this economy and its masters are under stress as its resource base declines, and as its base of capital also shrinks. This should be of great concern to us who are the world's prey, because of the well-known tendencies and behaviors exhibited by predators under stress. The recorded history of such tendencies and behaviors give us a clue as to what we can expect from our present globalist, corporatist system and its masters as that system experiences increasing stress.

I have written about the need to foster resilient neighborhoods as preparation for a post-Peak world of economic collapse. My writing has been partly a blind, groping, feeling exploration for solutions to the immediate, present threats that I see in neighborhoods, communities and cities in the U.S. In thinking about these things, I have also read many of the writings of other thinkers, people whom I believe to be far more knowledgeable than me regarding Peak Oil, climate change, and their likely societal effects.

But I have noticed a tendency among many of these writers to think only of the scientific or technical implications of the effects of resource constraints and climate change on our social arrangements. So there are endless discussions about how post-Peak oil production declines will affect finance, global shipping and land-based transportation, or about the importance of mass transit and localized food production, or about personal preparedness along the lines of organic gardening and relocating to ideal “lifeboat” locales. Those who discuss “resilient communities” have tended to approach the subject by laying out high-level theories of optimum social organization, organization whose effectiveness is often bolstered by technological advances (see Global Guerrillas: THE RESILIENT COMMUNITY, for instance). The sense of many such writings is that resilient communities are a futurist vision that's always just around the corner.

These theories have value, and I would not discourage them. Yet they do have a blind spot. Pardon me for saying so, but many of these discussions and theorizings sound so very “upper middle-class white.” Therefore, they ignore the present relation between our predatory global economy and the large numbers of people who are its prey. This is a dangerous omission. Consider the dictionary definition of resilience: “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” In order to have this ability, one must have a stable resource base from which to draw in order to deal with the stresses of misfortune and change. Those who are deprived of that resource base are not resilient, but brittle and prone to break down. Consider a well-fed, athletic, well-rested teenager who is suddenly thrown into an ice-cold pool. The experience is undoubtedly a shock to him, yet once he swims to the side and gets out, he easily recovers from it. The same is not true of someone who is seriously ill, malnourished and sleep-deprived.

Being treated as prey robs people of the reserves of strength they need in order to be resilient, for all their resources are either consumed in coping with their predators or are taken from them by their predators. Here are some recent examples of our masters treating us as prey:

• The U.S. Congress has been trying to pass broad “food safety” laws in response to public concerns over tainted food and food recalls. The problem is that these laws don't correct the bad practices of the large agribusinesses that produce tainted food, but rather, the laws impose such a huge regulatory burden that they drive small, sustainable farmers out of business. Thus they force us to rely on the big agribusinesses instead. Just last week, the House of Representatives passed such a bill – H.R. 2749.

• U.S. mortgage lenders are, by and large, not cooperating with the recently enacted $75 billion Federal program to prevent foreclosures. This is because lenders who foreclose are able to collect lucrative “junk” fees on delinquent loans. Such fees include late fees, title search fees, legal filings, and appraisal fees. (Sources: Homeowners ask government in lawsuit: Where's the foreclosure relief?, and Profit motive may trump plan to modify mortgages.) Heaven help you if you get in trouble on your mortgage, because the banks sure won't – they get more money from making you homeless.

• Amid California's recent budget crisis, the Governor was proposing a budget that would protect the outlay of State funds to the private prison industry – even though there were many headlines about the need to slash social services. At present, there are three corporations operating private prison chains in the not-so-Golden State. (Sources: Schwarzenegger Talks Private Prisons and Budget Cuts | Youth Radio, and http://reason.org/blog/show/solving-the-ca-budget-governat, from Reason Magazine which should perhaps be named Un-reason Magazine for praising such an evil arrangement.) Meanwhile, “Governator” Schwarzenegger seems uninterested in genuinely rehabilitative ways of dealing with California's prison population, as these might be bad for somebody's business.

• The City of Los Angeles has been criminalizing homelessness under the direction of its police chief, William Bratton and his “Safer City” initiative. Under this initiative, it is illegal to sit, sleep or store personal belongings on sidewalks and other public spaces. Also, if you look shabby and are caught jaywalking or loitering, the police come after you, whereas the police don't seem to notice the same offenses when done by people who don't “look” homeless. Los Angeles is just one example of the broad criminalization of homelessness in America. (Sources: Los Angeles accused of criminalizing homelessness, LA is "Meanest City" for Homeless: Study, and A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities.)

I believe that these examples illustrate how our present economic masters will increasingly treat us as their opportunities for further enrichment through economic growth disappear. Even while it was expanding, the official economy always had catabolic tendencies – i.e., there were always some members of that economy who were consumed by it rather than being allowed to function as members of that economy. But as our economy continues to contract, its catabolic tendency will be amplified, and may well become its main characteristic. As more and more people slide from middle-class status to poverty, these people will increasingly discover what it means to be preyed upon, as they are consumed in order to satisfy those who are still rich.

