Contemplating Collapse

I wanted to put this reward at the end of my rant . . . a Pipal tree (an incarnation of Vishnu) in Calcutta

"The connection between the inability to goose up oil production beyond some already icecap-melting number, and the immediate trotting out of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is not immediately obvious. But apparently the U.S. economy is a sort of pyramid scheme, based on nothing more than faith in its growth potential, and can only continue to exist while it continues to expand, by sucking in ever more resources, particularly energy. Even a small energy shortage is enough to undermine it. So Peak Oil is hardly the problem – it is the foolish notion that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is possible. Collapse can be triggered when any one of many other physical limits is exceeded - drinkable water, breathable air, arable land, and so on – and so the limit to sustained oil production is only one of many physical limits to growth."

- Dmitri Orlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com


Often I think people miss an obvious point when discussing sustainability: if a particular practice or society or anything is unsustainable, that means by definition that it can’t continue forever. Sooner or later the shift to sustainable practices will happen in the way a pot that’s boiling over will settle down to a lower level of liquid. It would be nice to make some of the changes consciously, however. We can at least try to slow down instead of keeping our foot on the accelerator as the brick wall approaches (and—good timing—as we run of gas). It would be nice to have some soup left in the pot once we manage to turn off the flame. We can limit the damage and ease the transition to the sort of lifestyles we will have to live in a world where oil is no longer cheap and plentiful and our sprawling suburban communities with their tidy, barren front lawns is no longer feasible. Where there is not enough water to go around. Where credit is worthless, and wealth is increasingly measured in useful, tangible goods and services.
As the collapse-prophet James Howard Kunstler has written on his popular doomsday blog “Clusterfuck Nation,” (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com)it is president Obama’s task to first recognize our predicament and then to act accordingly: to mobilize the country to build new, smaller-scale systems that work in place of the large and failing ones now teetering awfully close to the brink. How depressingly ironic that for all his talk of change, so far Obama is scrambling to prop up the tattered canvas of the status quo against the howling winds of change. Obama and Americans in general are justifiably scared of change, now that it’s clear that we’re facing changes we can’t control. Who wants to stand up in front of the nation and explain that the era of America as we know it, of rampant consumption and credit card debt, is in its death throws? That we can’t live the lifestyles we’ve become accustomed to any more, can’t live in gated communities and depend on cheap fuel to drive to work everyday and expect cheap food to be there on the supermarket shelves at the end of the day.
But as many (including Noam Chomsky and the beautiful Ms. Waverly Lutz) have pointed out, Obama is not a mass movement. What he’s beginning to look like is the face of a highly successful mass marketing campaign engineered to sell us more of the same in a revolutionary new package.
We all want to like him—we voted for him, didn’t we?—but all his intelligence and eloquence and the good intentions I’m still willing to credit him with add up to nothing in the face of the machine in which the president is a rather small (though highly visible) cog. I’m talking about global capitalism and the corporate and financial mafia that enforce it. . . the ideology that’s doing an astoundingly efficient job of consuming the world.

‘So what, in the context of this madness, does life look like on the ground in Nepal these days?’ perhaps you ask. Well.

The capital, Kathmandu, has all but gone dry under the pressures of expanding population and sub-normal rainfall. At the public taps throughout the city, steady streams have turned into trickles or stopped altogether. People line up at the still-running taps for hours, their empty water containers snaking out into the streets.
Ever since the Koshi flood calamity in the Terai there’s been a power shortage, but now that problem too is reaching absurd proportions. There’s power for about 6 hours out of 24, businesses are folding left and right, industry is crippled. Intermittently, severe cooking gas and petrol shortages crop up, and auto fuel when available is notoriously mixed with foul-burning kerosene. (I’ll refrain here from getting into the corruption and dysfunctionality of Nepali politics.)
The city is clogged by traffic and the whole valley brimming with smog from all the cars and the burgeoning brick factories. The last rural parts of the valley are filling in with unplanned sprawl, as land prices shoot through the roof and more and more traditional farmers decide to sell their plots. In short, Kathmandu is looking more and more like Los Angeles.

