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This booklet is now available for order
in spiral bound hard copy.
Introduction (from Booklet #1)
This booklet is an excerpt from a larger book project which is in
the works, called “In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-Progress
for Outliving Civilization.” This project, and my writings and
life in general, are based on the premise that industrial civilization
is destroying the world and exploiting and murdering the inhabitants
of the world. I believe that industrial civilization is not capable
of doing anything else, whatever political party (or corporation,
or American-installed military dictator) is “in charge”.
I want to help to create communities which are equitable, ecological,
and sustainable. I also believe that we can’t do this within
the machinery of industrial civilization. More to the point, that
machinery is insatiable, imperialistic, and in the end, suicidal.
Civilization is destroying itself along with the world.
This introduction is necessarily brief, but I encourage you to look
at some of the resources at the end of this introduction to learn
more about the assumptions this book is based on.
Premises
Let me be specific about what I mean by industrial civilization.
For many people, the word civilization calls to mind words like “refined,
safe, convenient, modern, advanced, polite, enlightened and sophisticated.”
Of course, these words are the words that civilized people use to
describe themselves. For example, if you look up the word “Christian”
in the thesaurus, you will find words like “fair, good, high-principled,
honourable, humane, noble, right, virtuous” and other words
that Christians might use to describe themselves, but which hardly
apply to the Crusades, the Witch-Burnings, or other such atrocities
carried out by self-described Christians.
For a more unbiased definition of civilization, we can consider historian
Lewis Mumford’s use of the word civilization “to denote
the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its
chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history,
are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes,
the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the
magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the
weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for
both industrial and military purposes.”[1]
Anthropologist Stanley Diamond cuts to the chase, and says simply
that “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression
at home.”[2]
By “industrial”, I mean a society that is dependent on
machines for the basics of life. A society that needs tractors to
grow food, trucks to transport it, factories to synthesize fertilizers,
and so on, is an industrial society. A society where people participate
in the growing of their own food and other basics by hand would not
be industrial.
Put the two concepts together and you get industrial civilization.
This is a society with an extreme disparity of power, and where machines
are built, and humans mechanized, in order to serve the needs of those
in power. Since those in power want, essentially, to become more powerful,
society is caught in the claws of powerful people who constantly seek
to accelerate and extend the exploitation of human beings and the
natural world. We can see the effects of this in the intense global
destruction of the living world.
That the world is being destroyed probably isn’t news to you.
You’ve probably heard that 90% of the fish in the ocean have
been killed in the past 50 years, and that those remaining are significantly
smaller.[3] You’ve probably heard that the oceans are in a state
of ecological collapse. And that phytoplankton, the basis of the biosphere,
has decreased in global population by 6% in a mere two decades, and
by as much as 30% in some areas.[4] Populations of krill, the tiny
animals just above phytoplankton on the ocean food chain, are down
by 80% in three decades.[5] You’ve probably read in the news
that global warming will kill up to 37% of all species on earth by
2050[6] (and you’ve probably noticed that the estimates of these
casualties from global warming seem to increase just about every week).
In essence, you’ve probably noticed, even if you only read the
corporate-owned newspapers, that the world is being ever more rapidly
destroyed. If you’re paying attention, you don’t even
need the papers to tell you this.
Many, if not most of us, realize that this rapid destruction can not
continue indefinitely. A society which destroys the land will inevitably
die, because all people, in the end, depend on the land for sustenance.
Industrial civilization also depends on energy-hungry machines to
survive. Some people seem to believe that machines support our lives,
that water comes from the tap and potatoes come from the grocery store.
But machines only extract and centralize—I might go so far as
to say “loot and pillage”—the natural “resources”
that humans depend on. Machines don’t and can’t create
life.
As peak-oil activists are publicizing, the amount of oil on the Earth
is finite, and civilization is running out. More than half of the
extractable petroleum is gone. Demand is skyrocketing because of continued
growth and the industrialization of the so-called “Third World”.
The supply of oil that runs and builds the machines of industrial
civilization has peaked, and is now beginning the not-so-slow process
of running out. For a system dependent on growth, that’s a disaster.