If these things are so, then figuring out how to build resilient communities must take into account what sort of people are the prospective members of that community. Are they poor? Are they people of color? Are they both? If so, then they must not only contend with the general exigencies of post-Peak Oil, climate change and general economic collapse, but they must also be able to devise effective protection from their predators. (By the way, most of us are going to get a lot poorer.)

This is something that I don't hear many resource and sustainability activists talking about. I don't think, for instance, that the Transition Towns movement has thought about this. But this is what concerns me. How does someone keep from having his house repossessed? How do people of color protect themselves from police racial profiling and selective arrest? Where can homeless people go to find a place of stability where they can regroup? If you get thrown in jail – even for a stupid reason – how do you find a job afterward? Some of the abandoned houses I showed in my last post are in my neighborhood. How do we fix problems like this? How can poor people rebuild social safety nets that are now being dismantled by the rich? How can we stop getting jacked?

These are questions I've tried to answer in my posts on neighborhood resilience. I'm a little frustrated right now, because I haven't come up with satisfactory answers. Maybe I'm just not clever enough. But why are there so few other “collapse-aware” thinkers who are trying to tackle these things? We need answers, and right now.

Reckoning A Living Wage

The last few posts of this blog have covered the key role of local businesses and local economies in promoting neighborhoods and communities that are resilient in the face of Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse. Local businesses that have the greatest chance of early success will be those that make or repair necessary or highly beneficial material goods, or that provide essential or highly beneficial services, for market niches that cannot be easily serviced by the global “official” economy due to incompatibilities of scale. By incompatibilities of scale I mean that these market sectors are small enough and/or scattered enough that they can't be served by the mass-produced, mega-chain store approach that is typical of large-scale businesses. Of course, as economic contraction and collapse proceeds, an ever-expanding number of markets and people will be abandoned by the official economy, leaving more room for the rise of local businesses and local economies.

One key question for someone seeking to start his own local business is how much to charge for goods produced or services rendered. A big part of this question is for the prospective small businessman to figure out how much income he needs to live on, and this in turn is influenced by the state of the prospective market – that is, how much the businessman's customers are willing and able to pay for the goods and services rendered. The calculation of the businessman's required income can be stated another way: he must calculate what constitutes a living wage for himself and his dependants and employees.

The calculation of a living wage can be influenced by any number of factors. Many people start with a picture of a desired lifestyle, and by means of simple mental arithmetic they come up with the income required for that desired lifestyle. Our uniquely American problem is that almost everyone who watches TV (and a sizable number of people who don't) has been trained to imagine a very lavish lifestyle, and to want an income to match. Most of the celebrities and influential figures in our country are afflicted with this disease, and they will resort to desperate measures when their income doesn't match their desired lifestyle. Names like Donald Trump, Bernie Madoff, and Kim Basinger come to mind.

This diseased state of mind isn't confined to the rich and famous, as events of the last few years have shown how many Americans lived far beyond their means. And this mindset is a hindrance to the correct process of reckoning a living wage. The correct process begins, not by formulating a picture of a desired lifestyle, but by figuring out how much customers are willing and able to pay for the goods and services offered by a prospective local business. If a woman opens a shoe repair shop in a rural town in Kentucky, and hopes to have ten customers a day and gross $50 for each repair job, she's likely to be disappointed if the town's residents are so poor that they can only afford $5 or $10.

I'd like to suggest that those Americans who want to start local businesses should reckon their figure for a living wage downward, because the ability of most people to pay for goods and services is decreasing. This is due to three factors:

1. First, the global economy (and the large-scale American economy) is now contracting, due to constraints in the availability of natural resources necessary to supply the economy. It is becoming more evident that the world has passed the peak in global oil production, and that oil production is now beginning to fall. We have already seen peaks in other resources including metals and rare-earth elements. Peak coal is not far away. The availability of fresh water is also declining, due to overuse of rivers and drought-induced climate change. Some analysts say that the world experienced Peak Phosphorus (especially inorganic phosphates) in the 1980's. (Source: http://phosphorusfutures.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=30) Phosphorus is a key ingredient of agricultural fertilizers. Resource constraints and exhaustion mean a shrinking economy, and a shrinking economy means less income for each member of that economy.

2. Second, the concentrated wealth of the United States, as well as the lavishness of the American lifestyle, have been built on a foundation of military conquests, trade agreements and treaties that facilitated the concentration of the world's wealth in this country, and in the hands of the ruling elites of this country. Thus, for instance, the U.S. has only five percent of the world's population, yet uses over 40 percent of the world's oil. Now those complex arrangements of military might and slanted treaties are starting to unravel. Net oil imports to the U.S. have been declining for the last few years as oil rich nations have become wealthier and have begun to use more of their own oil. Foreign nations are becoming much less willing to buy U.S. debt, and are turning away from the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency, due in part to the huge debts for which the U.S. government is already liable.