And yet Kathmandu continues to grow. There is money to be made here, and things to spend the money on. More than any other it is this fact--Kathmandu’s involvement in the global economy--that keeps attracting young people from the countryside. This is the paradox, for as the city grows and the traditional urban centers meld into an endless suburban mess, one would expect Nepali village life to look more and more appealing to those who have roots outside the Valley. The beloved gaon (village), subject of so many folk songs, where the rhododendrons bloom and water flows clear. The gaon, where Maoist thugs create terror and set precedents of violent grab-what-you-can politics, where food security is marginal at best and public health issues abound. At its heart, perhaps the real issue is lack of access to the global economy and the standard of living that goes with it. Most rural Nepalis don’t live within easy access of a motorable road, let alone a hospital or college. While fifty years these would have been non-issues, today the West looms so large in people’s minds that traditional values are largely skewed. Village elders may cling to the old ways of living, but in most rural communities the chances are high that anyone under 30 desperately wants a one-way ticket out. Kathmandu is the portal to the outer world of boundless economic opportunity. Who, having escaped the dead-end drudgery of village and reached the promised land, is willing to return? It seems the village everywhere is a site first to be escaped and then nostalgically longed for.

The examples I mentioned, access to modern healthcare and higher education, are tricky issues: as a highly privileged American I can’t very well waltz into a village and say, ‘You guys don’t need higher education or modern healthcare! Keep going to the local shaman/herbalist! What do you want to study economics or English for?’ (Post)modernity has arrived, and simply shutting the doors on it is not an option. And yet these institutions are not necessarily the essential foundations of ‘civilized society’ that we tend to take them for. A great deal of the hardship of village life these days has to do with the manpower and brain-drain currently afflicting it; in times past, I imagine, intact communities were much better able to make do with their local resources their economies. Somehow or other, Nepal, like developed and developing countries worldwide, needs to find ways to revitalize its countless villages and small towns, where lifestyles that tread lightly on the earth are the norm and regional self-determination possible.

In any case, it looks like Nepal and other parts of the so-called “third-world” are facing the issues that the rest of the world can’t avoid for much longer. The difference is that here there is little insulation against reality: no insurance companies to absorb the shock of a bad fire or a drought, no self-interested corporations willing and able to provide (say) a desert like Arizona or Vegas or LA with water while aquifers dry up. If there’s not enough water to go around, people will know it instantly. The distance between action and reaction is simply shorter here, with fewer complex systems to create illusions of abundance while hidden costs pile up. This connection to reality means that Nepal, for all its tribulations, will never be able to swing itself as far out of line as the West has. With our recipe of neoliberal ideology, our celebrated work ethic, and financial voodoo that I will never fully understand, we in America have managed to build a teetering edifice, glory of the world, on a porous, shifty foundation. Nepal may never presume to reach so high, but it sure has less of a ways to fall. Of course there’s one glaring exception: Kathmandu, which as I implied is vulnerable to collapse in the same way Los Angeles is. Two generations ago the valley was all but self-sufficient in food and construction materials, with supplementation coming primarily with trade (e.g. in salt) with Tibet. Today its hyper-condensed, largely landless population is subject to shortages of essentials every time a bandh closes the few roads leading to and from the valley. There’s another reason Kathmandu is a ticking time bomb: it sits on a major tectonic faultline. The last time a major earthquake hit, in 1934, damage was severe, but at that time there was no concrete jungle.

How to close such a gloomy entry? First by saying that this kind of bitter medicine is essential to wake us up and mobilize us so we can start finding sustainable solutions before they are forced on us. That’s not much consolation, maybe. What we need here are stories, visions of a brighter future to raise our spirits and give us something to strive towards. Well I’m no bard. But check out Ursula LeGuin's novel Always Coming Home for some of that good old-time inspiration. If no one protests I might even post more about this remarkable book, ‘cause it too is good medicine for our times.