Dismantle Civilisation

Following on from Techno-Peasant’s eye-opening, but ultimately realistic article about living outside of civilization, I thought this would be a perfect time to publish Sharon Astyk’s brilliant list of “100 Things You Can Do to Get Ready for Peak Oil“. Lists rarely cut it when looking at real life solutions or providing effective advice: these things are better accumulated as life-experiences and shared knowledge. However, this list is far too good to ignore – American-centric it may be, but considering that the USA is probably the most oil-dependent culture on Earth, it seems a decent basis for all industrial cultures. Some items may not be relevant, some are obvious, some are a little wishy-washy, but taken as a whole you would be foolish not to read it:

SPRING

1. Rethink your seed starting regimen. How will you do it without potting soil, grow lights and warming mats. Consider creating manure heated hotbeds, using your own compost, building a greenhouse, or coldframe, direct seeding early versions of transplanted crops, etc…
2. Your local feed store has chicks right now – even suburbanites might consider ordering a few bantam hens and keeping them as exotic birds. Worth a shot, no? You can grow some feed in your garden for Them, as well as enjoying the eggs.
3. Order enough seeds for three years of gardening. If by next spring, we are all unable to get replacement seed, will you have produced everything you need? What if you can’t grow for a year because of some crisis? Order extras from places with cheap seed like www.fedcoseeds.com, www.superseeds.com, www.rareseed.com.
4. Yard sale season will begin soon in the warmer parts of the country, and auctions are picking up now in the North. Stocking up on things like shoes, extra coats, kids clothing in larger sizes, hand tools, garden equipment is simply prudent – and can save a lot Of money.
5. The real estate “season” will begin shortly, with families wanting to get settled in new homes during the summer, before the school year starts. If you are planning on buying or selling this year, now is the time to research the market, new locations, find that country property or the urban duplex with a big yard.
6. Once pastures are flush, last year’s hay is usually a bargain, and many farmers clean out their barns. Manure and old hay are great soil builders for anyone.
7. Check out your local animal shelter and adopt a dog or cat for rodent control, protection and friendship during peak oil.
8. As things green up, begin to identify and use local wild edibles. Eat your lawn’s dandilions, your daylily shoots, new nettles. Hunt for morels (learn what you are doing first!!) and wild onions. Get in the habit of seeing what food there is to be had everywhere you go.
9. Set up rainbarrel or cistern systems and start harvesting your precipitation.
10. Planning to only grow vegetables? Truly sustainable gardens include a lot of pretty flowers, which have value as medicinals, dye and fiber plants, seasoning herbs, and natural cleaners and pest repellants. Instead of giving up ornamentals altogether, grow a garden full of daylilies, lady’s mantle, dye hollyhocks and coreopsis, foxgloves, soapwart, bayberry, hip roses, bee balm and other useful beauties.
11. Get a garden in somewhere around you – campaign to turn open space into a community garden, ask if you can use a friend’s backyard, get your company or church, synagogue, mosque or school to grow a garden for the poor. Every garden and experienced gardener we have is a potential hedge against the disaster.
12. Join a CSA if you don’t garden, and get practice cooking and eating a local diet in season.
13. Eggs and greens are at their best in spring – dehydrated greens and cooked eggshells, ground up together add calcium and a host of other nutrients to flour, and you won’t taste them. We’re not going to be able to afford to waste food in the future, so get out of the habit now.
14. Make rhubarb, parsnip or dandelion wine for later consumption.
15. Now that warmer weather is here, start walking for more of your daily Needs. Even a four or five mile walk is quite reasonable for most healthy People.
16. Start a compost pile, or begin worm composting. Everyone can and should compost. Even apartment dwellers can keep worms or a compost Bin and use the product as potting soil.
17. Use spring holidays and feasts as a chance to bring up peak oil with friends and family. Freedom and rebirth are an excellent subjects To lead into the Long Emergency.
18. Store the components of some traditional spring holiday foods, so that in hard times your family can maintain its traditions and celebrations.
19. With the renewal of the building season, now is the time to scavenge free building materials, like cinder blocks, old windows and scrap wood – with permission, of course.
20. Try and adapt to the spring weather early – get outside, turn down your heat or bank your fires, cut down on your fuel consumption as though you had no choice. Put on those sweaters one more time.
21. Shepherds are flush with wool – now is the time to buy some fleece and start spinning! Drop spindles are easy to make and cheap to use. Check out www.learntospin.com
22. Take a hard look back over the last winter – if you had had to survive on what you grew and stored last year, would you have made it? Early spring was famously the “starving time” when stores ran out and everyone was hungry. Remember, when you plan your food Needs that not much produces early in spring, and in northern climates, A winter’s worth of food must last until May or June.
23. Trade cuttings and divisions, seeds and seedlings with your neighbors. Learn what’s out there in your community, and sneak some useful plants into your neighbors’ garden.
24. If you’ve got a nearby college, consider scavenging the dorm Dumpsters. College students often leave astounding amounts of Stuff behind including excellent books, clothes, furniture, etc…
25. Say a schecheyanu, a blessing, or a prayer. Or simply be grateful for a series of coincidences that permit us to be here, in this place, as the world and the seasons come to life again. Try to make sure that this year, this time, you will take more joy in what you have, and prepare a bit better to soften the blow that is about to fall.