3. The collapse of credit worldwide which precipitated our present economic crisis has also resulted in the loss of access to credit for ordinary people, who are now forced to live within their means. The means of ordinary people are shrinking as companies, stung by failing revenues and their own lack of access to credit, lay off ever larger numbers of employees. The increasing layoffs and downward pressure on living standards are the evidence of a shrinking global economy and shrinking American access to the goods and services provided by that global economy.

A word about point #2 above is in order. Some analysts and “collapse thinkers” have voiced the possibility of a sudden, near-term collapse of the arrangements which underlie the American lifestyle – perhaps through a massive sell-off of foreign-held U.S. debt, or a Federal default on U.S. debt, or a sudden crash in oil production or oil exports. If that happens, there will be a swift and sudden decline in the standard of living of most Americans, since we depend on imported goods for so many things. To cite just one example of the scale of this decline, consider what would happen if the American five percent of the world's population that now uses 40 percent of the world's oil woke up one day to find that they now had access to only five percent of the world's oil. On a per capita basis, this would be roughly equivalent to each American finding out that his or her income had suddenly been cut to one-eighth its former value.

Now a per capita estimate of the effects of such a collapse is necessarily flawed, as wealth is not equally distributed in this country. Nor is access to wealth. In the event of such a crisis, it follows that some people would hardly be affected, while a large number of people would be thrown into grinding poverty. Yet it seems quite likely that whether this happens suddenly or gradually, our nation is moving toward a condition in which we have access only to our fair share of the world's resource base – and that the non-renewable part of that base will be continually shrinking. Under these conditions, the sort of small businesses that survive will be those whose proprietors offer necessary goods and services at an affordable price, and who are able to stay in business because they have scaled their own needs back to a level that's sustainable over the long haul.

Here then are some good questions: Could you live on an income that's one-eighth or less of your present income? If not, what steps could you take to simplify your life so that you could live on a drastically reduced income? How much can the citizens of your locality actually afford for the goods and services you propose to sell them? Are these goods and services really so essential or beneficial that people are likely to buy them?

Swinging Your Own Hammer

In my post, Localism And Resilient Neighborhoods, I discussed the importance of building and supporting local economies as a part of building resilient neighborhoods. Of course, building local economies means the revival of a great number and variety of local businesses that were destroyed by the rise of globalism and the concentration of massive amounts of capital in the hands of a small number of national and global elites. The revival of local businesses that actually make or repair the material goods needed for everyday life is a key element of neighborhoods and communities that can survive large-scale economic shocks caused by the failure of the global economy – a failure that is occurring right now due to the collapse of the resource base needed to sustain that global economy.

A key question is whether now is the right time to begin reviving and/or building local economies, and the necessary businesses that make up such economies. That question can be answered on two levels. On one level, the answer is “Of course this is the right time! In fact, we should have started yesterday, given our precarious, crumbling national economy and the coming economic shocks caused by our post-Peak resource base.” But I'm asking a different question, namely, whether people who are trying to rebuild a local economy in their locality can get away with it at this time.

I believe that at present, an increasing number of people are starting to resent the official economy and the conditions under which they are forced to participate in it. I believe that these people would gladly turn to alternatives if these alternatives were readily available. Yet the masters of this official economy and of the big businesses that comprise this economy are actively working to prevent the emergence of alternatives. In this they are willing to use any tools at their disposal, including the lobbying of politicians in order to make it hard for people to pursue alternatives. The sudden emergence of many local economies based primarily on large numbers of small local businesses would constitute a threat to the “official” global economy and its dominant players. Therefore I am not asking whether “we” should formulate some grand policy for reviving local economies, nor am I asking whether we should try to enlist the help of our government at the Federal or State level to promote such a policy. Rather, I'm asking, “If I want to start a local business that both makes and sells useful things, can I get away with it at this time? Or will I be driven out of business?”

To put the problem another way, the official global economy is like a huge, vicious pit bull that has suddenly shown up in the front yard of a home. Inside is a group of children who are trying to escape from the house, but they are rightly afraid of the pit bull. They have already lost a couple of their comrades who tried to make a break for it and were caught in the jaws of this evil mutt. But a Providential event has befallen them in that the pit bull has just knocked over a trash can and eaten some really gross, poisonous garbage. Now he's looking quite sick, and the children are starting to think he may die – or at least that he might be sick enough that they could outrun him and get away from that house. Yet they're not quite sure – so they converse back and forth along the following lines, “I think maybe he's dead. Wanna check it out?” “No way, man! You go first.” “Chicken!” “You see what that dog did to Jimmy's leg, don't you?” “Maybe if we throw a stick at it, we can see if it's still alive...”

