says Jan Lundberg, on CultureChange.

Here is how the economic landscape will look, with attendant unraveling of the already frayed and twisted social fabric. Let’s summarize in terms of (A) coming days and weeks, (B) then perhaps months for the intense phase of collapse, and (C) post collapse:

The coming days and weeks

More bank failures. Government default as well. Revaluing the currency. Shortage of fuel, food and jobs. Otherwise, things are still working as to turning the tap and getting water, throwing the switch and getting electricity, and we see the various officials and cogs in the machine at their posts.

During the buildup to the collapse as seen by price increases, bankruptcies and bailouts, the elite’s careful top-down selection of commentators and officials’ pronouncements keep assuring us that a recession and a shake-out are possibly underway, but that the economy — globally corporate and guzzling energy that costs more due to (hush!) depletion — is of course going to always be with us and eventually rebound. The resumption of growth is a given, like believing in gods in heaven forever.

Height of collapse

“The revolution will be televised” only up to a point. Then the workers at the controls will head for their homes or head for the hills. As Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett told me, studies show that police and firemen bail after fives days of riots and other chaos, to protect their own homes. The height of collapse will be seen, felt and experienced, rather than documented (whether with commercials or thanks extended to the so-and-so foundation).

Overpopulation may be finally considered to be obvious, but what’s the difference by then? Die-off will be underway, for the simple reason that petroleum for food production and delivery (and storage, packaging and cooking) has been curtailed for various reasons, chiefly depletion. The violent desperation in the streets and fields may appear to some to just be a breakdown in order. Some loud voices may promise to restore it, but on a national level in the huge U.S. it’s not likely.

Yes, thats how we see it too. People, stop listening to the media, telling you that this is just a blip and ‘normality’ will be restored. Our society needs to change, and it is unlikely that the ‘mainstream’ will embrace this change, so for most people things will just keep getting ‘worse’. The only way to make them better is to accept that we need a local economy, strong communities, local organic and permaculture gardens. It may well be a fight to get these things sorted, but to fight to keep life as we knew it, is like building sandcastles to keep out the sea. Embrace that change, and rally your neighbours to start working together to shape your new collective reality.

Post collapse and a new world paradigm

When the dust settles, out of rubble come the survivors. “Hi, remember me, we were neighbors but for some reason never met.” The petroleum infrastructure has collapsed, negating the promise of alterative energy across the board. But small, decentralized mini-systems will be jury-rigged, and the bicycles will be traveling and hauling whatever. Food gardens and other essentials will be done through our evolutionary cooperation making a comeback. The family will again be the basis of (previously lost) community. Tribes will form for common defense and solidarity.

What’s your tribe? Are you living in an actual community yet? You will be, if you survive collapse. Is it the vague future when you will learn those basic skills your grandparents knew?

When society reconstitutes itself after the Great Collapse, I predict that greed-schemes and domination will be unattractive and seen as anti-social. With lower population the status of the common man and woman is much higher, as history has shown.

What’s pointing the way now for a livable future:

Ecovillages, intentional communities, anarchist collectives, Community Supported Agriculture, bicycle culture, animal husbandry, natural building techniques, biochar, sail transport network, and the path of the peaceful spiritual warrior. And more, add away. If you are not a part of these things, or aren’t supporting them, then you are definitely part of the problem and will be left behind in today’s Consumer Age. Whether the latter is a good or bad memory, we’ll see. I’m an optimist.

The way out from capitalism’s collapse is two-fold: (1) local-based economics without the growth syndrome. (2) Nature is the way. Nature is local; we cannot be everywhere. Nature is “the real thing,” although Coca Cola drummed it into millions of people’s heads that just anything can be the “real thing,” even a bottle of sugar and other drugs and chemicals in water. Such products, mainly for their plastic packaging, are the enemy of Mother Nature — this means you. You are Mother Nature. If we can’t stop our addictions to soy-milk drink-boxes, who are we fooling that we are hip and green? You may ask, What’s a better local drink? Answer: Water, and bring your own cup or make one out of your hand in the stream.

And Mother Nature could do with our help now, to rewild, and rebuild forest ecosystems that themselves will add greatly to our ability to survive as they mature. Using oil, we have decimated every forest, and stripped the great woodlands that once provided our ancestors with food, fuel, medicines and much more. Learn to value nature around us, and donate time to treeplanting (no monocultures – diversity is strength).

“To build the new economy”?

This is dreamland, perpetrated by those who hold steadfastly to their blinders. The proponents are paid to keep up their sing-song of a promised land. They won’t tell you that a single interdependent national or therefore global economy is not only unfeasible, but highly undesirable. Yet, it is believed in by those who do not understand peak oil and those lacking in actual community. They’re cut off from their evolutionary life boat.

The Green Jobs Now campaign touts a “green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” Poverty as defined by what — not being able to buy corporate products? If people take over some land and make it productive, respecting the existing wild species, they may achieve subsistence and yet be called impoverished. But they are the survivors. The green job that gives you money to buy stuff and services from unaccountable strangers is just more wage slavery, but we are urged to embrace it as if there’s nothing else conceivable.

As long as we believe in fairy tales of a new and better America for clean, continued consumption, instead of first dismantling the present system and building true alternatives on a local scale, we are eating BS for breakfast lunch and dinner.

Instead of “greenjobsnow” it would be more accurate to say, “green-job snow job.” Is it being framed in a constant growth paradigm? Where will the training be done? What about the fast-disappearing energy to forge the green economy? A critical analysis of the work-force aspects of the green jobs promise is from the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper (see link below; note that the head of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights left to head a green jobs center). Green Jobs Now “is a project of Green For All, 1Sky, the We Campaign…” Clearly, green is meant to mean dollar bills’ color, as the old expression was.

We need green (natural) living, not green jobs. Why continue to keep capitalism alive, or give away your time? Keep it personal, keep it in the community, and remember that energy is not the thing we most need, but rather the essential things that today are almost always too energy intensive.

The days of specialisation and consumerism are numbered. What we could create to replace the wage-slavery, heirarchies and polluting industries could be so beautiful. This is an opportunity and we fear that if it isn’t accepted as such there may be no future for most of humanity.

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