SUMMER

1. If you don’t can or dehydrate, now is the time to learn. In most climates, you can waterbath can or dehydrate with a minimum of purchased materials, and produce is abundant and cheap. If you don’t garden, check out your local farmstand for day-old produce or your farmer’s market at the end of the day – they are likely to have large quantities they are anxious to get rid of. Wild fruits are also in abundance, or will be.
2. Consider dehydrating outer leaves of broccoli, cabbage, etc…, and grinding the dried mixture. It can be added to flours to increase the nutritional value of your bread.
3. Buy hay in the summer, rather than gradually over the winter. Now is an excellent time to put up simple shelters for hay storage, to avoid high early spring and winter prices.
4. Firewood, woodstoves and heating materials are at their Cheapest right now. Invest now for winter. The same is true Insulating materials.
5. Back to School Planning is a great time to reconsider transportation in light of peak oil. Can your children walk? Bike? If they cannot do either for reasons of safety (rather than distance) could an adult do so with them? Could you hire a local teenager to take them to school on foot or by wheel? Can you find ways to carpool, if you must drive? Grownups can do this too.
6. Also when getting ready to go back to school, consider the environmental impact of your scheduling and activities – are there ways to minimize driving/eating out/equipment costs/fuel consumption? Could your family do less in formal “activities” and more in family work?
7. Consider either home schooling or engaging in supplemental home Education. Your kids may need a large number of skills not provided By local public schools, and a critical perspective that they certainly Won‘t learn in an institutional setting. Teach them.
8. Try and minimize air conditioning and electrical use during high Summer. Take cool showers or baths, use ice packs, reserve activity When possible for early am or evening. Rise at 4 am and get much of Your work done then.
9. Consider adding a solar powered attic fan, available from Real Goods www.realgoods.com.
10. Don’t go on vacation. Spend your energy and money making your home A paradise instead. Throw a barbecue, a party or an open house, and invite The neighbors in. Get to know them.
11. Be prepared for summer blackouts, some quite extensive. Have Emergency supplies and lighting at hand.
12. Practice living, cooking and camping outside, so that you will Be comfortable doing so if necessary. Everyone in the family can Learn basic outdoors person skills.
13. Make your own summer camp. Instead of sending kids to soccer Camp, create an at-home skills camp that helps prepare people for Peak oil. Invite the neighbor kids to join you. Have a blast!
14. Begin adapting herbs and other potted plants to indoor culture. Consider adding small tropicals – figs, lemons, oranges, even bananas can often be grown in cold climate homes. Obviously, if you live in a warm climate well, be prepared for some jealousy from the rest of us come February .
15. Plant a fall garden in high summer – peas, broccoli, kale, lettuces, Beets, carrots, turnips, etc… All of the above will last well into early Winter in even the harshest climates, and with proper techniques or In milder areas, will provide you with fresh food all year long
16. Put up a new clothesline! Consider hand washing clothes outside, Since everyone will probably enjoy getting wet (and cool) anyhow.
17. If you have access to safe waters, go fishing. Get some practice, and Learn a new skill.
18. Encourage pick-up games at your house. Post-peak, children will Need to know how to entertain themselves.
19. For teens, encourage them to develop their own home businesses over The summers. Whether doing labor or creating a product, you may rely On them eventually to help support the family. Or have them clean out Your closets and attic and help you reorganize. Let them sell the stuff.
20. Buy a hand pushed lawn mower if you have less than 1 acre of grass. New ones are easy to push and pleasant, and will save you energy and that Unpleasant gas smell.
21. Keep an eye out for unharvested fruits and nuts – many suburban and rural Areas have berry and fruit bushes that no one harvests. Take advantage and Put up the fruit.
22. Practice extreme water conservation during the summer. Mulch to reduce The need for irrigation. Bathe less often and with less water. Reduce clothes Washing when possible.
23. This is an excellent time to toilet train children – they can run around naked If necessary and accidents will do no harm. Try and get them out of diapers now, Before winter.
24. Consider replacing lawns with something that doesn’t have to be mown – Ground covers like vetch, moss, even edibles like wintergreen or lingonberry, Chamomile or mint.
25. If it is summer time, then the living is probably easy. Take some time To enjoy it – to picnic, to celebrate democracy (and try and bring one about , To explore your own area, walk in the nearby woods.

FALL (AUTUMN)

1. Simple, cheap insulating strategies (window quilts and blankets, draft stoppers, etc…) are easily made from cheap or free materials – goodwill, for example, often has jeans, tshirts and shrunken wool sweaters, of quality too poor to sell, that can be used for quilting material and batting. They are available where I am for a nominal price, and I’ve heard of getting them free.
2. Stock up for winter as though the hard times will begin this year. Besides dried and canned foods, don’t forget root cellarable and storable local produce, and season extension (cold frames, greenhouses, etc…) techniques for fresh food when you make your food inventory.
3. Thanksgiving sales tend to be when supermarkets offer the cheapest deals on excellent supplements to food storage, like shortening, canned pumpkin, spices, etc… I’ve also heard of stores given turkeys away free with grocery purchases – turkeys can then be cooked, canned and stored. Don’t forget to throw in storable ingredients for your family’s holiday staples – in hard times, any kind of celebration or continuity is appreciated.
4. Go leaf rustling for your garden and compost pile. If you Happen into places where people leave their leaves out for Pickup, grab the bags and set them to composting or mulching Your own garden.
5. Plant a last crop of over wintering spinach, and enjoy in The fall and again in spring.
6. Or consider planting a bed of winter wheat. Chickens can Even graze it lightly in the fall, and it will be ready to harvest in Time to use the bed for your fall garden. Even a small bed will Make quite a bit of fresh, delicious bread.
7. Hit those last yard sales, or back to school sales and buy a few extra clothes (or cloth to make them) for growing children and extra shoes for everyone. They will be welcome in storage, particularly if prices rise because of trade issues or inflation.
8. The best time to expand your garden is now – till or mulch and let sod rot over the winter. Add soil amendments, manure, Compost and lime.
9. Now is an excellent time to start the 100 mile diet in most locales – Stores and farms and markets are bursting with delicious local produce And products. Eat local and learn new recipes.
10. Rose hip season is coming – most food storage items are low in accessible vitamin C. Harvest wild or tame unsprayed rose hips, and dry them for tea to ensure long-term good health. Rose hips are Delicious mixed with raspberry leaves and lemon balm.
11. Discounts on alcohol are common between Halloween and Christmas – this is an excellent time to stock up on booze for personal, medicinal, trade or cooking. Pick up some vanilla beans as well, and make your own vanilla out of that cheap vodka.
12. Gardening equipment, and things like rainbarrels go on sale in the late summer/early fall. And nurseries often are trying to rid themselves of perennial plants – including edibles and medicinals. It isn’t too late to plant them in most parts of the country, although some care is needed in purchasing for things that have become rootbound.
13. Local honey will be at its cheapest now – now is the time to stock up. Consider making friends with the beekeeper, and perhaps Taking lessons yourself.
14. Fall is the cheapest time to buy livestock, either to keep or for butchering. Many 4Hers, and those who simply don’t want to keep excess animals over the winter are anxious to find buyers now. In many cases, at auction, I see animals selling for much less than the meat you can expect to obtain from their carcass is worth.
15. Most cold climate housing has or could have a “cold room/area” – a space that is kept cool enough during the fall and winter to dispense with the necessity of a refrigerator, but that doesn’t freeze. If you have separate fridge and freezer, consider disconnecting your fridge during the cooler weather to save utility costs and conserve energy. You can build a cool room by building in a closet with a window, and Insulating it with Styrofoam panels
16. Now is a great time to build community (and get stuff done) by instituting a local “work bee” – invite neighbors and friends to come help either with a project for your household, or to share in some good deed for another community member. Provide food, drink, tools and get to work on whatever it is (building, harvesting, quilting, knitting – the sky is the limit), and at the same time strengthen your community. Make sure that next time, the work benefits a different neighbor or community member.
17. Most local charities get the majority of their donations between now and December. Consider dividing your charitable donations so that they are made year round, but adding extra volunteer hours to help your group handle the demands on them in the fall.
18. Many medicinal and culinary herbs are at their peak now. Consider learning about them and drying some for winter use.
19. If there is a gleaning program near you (either for charity or personal use) consider joining. If not, start one. Considerable amounts of food are wasted in the harvesting process, and you can either add to your storage or benefit your local shelters and food pantries.
20. Dig out those down comforters, extra blankets, hats with the earflaps, flannel jammies, etc… You don’t need heat in your sleeping areas – just warm clothes and blankets.
21. Learn a skill that can be done in the dark or by candlelight, while sitting with others in front of a heat source. Knitting, crocheting, whittling, rug braiding, etc… can all be done mostly by touch with little light, and are suitable for companionable evenings. In addition, learn to sing, play instruments, recite memorized speeches and poetry, etc… as something to do on dark winter evenings.
22. While I wouldn’t expect deer or turkey hunting to be a major food source in coming times (I would expect large game to be driven back to near-extinction pretty quickly), it is worth having those skills, and also the skills necessary to catch the less commonly caught small game, like rabbits, squirrel, etc…
23. Use a solar cooker or parabolic solar cooker whenever possible To prepare food. Or eat cool salads and raw foods. Not only won’t You heat up the house, but you’ll save energy.
24. A majority of children are born in the summer Early fall, which suggests that some of us are doing more than Keeping warm . Now is a good time to get one’s birth Control updated .
25. Celebrate the harvest – this is a time of luxury and plenty, and should be treated as such and enjoyed that way. Cook, drink, eat, talk, sing, pray, dance, laugh, invite guests. Winter is long and comes soon enough. Celebrate!