Is the official economy sick? Absolutely. Those who depend on that economy for their livelihoods are being jettisoned from that economy in staggering numbers. The “official” unemployment rate in the United States is now 9.1 percent, although if you check out Shadowstats (http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data), the actual rate is over 20 percent. Is the Government, the enabler of that official economy sick? One way to answer that is to note that the Federal government depends heavily on debt, and foreign nations have grown increasingly reluctant to buy U.S. debt. Many state governments are in much worse shape. (California is the present poster child.) Is modern industrial society feeling well? Consider that there is now abundant evidence that global oil production is past peak and in decline, and that U.S. commercial crude inventories have been falling consistently by 3 to 4 million barrels every week for the past two to three months. Oil – the original topic of this blog, as well as the cause of our present economic collapse – is about to assume a central role in our story once again.

Is there still some “bite” left in the jaws of this pit bull? Unfortunately, yes. Consider government, for instance. There are several “food safety” bills now making their way through the United States Congress, bills that, if signed into law, would drive small farms and food producers out of business by creating such an expensive regulatory burden that only the biggest agribusinesses could survive. It's not surprising that large food corporations like General Mills, Kraft Foods and W.M. Kellogg have endorsed this legislation. There was also the “Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act” passed earlier this year ostensibly to protect children from lead and toxic chemicals. What the law actually accomplished was to saddle small American producers of children's toys with a crushing burden of required tests on products that obviously did not contain lead in the first place. These cases illustrate the strategy of big business, when faced with a crisis caused by a lack of safety in products produced by big business. That strategy is to promote legislation that does not forbid the big business practices that lead to dangerous products, but that rather saddle all businesses with a regulatory burden so heavy that it can only be borne by big businesses. Thus they drive smaller businesses out of business.

The use of governments to promote the policies of big business is but one of the strategies of big business. There are the other strategies – economies of scale, specialization, large-scale automation and the use of cheap labor in a globalized economy. Do you want to make something for a living? How about custom handmade guitars? It is certainly possible to make a decent living as a luthier, as long as you have a good reputation for quality products. Some well-known custom and semi-custom luthiers come to mind, such as Linda Manzer, Kevin Ryan, Grit Laskin and George Lowden, and their instruments can command a price of several thousand dollars each. Yet China has recently emerged as a lutherie powerhouse, and Chinese instruments of high quality can be had very cheaply, due to low labor costs and cheap fossil fuel-based transport. Last year's oil price spike put a temporary crimp in globalism, but that spike has gone away for the present.

Okay, then, how about bicycles? China's prominence is true in spades here. Almost every inexpensive bike sold in the USA is made in China. Yet it is also becoming true that expensive, supposedly “custom” bikes are also made in “low-cost” overseas locations. Consider the offerings of Rivendell Bicycle Works, a seller of “custom” bikes that were at one time all made in the United States. The majority of their most popular models are now made in foreign countries such as Japan (for the Rivendell Atlantis) and Taiwan (for the Sam Hillborne). Now don't get me wrong. I really like Rivendell and respect the company, and I know they aren't exactly rolling in dough. But even they have been somewhat altered by globalism. My point is that making a living in the First World by making things in the First World is still fraught with difficulty, unless you're a really big player.

So what's a person to do if they want to start a local business? What should be the focus of their business? This question is no doubt uppermost in the minds of many people who see that the official globalist system is breaking and who are looking for some sort of escape. Yet such people may feel trapped, people whose education has “...prepared [them] solely for working in a large organization,” and who can't imagine earning a living otherwise, as Matthew B. Crawford says in his book, Shop Class As Soulcraft.

Crawford's book is a deliciously subversive critique of modern globalism, and of white-collar culture and all its support institutions, including schools that teach useless factoids while destroying common sense. To those looking for a localist escape from the breaking globalist system, Crawford suggests finding work that essentially requires human craft of the kind that can only be gained through experience, and that can only be handed down through apprenticeship. This sort of work can't be globalized, outsourced, automated or exploited over an Internet connection. He suggests “finding work in the cracks,” work that is not being done by the official global economy because its scale or scope does not fit the large scale suited to the organs of the global economy.

Figuring out where the “cracks” are and what sort of work can be done in the cracks is a challenge I leave to you, the reader. (It's certainly a challenge I myself am facing.) But I leave you with some suggested avenues of exploration for finding such work. These were written by Ahavah Gayle, author of the blog Shalom Bayit, and are found in a series on that blog titled, “The Collision With The Reality Train – What Can We Do?” The relevant post is here: Repost: Third and Final part. Enjoy!

(P.S. I once got to see a Rivendell Atlantis as I was coming home from work and waiting at a MAX platform. It belonged to a middle-aged lady who was also a bike commuter. I came up to her and said, “Is that a Rivendell Atlantis? Can I drool over it?!” She said, “Sure! Do you need a bib?” Those bikes are cool.)

Sources:

• “Are Foreign Investors Losing Interest In US Treasury Bonds?”, Christian Science Monitor, 15 June 2009, (http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/06/15/are-foreign-investors-losing-interest-in-us-treasury-bonds/)

• “General Mills, Kraft Seek Safety Rules In 'Philosophical Shift'”, Bloomberg, 4 March 2009 (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aRnLL61d9xmc&pid=20601087)

• “Made In China,” Strings Magazine, October 2003 (http://www.stringsmagazine.com/issues/strings113/china.html)

• Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work, Matthew B. Crawford, The Penguin Press, 2009

Localism And Resilient Neighborhoods

This week, I'd like to resume discussion of building resilient neighborhoods as preparation for Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse. In this post, I will emphasize the importance of supporting local economies as a part of the building process. In an earlier post, Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods, I said the following: “Building resilient neighborhoods therefore consists of devising effective defenses against breakage [of neighborhoods], repairing the culture of the neighborhoods and fostering neighborhood self-sufficiency.” One key element of neighborhood self-sufficiency is financial self-sufficiency – that is, being as free as possible from the claims of the official money economy. This means either not having huge financial obligations, or having locally-owned, locally-controlled means of meeting the obligations one has, or both.

As a practical example, consider a homeowner who wants to become more self-reliant and less susceptible to economic collapse. Let's assume that his house is on a fairly decent lot (around 6000 to 7000 square feet), and that he has started “farming” his front and back yards in order to provide some of his own food. Let's also give this man a clothesline and some chickens in his backyard and assume that he has saved up a bit of money to pay for super-insulating his house and installing a simple rainwater catchment system under his roof gutters.

This is all well and good. The man is pursuing financial self-sufficiency by providing for his needs in a way that reduces his need to spend money over the long run. But let's assume that he “owns” his home only in the sense that he is paying a mortgage. If we give this guy a two bed, one bath house and assume that he bought it in Southern California between 2000 and 2007, he probably has a sizable mortgage payment (say, around $1800 a month if he bought it before prices really took off). That's a significant financial burden, a significant obligation to the official money economy. Even if we assumed that the homeowner in question owned his home outright, he would still have to pay property taxes as part of the cost of living in a city. Yearly taxes for this man's house would probably run between $2500 and $3000. That money would have to come from somewhere. If he didn't pay it, the County would foreclose on his house and he would be homeless.

So how does this guy get the money? Until recently, the answer to this was, “By participating in the official economy.” In the overwhelming majority of cases, that meant getting a job from an employer. Now, this employer demands a certain amount of work, as well as a certain level of personal preparation, skill and competence. The employee must spend some of himself in his labors and in his preparation to perform his labors competently (i.e., in schooling and self-study). The employee's labors generate wealth for the employer, who returns some of that wealth to the employee as compensation for his labors.

This arrangement works tolerably as long as the employer returns a fair share of the wealth generated by the employee's labors, and as long as the cost of goods and services required by the employee do not exceed his compensation from his employer. But whereas that may have been true of American employers and employees before 1980, it is certainly not true now. The trends of deregulation and globalism, pushed by corporations and corporatist politicians from 1980 onward, have produced a world in which an ever-larger share of the fruits of the labors of workers are skimmed off and sent to a small “club” of ever-richer ruling economic elites, while an ever-smaller portion of the wealth generated by those labors is returned to the laborers. Thus, for instance, there is an expanding class of recent college graduates who can't get work paying more than $10 or $15 an hour. (See http://legacy.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/livingtoday/050516/degree.shtml, http://www.impactlab.com/2007/04/30/study-growing-number-of-college-graduates-classified-as-poor/, and http://www.newser.com/story/58492/college-grads-face-years-of-lower-wages.html. Or if you're in college now, maybe you should skip reading these. I don't want to depress you.)

Meanwhile, the cost of necessities such as housing and health care skyrocketed during the period between 1980 and the last two years. In fact, the cost of health care is still climbing. And the rise in the cost of an education has outpaced the nominal national inflation rate. These rising costs have led to massive indebtedness, which does not make for a very resilient or self-reliant situation for most people. Organic farmers know that soils can become exhausted when they are over-farmed without returning returning adequate amounts of dead plant and animal matter back to the soil. In the same way, most American workers are becoming depleted and exhausted as the majority of the wealth generated by their labors is taken away from them by greedy faraway corporate masters who do not give back enough to maintain the workers on whom they depend. All these things mean that it has gotten much harder for people to meet their financial obligations to the official economy by working in that economy.

This is why localism has become such an attractive concept recently. The premise of localism is the local control and ownership of means of generating wealth, where profits generated by local businesses stay in the community in which these businesses reside. Thus the fruits of the labors of local workers remain in the communities of these local workers, providing them with the nourishment they need in order to continue their labors. If, for instance, a person worked for a fairly-run local business and her labor generated $50,000 a year in wealth for the business, it is far more likely that she'd be compensated with a fair share of that $50,000 than it would be if she worked for some multinational, publicly traded corporation. Thus it is far more likely that she'd be able to pay her bills – including her housing bill, whether that meant rent, a mortgage, or property tax, and that she could do this without having to work like a dog.