WINTER

1. Your local adult education program almost certainly has something useful to teach you – woodworking, crocheting, music training, horseback riding, CPR, herbalism, vegetarian cookery… take advantage of people who want to teach their skills
2. Get serious about land use planning – even if you live in a suburban neighborhood, you can find ways to optimize your land to produce the most food, fuel and barterables. Sit down and think hard about what you can do to make your land and your life more sustainable in the coming year.
3. The Winter Lull is an excellent time to get involved in public affairs. No matter how cynical you tend to be, nothing ever changed without Engagement. So get out there. Stand for office. Join. Volunteer.
4. Now is the time to prepare for illness – keep a stock of remedies, including useful antibiotics (although know what you are doing, don’t just buy them and take them), vitamin C supplements (I like elderberry syrup), painkillers, herbs, and tools for handling even serious illness by yourself. In the event of a truly severe epidemic of flu or other illness, avoiding illness and treating sick family members at home whenever possible may be safer than taking them to over-worked and over-crowded hospitals (or, it may not – but planning for the former won’t prevent you from using the hospital if you need it).
5. Most schools would be delighted to have volunteers come in and talk about conservation, gardening, small livestock, home-scale mechanics, ham radio, etc…, and most homeschooling families would be similarly thrilled. Consider offering to teach something you know that will be helpful post-peak (although I wouldn’t recommend discussing peak oil with any but the oldest teenagers, and not even that without their parents permission
6. Now is the time to convince your business, synagogue, church, school, community center to put a garden on that empty lawn. If you start the campaign now, you can be ready to plant in the spring. Produce can be shared among participants or offered to the needy.
7. The one-two punch of rising heating oil and gas prices may well be what is needed to make your family and friends more receptive to the peak oil message. Try again. At the very least, emphasize the options for mitigating increased economic strain with sustainable practices.
8. Get together with neighbors and check in on your area’s elderly and disabled people. Make a plan that ensures they will be checked on during bad weather, power outages, etc… Offer help with stocking Up for winter, or maintaining equipment. And watch for signs that they Are struggling economically.
9. Work on raising money and getting help with local poverty-abatement Programs. After the holidays, people struggle. They get hungry and cold. Remember, besides the fact that it is the right thing to do, the life you save May be your own.
10. Get out and enjoy the cold weather. It is hard to adapt to colder Temperatures if you spend all your time huddled in front of a heater. Ski, Snowshoe, sled, shovel, have a snowball fight, build a hut, go winter Camping, but get comfortable with the cold, snowy world around you.
11. Have your chimney(s) inspected, and learn to clean your own. Learn to care for your kerosene lamps, to use candles safely, and how To use and maintain your smoke and CO detectors and fire extinguishers. Winter is peak fire season, so keep safe.
12. Grow sprouts on your windowsill.
13. Now is an excellent time to reconsider how you use your house. Look around – could you make more space? House more people? Do projects more efficiently? Add greenhouse space? Put in a homemade Composting toilet? Work with what you have to make it more useful.
14. If a holiday gift exchange is part of your life, make most of your gifts. Knit, whittle, build, sew, or otherwise create something beautiful for the People you love.
15. If someone wants to buy you something, request a useful tool or preparedness Item, or a gift certificate to a place like Lehmans or Real Goods. Considering giving Such gifts to friends and family – a solar crank radio, an LED flashlight, cast iron pans, These are useful and appreciated items whether or not you believe in peak oil.
16. Do a dry run in the dead of winter. Turn out all the power, turn off the water. Turn off all fossil-fuel sources of heat, and see how things go for a few days. Use What you learn to improve your preparedness, and have fun while doing it.
17. Learn to mend clothing, patch and make patchwork out of old clothes.
18. Write letters to people. The post is the most reliable way of communicating, And letters last forever.
19. Make a list of goals for the coming year, and the coming five years. Start Keeping records of your goals and your successes and failures.
20. Keep a journal. Your children and grandchildren (or someone else’s) may want To know what these days were like.
21. Wash your hands frequently, and avoid stress. Stay healthy so that you can be useful To those around you.
22. For those subject to depression or anxiety, winter can be hard. Find ways to relax, Decompress and use work as an antidote to fear whenever possible. Get outside on sunny Days, and try and exercise as much as possible to help maintain a positive attitude.
23. Memorize a poem or song every week. No matter what happens to you, no one can ever take away the music and words you hold in your mind. You can have them as comfort and pleasure wherever you go, and in whatever circumstances.
24. Take advantage of heating stoves by cooking on them. You can make soups or stews On top of any wood stove or even many radiators, and you can build or buy a metal oven That sits on top of woodstoves to bake in.
25. Winter is a time of quiet and contemplation. Go outside. Hear the silence. Take pleasure in what you have achieved over the past year. Focus on the abundance of this present, this day, rather than scarcity to come.

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‘A Farm for the Future’ is the BBC’s recent excellent documentary on Peak Oil and its effects on farming, leading to the promotion of Permaculture (all of which happened at 8pm on a Friday evening, so a good visible slot for the masses!). I’ve included some blurb from Chris Vernon of The Oil Drum written just before broadcast below as an intro:

On Friday the BBC will be broadcasting an excellent peak oil documentary; it focuses on farming. Presenter and co-producer Rebecca Hosking explores the importance of oil in farming and the potential impact of peak oil. The film has a passionate narrative centred on Rebecca’s small family farm in South West England; can she make her farm fit for the future?

The subject mater is top notch. Colin Campbell and Richard Heinberg contribute, permaculture, forest gardens, gardening vs farming, biofuels, biodiversity, industrial farming and no-till farming are all covered. It seems certain that present methods cannot go on feeding Britain as they are highly dependent on fossil-fuel. The film concentrates on the necessity to find a new way to feed the nation.

Above all, the presentation comes from the heart. It is sure to capture the imagination of many people who, not least due to the deepening recession, are primed for new ideas like never before.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this film is that it exists at all. Within the BBC, the Natural History Unit is one of the most conservative. The producers of ‘A Farm for the Future’ had a tremendous struggle getting this film made. BBC executives were not keen; the big global travellers even called the film “messed up propaganda”. However two years after I met with co-producer Tim Green at the inception of the film; it does now exist. The hope is that with the Natural History Unit producing a film with peak oil at its heart, the gates are now open to all the other departments such as News at Ten, Panorama, Horizon etc. to cover peak oil. There is knowledge and understanding of peak oil within the BBC but also nervousness about reporting.

Rebecca and Tim would like to thank the community here at The Oil Drum for providing much of the information needed to make this possible.

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by Chuck Burr, at CultureChange

The next ten years will not look like the last ten. They will be a shock to many people. Theories such as petrocollapse will become mainstream; the first world will begin to look like the second and third world.

Industrialized Countries Back Slide

If you want to see what the next decade will look like, look no further than France, Ukraine, and Iceland today. Last week one to three million people took to the streets of France for a second round of protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis. Protests later turned violent as youths clashed with police.

Protests have also erupted in Ukraine. Ukraine’s economy has gone into a nosedive, its banking system is paralyzed and millions of people have lost their jobs in recent months, industrial production has plunged 26.6 percent in the past year, the national currency, the Gryvna, has lost 50 percent of its value since last summer, default on Ukraine’s $105 billion foreign debt may be imminent or barely avoided.

In a 24-page internal memo leaked to the Ukrainian media, Finance Minister Viktor Pynzenyk warned in late January that Ukraine’s economy is on the verge of collapse, “We have entered an extremely serious and deep crisis. Ukraine’s [economic] situation is the worst in the world.”

“It’s a war of all against all,” says Dmytro Vydrin, an independent deputy of the Supreme Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. “Our best hope at this point is that chaos will win out over ill-intentions, because the worst thing will be if one group wins and establishes a monopoly of power.”

In October of 2008 Iceland’s three largest banks failed unable to pay about $61 billion of debt, 12 times the size of the entire economy. The Iceland banking failure slashed more than two thirds off the value of the krona last year, pushing inflation 20 percent and sending unemployment to a record high. The inflation rate fell to 17.6 percent in February.

Worldwide, a wave of social and political unrest could sweep through the world’s poorest countries if G20 leaders fail to come to their aid, the World Bank warned on March 22, 2009. A new report from the Overseas Development Institute says a collapse of the global economy would cost developing countries $750 billion in lost output, drive millions more into poverty, lead to an increase to nearly a billion in the number of people going hungry, and cost 90 million lives.

If all of the above spreads to China and Mexico in the form of political instability and disrupts production, there will be a bunch of clueless formerly middle class people wondering what happened to their limitless supply of cheap products to consume.

U.S. May Face Bankruptcy

I will spare you the details of Stimulus’s, TARPs, derivative bubbles, toxic bank asset market plans, to just focus on the big picture.

Ordinarily, U.S. federal spending is about 20 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But as a result of the economic downturn and rapidly increasing spending, federal spending as a percent of GDP has risen by almost a third to 26 percent. Add state, county, and municipalities, I estimate total government spending to be about 36 percent of GDP. Of the proposed $3.6 trillion 2009 federal budget, almost 40 percent or $1.38 trillion will have to be borrowed because of plunging revenues. Just two years of deficit this size would equal 93 percent of the entire 2008 federal budget.

The end of cheap natural resources compounded by the debt collapse will prevent the future growth needed to pay the interest on federal, corporate, and consumer debt. We are seeing a last ditch spending effort to revive growth while other nations will still lend the U.S. money. After this, it is game over.

Calfornia’s governor-sanctioned tent city

President Obama went to Harvard, but it was in law not economics, and even if he studied economics it would have been the wrong kind; universities need to retool and start teaching powerdown and steady-state economics because that is all we will have left within ten years. We will have to develop new economic models that do not rely on indefinite growth to pay interest on our debt.

Don’t be fooled by the Obama-bump in the global casino stock market. The current surge from the toxic assets plan will end soon as it ignores the fact that the government is responsible for guaranteeing half the value of the toxic assets. The toxic assets won’t disappear; they will just be moved from one pocket to another on the taxpayer dime. It’s like creating a market to sell shares in the Titanic. Don’t get back in the market. Financial players are running the market back up so they can get out of it.

A U.N. panel will recommend at next week’s G20 summit that the world replace the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar. The world knows the dollar will lose its value over the coming years. This month Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao expressed concern about the outlook for the U.S. and the safety of its Treasury bonds. “We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S., so of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. Frankly speaking, I do have some worries.”

A new world reserve currency will be a fatal blow to the dollar and may make it more difficult or impossible for the U.S. to finance our hemorrhaging deficit. Watch for China also to call for a new reserve currency at next week’s G20 summit.

What We Will See by 2019

Over the next ten years we will probably see: The end of the go-anywhere any-day airline industry as we know it. A 20 to 50 percent reduction in long-haul trucking. The mothballing of the international space station. $6-$10 gallon gas and the end of one or all of the big three automakers. Closure of several national retail chains. A DOW of between 4000 and 6000. Pension benefits cut by half. The Great Depression II will not have ended. Resurrection of the “victory garden” now called the “I need to eat garden.” Mass migrations. Reinstatement of the draft to fight resource wars or mandatory national service. Shortages of spare parts. Gas lines and rationing. Ideas such as petrocollapse and a steady-state economy will have joined global warming in mainstream consciousness. With a decline of world oil production of 6 to 9.1 percent per year, we will see GDP drop from $14.58 trillion in 2008 to between $7 and $9 trillion by 2019.

Reaching Limits to Growth in the Next Ten Years

Our system is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. The three key lynchpins holding it all together will start coming apart in the next decade.

First, the house of cards construction of it requires several “ifs” to all be maintained. For instances, if the system can keep expanding to pay the interest on the debt, if the minority can continue to exploit the majority, if we can continue to find cheap energy and natural resources, if large nation states can be maintained to keep global markets open, if we can continue to operate at a high degree of inefficiency and waste, if we can maintain a consensus and motivation, etc.

Second, because we have put off our problems with economic and cheap energy technology adaptations, it is now becoming more likely that we will run into several of our problems at the same time. Our system will not run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it will run out of is the ability to cope. Today we are witnessing the Obama administration trying to maintain a consensus to spend at ever higher levels to solve our problems. When problems arise exponentially and in multiples, problems that could theoretically be dealt with one by one can overwhelm the ability to cope.

Third, as our population continues to grow, it’s weight upon the house of cards becomes increasingly crushing. More cheap energy, food, land, clean water, transportation, etc. are all needed. What was once a manageable problem at a population of 1 billion, starts to become a catastrophe at 7 billion. At some point limits to growth are reached.