One other important aspect of the “official” economy is that it requires continual growth to function properly, and that it is now breaking because it can no longer grow. The masters of this economy – the majority shareholders, CEO's, corporate presidents and so forth – still expect and demand ever-increasing profits. Therefore, they have not only been cutting laborers from their workforce wherever they can, but they have been driving the remaining laborers ever harder. Those who are still bound to the global economy are therefore increasingly losing control over their lives and their time. (An example: “WANTED: Certified QXZ Engineer for ABC process control. Must be goal-oriented, self-starter, highly motivated to bring the client the best possible value for the lowest price. Must be willing to travel at least 20 percent of the time. ABC is a fast-paced, dynamic place for hungry, rising stars willing to grab all they can.” Translation: “You will live in a hotel at least one week per month and work like a dog at least 60 hours a week. You will also be on call evenings and weekends.”) Proper participation in a properly organized local economy allows people to regain some control over their lives while meeting their needs.

So what are some desirable characteristics of a locally-owned business? First, it must truly be 100 percent locally owned – not a mere franchise of some national or global business. McDonald's, New Seasons Market and Whole Foods Market don't count. Neither does Valero Petroleum, NBC or Clear Channel. Second, it must be entirely locally controlled. This follows from the first condition, since those who own a business get to run the business. A business run by faraway masters is not local. Of the various local business models, a cooperative model is one of the most attractive. Examples of cooperatives in Portland include Citybikes Workers Co-op and People's Food Co-op. Third, it must return a fair share of its profits back to its employees. At the very least, it must be able to pay a “living wage.” Lastly, its profits must be spent predominantly within the community in which it resides. A business which sends the majority of its profits out of the community is a drain on the community, and is not truly local. This also means that local businesses need a supplier base that is also predominantly local in order to keep profits within the local community as much as possible.

In light of these characteristics, what can be said about some of the recent advertising by large corporations who want to portray themselves as “local”? In my post, "Localism" And Truthfulness, I described a few corporations whose advertising I had recently heard or seen. Feel free to check out that post and answer for yourself whether these businesses are truly “locally owned.” But I want to ask another question, namely, how “local” does a business have to be in order to be truly “local”?

I ask this question because of a billboard I saw last week as I was on the way home from work. It was an advertisement for Darigold Farms, and it showed a burly guy with a mustache standing in a field of some kind of grain, with the caption, “Your Local Farmer” underneath. Now, there are some good things to be said for Darigold. First, it is a farmer-run cooperative that offers hormone-free milk among its product lines, and second, it does have a number of operations that are “local” to the Pacific Northwest. But is it truly “local” on smaller scales, such as the individual cities in which its operations are based? How much local control is exercised in each place where such companies have their operations? How much local say is there over how locally-generated profits are used? These are questions that successful cooperatives will have to answer for themselves, as some of them grow beyond the boundaries of the communities in which they first started.

Neighborhood Resilience and Safety Nets - A "Lab" Question

Among the writers whose work addresses Peak Oil and its related crisis are some who still view these crises as abstractions or events of the misty future. When they discuss possible responses to these crises, they write in high-level terms about what policies mankind (and its leading classes) should adopt, rather than delving into concrete things individuals should do. I'll start this post by suggesting that the future imagined by many who have written about Peak Oil and its related issues is here now. The economic dislocation caused by climate change, Peak Oil and other resource constraints is happening now. And the behavior to date of the masters of our present economic and governmental systems in responding to our present crisis shows exactly what we can expect from these masters as the crisis continues to unfold – namely, little to no help at all.

As writers like Sharon Astyk have noted, Peak Oil, climate change and economic collapse will not manifest themselves as some new and exotic crisis, but will look to many like ordinary human suffering that steadily gets worse. Successful adaptation to this suffering will not depend on grand governmental policy initiatives so much as the local responses of individuals, neighborhoods and communities. This adaptation must have both an individual and a community component. Being a prepared individual in the midst of an unprepared neighborhood has only limited value. In my articles on neighborhood resilience and building safety nets of alternative systems, I have attempted to explore the process of adaptation as seen by dwellers in urban and suburban neighborhoods, as well as outlining some of the hindrances to this adaptation.

Now it is time to take this study entirely out of the realm of the theoretical and to ground it firmly in the practical. Therefore I want to consider three real neighborhoods in three real cities in the United States. These are cities with which I have personal experience, having visited all three and having lived in two of them. However, the exact details of the neighborhoods under consideration will be somewhat fictionalized in this post. I want to consider a hypothetical resident in each of these three locales, a resident who one day began to become “Peak Oil-aware” or “climate change-aware” or more generally, “collapse-aware.” How that resident did so may vary according to a number of factors. Perhaps he was shocked into awareness by the run-up in gasoline prices in 2008. Or maybe she ran into a friend or relative who suddenly dived into urban homesteading with both feet, and her curiosity was aroused. Or maybe he was hanging out at a bookstore and just happened to pick up a book written by a “collapsnik.”