The Future is Unavoidable

With the large population size we have for at least another generation, our auto-dependent suburban infrastructure, and our infinite growth economic model, we are set up for failure. Every step in the same direction is just digging a deeper hole: more debt, more decaying infrastructure, no real value employment, little population control, hopelessly inappropriate skills and education.

We need a shift in our mindset from “the world belongs to man” to “humanity belongs to the earth.” Mainstream consciousness does not yet recognize nor appreciate the great biodiversity of our planet is dying—millions of lost species just when we need the earth’s resilience the most. Our culture teaches us to wear blinders, and only think about “number one.” When we consume or till a field, we do not “see” the life we are taking or the habitat that is lost. We do not see what a field once was or could be if succession was allowed to again progress.

The Only Solution That Will Ultimately Work: One Child Families Through New Culture

If we are going to engineer a softest landing for the next generation we do need to strive for: a steady-state economy, re-localization and expanded nonprofits, local community, respect for our elders, dissolve the nation-state, indy-media, transition from agriculture to horticulture, and community education—basically a new culture(s). Standardized “no child left behind” should be replaced by “every child can plant a forest garden and feed their family.” But no matter your cause, it is a lost cause without reducing population. Planting a food forest and having four kids is one step forward and four steps backward.

Reducing our population to 1900 levels will go the furthest to a brighter future for our children and our fellow species from whom we have stolen so much. One child families can reduce human population each generation from 6.7 billion, to 3.4 billion, to 1.7 billion, to 838 million and so on all within one century. Everyone will still be able to nurture a loving family.

Change Has to Come From the Bottom Up

Change will not come from top-down centralized governments. Nation states protect assets of the wealthy, tilt the table to concentrate wealth up, and just do not inspire local change. We have to let go of the nation state, and re-localize more than just our food production. This will mean fewer big box stores and gadgets, but also a better future.

My own family is trying to make the transition now from consumers to food-forest farmers and educators. It’s hard because our society does not give us alternatives. It’s, “get a job or we don’t give you any happy juju points to buy food or stuff with.” “Free land, forget it.” “Here, stare at this light box five hours per day, and zone out watching 21,000 commercials per year.” “Sit down, shut up, and don’t ask questions in school.” “Don’t save your seeds, buy this new and improved variety from us.”

Restore the Original Cultural and Economic Model

The following short “solutions” sections are repeated from my previous essays. However, about half of my readers are new to Culturequake. So read on if you’re new.

Moving towards a stead-state economy is an important first step, but it is only the beginning. It is time to dump the agricultural revolution economic model of privatizing the land, locking up the food, forcing people to get a job and work for the system just to live and eat. Humanity’s anthropocentrism and dominion have gotten us where we are today: hot, dry, and crowded.

It used to be that you “give support to get support;” now it is “make things to get things.” The new agricultural revolution or Taker model leaves us unfulfilled, and destroys the planet’s biodiversity. The original model worked for three million years until the agricultural revolution. Small tribal communities provided cradle-to-grave security for everyone. No Medicare card required. The beauty is that thousands of different cultures used this model for millions of years, plus it works for the average person. You didn’t have to be a walking Buddha or the second coming to be fulfilled, happy, and supported by your community.

So What Do We Do Now?

Find like-minded people and start the multi-generational journey to find more ways to support each other. Unplug from the matrix; unplug from your television and the private property debt treadmill. Create community and land trusts. Make things up as you go. Repurpose the best skills to support your community. Plant a food forest instead of an annuals only garden; emphasize perennials. Work from a sense of joy.

The majority is not ready to unplug from the system until it sees repeated examples of a better way to live—of new cultures. They need to walk towards something better, not away from something bad. We are not only becoming the change we want to see, but we will be the inspiration for more to follow. For those already becoming the change we want to see, we will be the inspiration for those who follow.

Visit culturequake.org to learn more about the book Culturequake and the blog. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC

We are inclined to think there isn’t 10 years. But the ethos of forest garden creation now just makes sense, no matter how much time before collapse of human or natural infrastructure.

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Earth Hour.
Worried about climate change? Recognise that your lifestyle is damaging the earth’s life support system? Need some way to show that you care, that doesn’t involve giving up anything, any hard work, or any challenge to the status quo and those who run things? Turning your lights off for one hour will not have any real effect, and can be done by anyone. No matter how disempowered you feel in your everyday life, or how enslaved you are to your mortgage payments, you can feel good and like you have made a difference, simply by turning your lights out for one hour (the earth hour website suggests making a blog post about it while the lights are out, completely negating any tiny possible CO2 reductions!)

Having lived on a smallholding, gradually reducing our shopping and increasing our self-sufficiency, for the past 5 years, I have been told time and again how ‘lucky’ I am. Many many people would love to live this life, but are fundamentally slaves within civilisation. The danger of earth hour and similar events, is that people are encouraged to do a token gesture, thereby feeling better about themselves and their lives, without taking a proper honest look at their lives, or doing anything that will make a difference.

Lets face it, most of us have grown up within the empire/civilisation with very little contact or experience of food growing. The transition to a more sustainable society, is not going to be easy for most of us. Growing food is hard work, and even the hands-off systems of permaculture and no-dig raised beds are hard work to set up and the personal changes we’d need to make to live with nature will not necessarily come easy.

Making this lifestyle harder is the fact that we are not able to remove ourselves completely from civilisation. Many of us have mortgages or rents to pay, which means we must generate cash – which the industrial food machine has made close to impossible from small farms. I have a few chickens, as an example, whose eggs end up costing me more than supermarket eggs. They are fantastic eggs, far superior to any industrial factory eggs, and I could reduce my costs if I had more time to put into growing food for my chickens – time that now goes to making a cash income to pay our few bills.

I guess what I am saying is that we are all slaves to some degree in this system. People who are still totally reliant on empire for their necessities are likely to find earth hour appealing as they can get a warm glow without any comfort zone infringement. What we need, though, is to take stock, look at the situation and start freeing ourselves from that slavery. This system is in the process of crashing, the earth needs it to crash, the human race needs it to crash. Dependent slaves will be going down with it – leave your lights on and use that hour to research heritage veg seeds, permaculture, rainwater harvesting or some other skills that will help in the local, organic, hand-powered reality.

Those of us further down the line also could do well to honestly look at where we stand. I look around my farm/home and see far too many external inputs. Breaking old habits is perhaps the hardest thing to do, especially when those habits have been with us all our lives, and are reinforced by everyone around us.

Things have to change, and the longer we resist that change, the harder it will be for us. If we wait until the decision is made for us, either through financial collapse due to peak oil, or food scarcity due to climate catastrophe (both hapening already) it will be no fun. If we avoid hard work and hardship now, it will accumulate for later.

On a positive note, permaculture systems do get easier with time, as perennial food plants get established, and life generally gets easier on the farm as we get used to the work, the different diets, different hours, and self-motivation. It should all get easier too, as the system collapses and perhaps demands for our time and cash disappear.

By growing stuff now, instead of buying it, we are also hastening the economic collapse, which in turn pushes others into a different culture, as jobs vanish and businesses disappear. Civilisation is a worldview, and is supported by our confidence in it. If enough of us find our way back to the land, refusing to waste our lives in factories and offices, those same factories and offices cease to be economically viable and disappear.

Ten thousand years or so of civilisation have gotten us here, we can’t expect quick fixes to work although you may well find that home grown food immediately improves your health.

The only way to change society is to start living what you want society to be like. Its up to you and me to stop buying things from far away or big companies, or that we can make or grow ourselves, and to reclaim our lives. It is unlikely to be easy for any of us, but it will be worth it.

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Here’s the Unsuitablog’s response to another farce going on this Saturday – WWF’s ‘Earth Hour‘:

Apparently, on March 28, millions of people will be turning off their lights for an hour, for Earth Hour. Yes, a whole hour when all sorts of really green places, like Las Vegas, New York and San Francisco, will be flicking off the lights in symbolic venues and, an hour later, turning them all on again, just to show that Industrial Civilization doesn’t really give a f*** about the planet, but likes a good joke: like the joke of Alanis Morrisette flicking her toenails in the tumbler of her fellow airline passenger.

Like the joke that you can be an airline passenger and, at the same time, talk about saving energy.

Like the joke that trivial, symbolic activities, such as Earth Hour do anything other than make people think they have done something worthwhile.

Stop messing about with trivia and do something real.

Much like the pointless Earth Day, this event will serve no real benefit to the planet.  The few kilos of carbon potentially saved from entering the atmosphere will be more than made up for as civilisation continues to plunder the planet and economic growth outstrips any carbon saving.   This is meant to raise awareness about the environment, yet will in fact only reinforce the idea that all that needs to be done to solve this crisis is some simple conservation and efficiency measures, whilst continuing with business as usual.  And all this for one pitiful hour!  Doesn’t the earth deserve more than just one hour, or even one day?  Isn’t it always earth time anyway, or are we meant to only get away with being aware of our life support system for an hour a year?  If you want to show the world you really care about is future, take part in the dismantling of the systems that are threatening it – help bring down the growth system and dismantle civilisation.  Every hour is Earth Hour, and every day is Earth Day!

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The time of the G20 summit in London approaches, where the leaders of the 22 nations that make up the vast majority of world GDP are meeting to discuss the economic crisis as well as free trade, climate change and other current crucial issues. As per usual, a series of counter-protests have been organised by various groupings, from liberal to anarchist. One of these groups calling itself ‘Put People First’ is a joint collaboration between many high profile charities, unions and environmental organisations, and is marching through London this Saturday to put their message of putting people and planet first in this crisis across. Sounds promising, but let’s take a look at their policy platform in more detail.

The global financial and economic system is in crisis.

Existing economic policies and institutions have overseen an economic system scarred by high levels of poverty and inequality, which is contributing to an environmental catastrophe.

…

There can be no return to business as usual. Fundamental change is needed.

We call on the UK government to show its commitment to putting people first by signalling an historic break with the failed policies of the past, and the start of a new system that seeks to make the economy work for people and the planet.

A good start – we agree that the current economic system is driving the environmental catastrophe and leads to unjust distributions of wealth. Business as usual must be eliminated and a new system built. But this is where we part ways – this grouping has unfortunately fallen prey to the Green Growth mantra which is now gaining currency in the mainstream environmental movement, which I’ve written about previously. Here are some of their specific demands:

Ensure a massive investment in a green new deal to build a green economy based on decent work and fair pay.

…

In addition to the green new deal (recommendation 4), introduce the robust regulatory requirements and financial incentives needed to deliver a green economy.

Nowhere do they mention the problems created by growth – a green economy is simply seen as one with some more investment in renewables and other green technologies with a nod to fair pay and greater equality. Out of the long list of groups supporting this manifesto, apparently not one has considered looking even slightly deeper at the links between the economy and environmental destruction. How can a finite planet support the infinite growth demanded by civilisation? Unless environmentalists can answer this satisfactorily, their support of green growth and a green new deal based on it is misplaced.

Push for a deal at Copenhagen to agree substantial, verifiable cuts in greenhouse gases, which will limit temperature increases to well below 2°C.

How do they think we can keep temperature increases below 2°C if they’re implicitly supporting continued economic growth that will inevitably produce more greenhouse gases? The claims that efficiency and technology will keep emissions down, and even reach zero-carbon levels, are hopelessly naïve – unless these receive massive investment (which looks unlikely in the status-quo) and ultimately break the laws of physics to keep up with the exponentially increasing rate of growth. As a result, if you want to keep temperature rises below 2°C, supporting the growth system is not tenable. Have these groups considered this? Unlikely.

Deliver 0.7% of national income as aid by 2013, deliver aid more effectively and push for the cancellation of all illegitimate and unpayable developing country debts.

Although the cancellation of debts is a must, this statement implicitly supports the status-quo of aid dependency, rather than changing the entire system in which developing countries have their natural resources extracted for the benefit of western nations. Aid for natural disasters is justified, but keeping nations dependent on aid allows this plunder to continue. The globalised economy has shackled these countries into poverty, and so must be destroyed to free them.

‘Put People First’, despite their promising message that the current economic system is flawed, are in fact promoting the same system repackaged with a big green stamp on the box. The message their putting out does not match their rhetoric on putting people and planet first in this crisis – they are in fact peddling the rhetoric of the growing movement to create a ‘Green Growth economy’, they’re helping to greenwash civilisation. This blog has and will continue to make clear how Green Growth is a nonsensical farce, and how the mainstream environmental movement in pursuing it will not help either people or planet.

We would very much advise against marching for this manifesto, and instead take some positive actual action this Saturday – start a vegetable garden, join local groups, form a co-op, subvertise the media, or anything else regularly suggested here. If you still have the protest bug, the climate campers are taking on the carbon trading scam and the growth system at the European Climate Exchange on Wednesday, whilst others are marching on the Bank of England. The symbolic nature and utility of these protests can be debated, but they’re closer to the mark than the misnamed ‘Put People First’ marchers. We propose that ultimately the only way to put people first is to stop the growth system and dismantle civilisation, and the best place to start is in your own life and backyard.

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To celebrate 21 years of anti-capitalist financial innovation
Radical Routes and Rootstock
present a one-day conference and workshops.

How can we protect our remaining social and ecological resources from the convulsions of capitalism?

Places are free, but booking is essential.
Click here to download a booking form.

Keynote Speaker
Paul Mason , economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight

Confirmed Workshop Leaders:

Liz Cox from the New Economics Foundation on sustainable community economics

Rufus Pollock , Mead Fellow in Economics, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and co-director of the Open Knowledge Foundation
on free information and open economics

Chris Cook of Open Capital on innovative legal structures and financing

We hope also to have speakers from the Permaculture Association, Transition Towns Inititiative, West Midlands New Economics Forum and many more. Workshops are likely to cover gift economies, local currencies, co-ops and collectives, property in common ownership, anarchist economics, income sharing, etc.