Anyway, let's assume that this person had or is having his or her awakening sometime between the beginning of 2007 and now. The person comes to realize that he must radically alter and simplify his life, or that she must not only alter her life but must also reach out to her neighbors and educate them about the events now unfolding. Let's say that the “collapse” message comes to this person with the same sort of urgency with which it hit me – as, in early 2007, I began to devour everything I could get my hands on concerning Peak Oil, as I followed the “World Without Oil” scenario website with all the devotion of a sports fan watching his team in the playoffs, as I downloaded podcast after podcast from Global Public Media, as I watched the weekly fluctuations in gas prices, and so on. One of the chief questions this person will likely ask is, “If these things are for real, can I successfully prepare for and adapt to these things here, right where I live? And can I successfully educate my neighbors so that we can adapt together?” What sort of answer to these questions do you think such a person will find, given the following scenarios?

Scenario 1: Willow Street, La Habra, California

You are a technical specialist for structural engineering at a CAD (computer-aided design) software reseller's office located in Costa Mesa. You live in La Habra, having bought a house on Willow Street near La Habra High School. Your morning commute takes between forty-five minutes and an hour and forty minutes, and it takes about the same amount of time to get home. It is early 2008, and you have been a homeowner for five years. In early 2008, the price of oil is already over $100 a barrel and gasoline prices are floating up toward $4 a gallon. You don't make very much, and because you bought your house for over $250K, a large portion of your paycheck goes toward the mortgage. You decide that you can't take the continual hit at the gas pump, but you don't know what to do, other than look for a job closer to home.

One day you are at Borders' Bookstore at Beach and Imperial, looking for a book on ornamental plants for your wife. You pass by a section full of books on declining oil supplies and the impending energy crisis. Your eye is attracted to a book with an unusual title, “Divorce Your Car!” You buy the plant book for your wife, but you are intrigued by the “car” book, and you buy it for yourself. As you read it, you are introduced to several new concepts, including the concept of “Peak Oil.” For some reason, this concept sticks in your mind to the extent that you do a Google search on it at lunch one day. What you find astounds, disturbs and profoundly moves you.

At home, you begin making immediate changes. First, you put a clothesline in your back yard. Then you start trying to kill the Bermuda grass so you can plant some vegetables. You start talking with one of your neighbors who lives across the street from you about the real reasons for the high gas prices, as well as where you think the economy is heading. In your conversations, you are always asking yourself, “Does my neighbor 'get' it? Would he be interested in joining me in helping the neighborhood get ready?”

But there is a big neighborhood problem, namely, a single woman with a teenage son who lives three houses down from you and whose son attends La Habra High. He has recently gotten into the habit of throwing big weekend drinking parties at his house, with his mom's full knowledge and permission. Lots of his friends and classmates show up, driving recklessly up and down the street as they arrive, and frequently urinating and/or vomiting on residents' properties as they leave. Fights are not uncommon, and the police are regularly called to that house on the weekends.

You also notice that the steps you are taking are highly unusual for your neighborhood, as most of the other residents are trying to grow room additions on their property, and not vegetables. One of your next door neighbors is annoyed by the clothesline and the vegetables in your backyard. One day you and your wife come home to find that this woman and her husband have replaced the chain link fence between your houses with a seven foot-high redwood fence.

You want to stop driving to work, but you live over 24 miles away from your office, and public transit is slow and disjointed. At last you settle on riding the Metrolink from the Fullerton station to Tustin, then heading to the office from the Tustin station. From your house to the Fullerton station and from the Tustin station to the office, you plan to travel by bike. Your wife is a bit hesitant about this at first (because she doesn't want you to become an accident statistic), but you decide to give it a go. The leg from your house to Fullerton isn't too dangerous, but going from the Tustin station along Jamboree Road and Main Street in Costa Mesa, you sometimes have to ride on the sidewalk, because there are a few parts with no bike lane and the cars go pretty fast. You wind up pedaling over 24 miles each workday. It's a brutal commute in the summertime.

Scenario 2: Olmstead Avenue, Los Angeles, California

You are a black single mother with a teenage son. You live on Olmstead Avenue, in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles, in a house you have owned for seventeen years. You are an IT support staff member at a hospital near the downtown area. You are pushing your son to excel in school, and he is responding well for the most part, though he sometimes resents your pushing. You tend to be stricter with him than other parents are with their children, believing that if you don't hold him to a high standard of behavior, he will find himself being judged and treated more harshly for youthful indiscretions than his classmates who aren't black. You believe this to be true even now, years after the Rodney King beating and the “changes” in the LAPD.