We will be holding the Rootstock AGM during the course of the day. At the same time and again after the conference, we will show the newly released film, ‘Age of Stupid‘ , starring Pete Postlethwaite.

This event is supported by the New Economics Foundation and by other supporters.

Join us in the evening for our 21st birthday celebration, with Attila the Stockbroker, David Rovics, Wholesome Fish and the Carbon Town Cryer. The Anarchist Teapot Mobile Kitchen and Veggies Catering Campaign will be providing an evening meal and selling snacks and Brighton’s Cowley Club will be running the bar. Gig only tickets are £8/£4 concessions, tickets for the gig plus evening meal are £11/£6 concessions. Click here to read more about our birthday bash .

If you would like to book an info-stall at either the day-time or evening events, contact stalls(at)radicalroutes.org.uk

Conway Hall is in London, nearest station Holborn. It has a long tradition of supporting radical and left-leaning events.

Click here to read more about Conway Hall.

Click here for location information and directions.

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Another great article from Jan Lundberg, at CultureChange.

Personal cars must be outlawed. Auto manufacturing jobs are disappearing in the U.S. anyway, so why allow imported cars to drain our wallets and worsen the balance of trade? This rudderless nation needs to veer toward sense and wake up from the manufactured “American Dream,” and find healing for both nature and personal health.

The benefits from outlawing personal cars or bringing about their earliest demise will stimulate a great deal of economic activity of the sustainable kind. The sectors to benefit would be in all forms of alternative transportation that offer sustainability: low-tech, inexpensive, and using local resources. The work created would be local as people give up the jobs down the highway (these jobs are disappearing anyway) that are far away from one’s neighborhood.

Three quarters of U.S. commuters go by car, in a single-occupant vehicle. If these planet-killing citizens would give that up voluntarily, they would be liberating themselves in several positive ways, and we would all be better off ecologically. But since doing the wrong thing is rewarded as a feature of the dominant culture, an extreme response to change habits is required.

Oil and car infrastructure doomed

As motorists are presently opting to fix rather than buy cars in order to save money, the trend is that of ending up with a jalopy fleet. But what would the cars run on? In a collapsing economy the oil industry will not be refining and shipping unlimited supplies of petroleum products as before. Meeting demand sounds simple and the pace of depletion of crude reserves seems surmountable, but the industry isn’t able to ratchet down and provide all products to all sectors according to many peak oilists’ energy-descent assumptions. This I learned as an oil-industry analyst serving major oil companies and government for 13 years.

Additionally, as we know from Matt Simmons, oil industry investment banker and author, the petroleum infrastructure is rapidly rusting into a state of eventual and enforced disuse. So the car as mass transportation will be history, despite technofix-dreams of switching the means of propulsion.

Who might conceivably pull off such a ban of personal cars? It’s hard to imagine it now, but we can imagine the ban on smoking in public buildings being almost accomplished across the U.S. — seemingly unlikely a couple of decades ago. As cars increasingly appear to be the financial and environmental drain that they are, and the economic picture only worsens, more radical steps at restructuring will come to the fore. It could be that national pride pushes major transformation, as U.S. car companies completely collapse and leave the field to imports. Many may ask, why let that happen?

The pleasant surprise of working more locally is that it will be more for oneself and one’s community. Local people know each other and cannot ignore each other’s problems and needs if they are front and present. Cars are isolating socially, and serve competition between neighbors that only benefits corporations that keep people in hock with unnecessary purchases.

How to heal while getting ahead financially

Car-free living is a start. If I hadn’t sold my car, my last one, in 1989, my health would be much the poorer. After a number of months after ditching my Buick Behemoth, I was surprised to notice in the mirror that I had developed my leg muscles markedly. And the money I saved on gasoline, insurance, repairs, registration, etc., was as satisfying as learning that I had not slowed down my mobility whatsoever: Ivan Illich calculated in his book Energy and Equity that the average speed of the U.S. motorist, when taking into account most of the hours associated with car ownership — compared to miles traveled — is adjusted to just 5 MPH (five miles per hour).

Personal transformation is needed to cope with the unfolding global crisis. To come out better for the experience, we must address our health and our personal responsibility in a way that adds to our own power and capability to improve ourselves. In so doing, we improve the lot of our families and communities. It comes down to healing. The question is how.

Taking care of one’s health became relegated in the U.S. to primarily visiting doctors, hospitals and taking medications. None of these practices had to do with healing by the individual in a natural fashion. Sensing this, and in an effort to become healthier and regain our self control, the health food movement, self-help and alternative healing methods became more popular. Chiropractic and massage, for example, have started to make inroads for mainstream and corporate respectability.

But those 1960s and ’70s-era developments did not do enough. Health care in the capitalistic, insurance dominated, drugged-out U.S. must be addressed in a radical way, if only for cost control and affordability.

To detoxify the body and reduce stress is to heal and avoid major health crises and the costs they claim. Fasting is always effective, contrary to fears held by the uninitiated. One benefit is not having to buy food during the fast, and when eating resumes, costly processed foods or restaurant fare is not only ill-advised but repugnant.

The top fasting author, the late Herbert M. Shelton, wrote in Natural Hygiene: Man’s Pristine Way of Life
We are not Reformers; we are Revolutionists. Medical reform — the world has had quite enough of that. Reforming the drug system by substituting one set of drugs for another is a ridiculous farce. It may, to be sure, substitute a lesser for a greater evil, in many cases, but is like reforming big lies with little falsehoods.

The health benefits of not driving are tremendous, whether you spare yourself a fatal crash or killing others, or you’re just escaping the sedentary lifestyle whereby you breath plastics and other petrochemical poisons. During a fast, one’s meditative perception makes clear how much of a strain driving is on our health and spirit. If it should be avoided during a fast, that should call driving into question as normal or harmless.

The Depression and health

One of the hardships of this Depression is that medical costs are keeping constant during income loss and disappearing credit. “Health care is weighing down income,” reported the Associate Press in an article syndicated starting March 9, 2009, titled “Recession on track to be longest in postwar period” and sometimes as “Recession closes in on postwar record”.

Our mental health as a people and individually is pushed to the breaking point as stress mounts and “the way home” is obscured by fear and vested interests. Fasting and liberating oneself from the onerous car improves our frame of mind and reduces the discouraging tendencies of watching material security evaporate at the hands of the big corporations. Those profiting off greed and destruction are happy to see people remain discouraged and disempowered. All this can change rapidly, as we are seeing.

When those who care about the Earth and seek fundamental change see this newspaper headline for February’s Depression statistics — “Industrial Output Declines for a 4th Month” — it would prompt an eco-jihadist to shout, “God is great!”(or rather, “Goddesses are great!”) Rather than being extremist, this exuberant stance actually embraces the inevitable and welcomes an historic departure for wayward modern humanity. Lest anyone be thought of as insensitive or elitist for advocating revolutionary change — defined as changing consciousness rather than replacing rulers — there is no employment on a dead planet.