It is January 2007, and while reading the Los Angeles Times on a Sunday, you find an article titled, “O Pioneers In Pasadena,” about the Dervaes family, who have turned their house into an “urban homestead.” The article arouses your interest and lingers in your mind for several days. Intrigued, you do a Google search on the Dervaes family and on Jules Dervaes in order to find out more about them. Your search leads you to the Global Public Media website, where you find not only a podcast of an interview with Mr. Dervaes, but much, much more! What you find astounds, disturbs and profoundly moves you.

You start making radical changes in your life and home. Your son initially reacts by looking at you as if you were slightly crazy. It's hard for him to grasp the need to reuse and repair things, to voluntarily make do with less, when he sees all his friends getting the latest shiny new “stuff.” You fare somewhat better with the neighbors, several of whom you have known for years, many of whom are already starting to be squeezed by the incipient economic downturn. You form an “Olmstead Avenue Gardening Club” with some of your neighbors, and you all enthusiastically plant whatever you think you can easily grow without accidentally killing it. Soon your yards are full of cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and sunflowers. One yard even has some corn and squash.

In early September of 2007, you and your neighbors decide to have a little streetside “Urban Farmers' Market” to show off your produce. You plan your “Market” for a Saturday in early October. Word gets around the neighborhood, and people from several streets away express interest in dropping by. On the day of the “Market, you all set up several tables in the front yards of your house and the houses of your next door neighbors, and there's a large, joyful crowd. Your son is also there along with his friends, some of whom have the typical “urban” uniform consisting of sideways baseball caps, baggy shorts, and long, unbuttoned shirts or long tees or tank tops with Lakers colors. These young men are not being disorderly in any way – in fact, they are helping set up tables and set out vegetables – but they attract the notice of a passing LAPD squad car. Suddenly, several LAPD units show up, and officers begin questioning people, frisking some and harassing all the young men, including your son. The officers respond very rudely to your protests that you are doing nothing wrong, nothing any more out of the ordinary than any block party or multi-family garage sale. In fact, they threaten to arrest you for disorderly conduct.

Scenario 3: SE 88^th Avenue, Portland, Oregon

You are a freight rail dispatcher at the Port of Portland, Oregon. You own a home on SE 88^th Avenue, in the Lents district of Portland, across the street from Lents Park. You have owned your home for nearly 30 years, having bought it with the aid of GI Bill benefits you received after you got out of the Air Force. Though your Port job paid well enough for you to have relocated several times to larger and more expensive housing, you have never felt the urge to move. Now you are glad that your house is almost paid for; in fact, you have enough saved up to pay it off outright if you need to.

In the latter half of 2008, you notice a steadily worsening drop in shipping and container traffic at the Port, compared to a year ago. The drop in traffic grows severe enough to force some employees, such as yourself, onto an involuntary part-time schedule, while other employees are laid off altogether. You know that the economy has something to do with your situation, and during your breaks and lunch periods, you and your workmates discuss what is wrong with the economy, as well as how to fix it. One day in November, an engineer for one of the freight lines overhears your discussions, and he starts talking about impending economic collapse. Because you and he are old buddies, he loans you a book written by a “collapsnik,” and you read it over a couple of weekends. What you find astounds, disturbs and profoundly moves you.

You start making radical changes in your life and home. This turns out to be relatively easy in Portland, with its well-connected system of mass transit and bicycle routes, in addition to its strong base of community and volunteer groups. You soon find out about organizations such as Growing Gardens and the Portland Fruit Tree Project, and after attending their classes, you are able to plant your first garden.

Several of your neighbors catch the gardening “bug” (several others already had it), and you all begin talking together about the present economic situation and what you can do about it. You make your last house payment in March 2009, and host a “Burn the Mortgage” party.

But in April, you and your neighbors find out that the City wants to turn Lents Park into a baseball stadium for a minor-league professional team. This news is profoundly disturbing, as both you and your neighbors can't afford to sell your houses and relocate, and you are wondering what sort of adverse effects you will all suffer from having a 9,000 seat stadium right next to your homes. You are especially grieved about Lents Park. Your kids played in that park. When your young granddaughter visits from time to time, you take her to that park just to sit and read stories or play. What will become of the place now?

Questions for Discussion

1. What are the destabilizing influences in each neighborhood?

2. What structural barriers to Peak Oil/economic collapse adaptation exist in each neighborhood?

3. If we assume that the persons in each of these scenarios could relocate, would you advise them to? To where would you advise them to relocate?

4. Assuming that these people cannot afford to relocate, what strategies would you suggest for helping them to adapt, to build local safety nets and a resilient neighborhood?

5. What other factors or elements would you insert into each of these scenarios? Notice that in these scenarios I haven't seriously examined the effects of massive job losses, polluted land or altered climate.