The Associated Press reported on March 16th, “Industrial output dropped 1.4 percent last month and the factory operating rate dropped to the lowest level in more than a half-century of record keeping, the government said.” Indeed! Highly entropic activity is calming down — healing to our bodies, spirits, and nature.

Another recent post by Jan tells us that for the first time since world war 2, the number of new cars on the roads is forecast to be less than the number of cars junked, in the year leading up to june 30th. Fantastic.

“Cars were a bubble” – General Motors

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by Douglas Rushkoff, at Arthur magazine.

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it’s a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

Chartered Corporations

Back in the good ol’ days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.

They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he’d get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.

But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn’t need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.

For example: In the 1700s, American colonists were allowed to grow corn but they weren’t allowed to do anything with it–except sell it at fixed prices to the British East India Trading Company, the corporation sanctioned by England to do business in the colonies. Colonists weren’t allowed to sell their cotton to each other or, worse, make clothes out of it. They were mandated, by law, to ship it back to England where clothes were fabricated by another chartered monopoly, then shipped back to America where they could be purchased. The American war for independence was less a revolt against England than a revolt against her chartered corporations.

The other big innovation of the early corporate era was monopoly currency. There used to be lots of different kinds of money. Local currencies, which helped regions reinvest in their own activities, and centralized currencies, for long distance transactions. Local currencies were earned into existence. A farmer would grow a bunch of grain, bring it to the grain store, and get receipts for how much grain he had deposited. The receipts could be used as money—even by people who didn’t need grain at that particular moment. Everyone knew what it was worth.

The interesting thing about local, grain-based currencies was that they lost value over time. The people at the grain store had to be paid, and a certain amount of grain was lost to rain or rodents. So every year, the money would be worth less. This encouraged people to spend it rather than save it. And they did. Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health. People did preventative maintenance on their equipment, and invested in innovation. There was so much extra money looking for productive investment, that people built cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were not paid for with money from the Vatican; they were local investments, made by small towns looking for ways to share their prosperity with future generations by creating tourist attractions.

Local currencies favored local transactions, and worked against the interests of large corporations working from far away. In order to secure their own position as well as that of their chartered monopolies, monarchs began to make local currencies illegal, and force locals to instead use “coin of the realm.” These centralized currencies worked the opposite way. They were not earned into existence, they were lent into existence by a central bank. This meant any money issued to a person or business had to be paid back to the central bank, with interest.

What does that do to an economy? It bankrupts it. Think of it this way: A business borrows 1000 dollars from the bank to get started. In ten years, say, it is supposed to pay back 2000 to the bank. Where does the other 1000 come from? Some other business that has borrowed 1000 from the bank. For one business to pay back what it owes, another must go bankrupt. That, or borrow yet another 1000, and so on.

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

The biggest wealth generator of all was banking itself. By lending money at interest to people and businesses who had no other way to conduct transactions or make investments, banks put themselves at the center of the extraction equation. The longer the economy survived, the more money would have to be borrowed, and the more interest earned by the bank.

Financial Meltdown

Which is pretty much how things have worked over the past 500 years to today. So what went wrong? Nothing. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to. The problem was that after America’s post WWII expansion, there was really no longer any real growth area in the economy from which to extract wealth. We were producing and consuming about as much as we could. Almost no commercial activity was occurring outside the corporate system. There was no room left to grow. Sure, outsourcing, lay-offs, and technology created some efficiencies, but wars, rising costs of health care, and exchange rates essentially offset any gains.

Making matters worse, all that capital that the wealthy had accumulated needed markets—even fake markets—in which to be invested. There was a ton of money out there—just nowhere to put it. Nothing on which to speculate.

The dot.com boom seemed to offer the promise of a new market, but it fizzled almost as quickly as it rose. So speculators turned instead to real assets, like corn, oil, even real estate. They started investing speculatively on the things that real people need to stay alive. What real people didn’t understand was that there is no way to compete against speculators. Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Luckily for us, the banks, and the speculators depending on them, made a bad wager: they bet on our continuing capacity to provide a reality on which to base their highly leveraged schemes. We just couldn’t do it. They put us between a rock and a hard place. With George W’s help, they sold us on the notion of home ownership as a prerequisite to the American dream. And they created a number of loan products which made it look as if we could actually afford over-priced homes. The banking industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for laws making bankruptcy difficult or impossible for average people to accomplish—while simultaneously selling average people loans that they would never be able to pay back.

The banks didn’t really care, anyway, since they never meant to keep these loans. They simply provided the cash to mortgage companies, who then packaged the loans. In return for putting up the original cash, the banks also won the right to underwrite the sale of those mortgage packages to investors—investors like pension funds, retirement funds, or you and me. Get it? The banks get all the interest, but we put up all the money. Our retirement accounts and pension funds invest in the very mortgages that we can’t pay back. The bank collects any interest, playing both sides of the equation but responsible for neither.

And when the whole scheme begins to break down, what do we do? We try to bail out the very banks that created the mess, under the premise that we need these banks in order for business to come back, since only banks can lend the capital required for businesses to flourish.

Yes, It is Wrong

President Obama may be smarter than most of us, but he’s still attempting to rescue the very institutions that robbed us in the first place. He’s not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place. And while it may be temporarily uncomfortable for the rich, and even temporarily devastating for the poor, it may be the fastest and least violent way to dismantle a system set in place for the benefit of 14th Century monarchs who have long since left this earth.

If the corporate supermarket chain’s debt structure renders it incapable of stocking its shelves this spring, this may be the wake-up call that consumers need to finally subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture farmer. If the former associate fund analyst at Lehman realizes that he is unable to get a job not just because his industry is contracting but because his work day creates no real value for anyone at all, he will be forced to learn how to do something that does. If an urban elite parent realizes he can no longer pay private school tuition for his kids, maybe he’ll consider donating to public school the time he would have spent earning that tuition.

In short, the less we are able to depend on business-as-usual to provide for our basic needs, the more we will be forced to provide them for ourselves and one another. Sometimes we’ll do this for free, because we like each other, or live in the same community. Sometimes we’ll exchange services or favors. Sometimes we’ll use one of the alternative, local currencies coming into use across the country as Central bank-issued currencies become too hard to get without a corporate job.

Deprived of centralized banks and corporations, we’ll be forced to do things again. And in the process, we’ll find out that these institutions were not our benefactors at all. They were never meant to be. They were invented to mediate transactions between people, and extract the value that would have passed between us. Far from making commerce or industry more efficient, they served to turn the real world into a set of speculative assets, and real people into debtors.

The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day.

Exactly. And as we create a real economy to relace this pyramid scheme, we should consciously be creating a new culture, that doesn’t enslave or devastate the world and doesn’t require war and endless growth.

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