A number of recent books examine the situation with great clarity,
such as Matt Savinar’s “The Oil Age is Over”, and
Richard Heinberg’s “The Party’s Over: Oil, War,
and the Fate of Industrial Societies”.
Many peoples’ first impression is that we won’t actually
be in trouble until the oil actually runs out completely, several
decades from now, but it’s actually much more urgent than that.
I’ll use an analogy to explain.
Imagine industrial civilization as a weight which is suspended from
a ceiling by many, many ropes. These ropes are the constant supplies
of oil that keep civilization from crashing down.
Now imagine the weight of civilization as the energy required to
deal with all of civilization’s needs to keep existing -- energy
to build and maintain the physical infrastructure, to transport and
centralize materials and resources, to engage in war and occupation
to ensure a constant supply of resources, to industrially produce
food for a growing population, and so on. As those needs increase,
the weight gets heavier. For example, as the water tables in agricultural
areas drop, more energy and infrastructure are required to drill deeper
wells, to pump water from further away, to construct and maintain
irrigation systems. Things like this increase the “weight”
of civilization. And those actions tend to cause their own problems,
like depletion and salinization of the soil, which will require more
and more energy in the future. The weight just keeps on getting heavier.
Now, industrial civilization has managed to persist so far because
it keeps getting more and more ropes -- that is, it extracting more
and more oil each year. But now oil production has reached a plateau.
Civilization has as many ropes as it will ever have, but it keeps
getting heavier. The ropes are stretched taut, and soon they’ll
be stretch to the breaking point. Some time around 2007 the gap between
the demand for oil and the production will become “unbridgeable”.
There won’t be enough oil, or ropes.
If you cut a rope in our strained example, maybe the other ropes
will still be able to hold it up. But if you cut another one, and
then another one, eventually the remaining ropes will be overloaded.
They will all snap and the weight will fall.
But civilization isn’t a single object. A more accurate analogy
would look at civilization as a set of weights, which are all hanging
by ropes and connected to each other by cables. Each of these weights
is a segment of the interdependent industrial economy: synthetic fertilizer
production, oil extraction, natural gas distribution, military arms
manufacturing, and so on. And each of these weights is connected to
each other by cables because they are interdependent. Fertilizer production
requires ample supplies of natural gas, and reliable oil extraction
depends on a stable regime backed up by a well-armed military. Once
the ropes snap on one weight, it falls and pulls on the weights connected
to it by cables. And then one after the other their ropes snap too,
and the entire apparatus falls in ruin.
That’s called a “cascading industrial collapse,”
and I think it’s the most likely future for industrial civilization
within the next decade or so.
This knowledge is a shock that many people are unable to cope with,
so they ignore it. Or they cheer for or work on energy technologies
like fuel cells with which they hope to draw out the lifespan of civilization.
But at the same time civilization brings them their gasoline and electricity,
it also strips away the forests that used to provide fuel and wood
for anyone who lived near them. It poisons the air, water and soil,
it empties the oceans of fish and destroys the sensitive balance of
the Earth’s climate. And as it reaches out, one foot already
in the grave, to pillage the last bits of remaining “resources”
it displaces and murders those human communities that have managed
to survive as long as they can. Remaining indigenous groups world-wide
are displaced, threatened, and assaulted to obtain more oil and minerals.
Rural communities shrivel as agriculture, forestry and fishing become
ever more mechanized, or simply cease to exist because of deforestation
and the collapse of fisheries. Even now, already a billion people,
1 out of every 6 people on the planet, live in squalid conditions
in urban slums, and that number is likely to double within the next
quarter century, according to the UN.[7]
The longer industrial civilization lasts the more human and living
communities it will destroy. We know that it’s going to come
down one day, and probably soon. The longer it exists, the worse shape
we will be in. Knowing that, we realize that it is time to bite the
bullet.
Industrial civilization needs to end as soon as possible.
It is my starting point that if we want to have healthy communities
and landbases, which can recover from the attacks they have faced,
we must first get rid of industrial civilization. You can’t
heal from an assault until the assault has actually ended.
Those of us who are aware of the situation are often deluged by greenwash.
Those in power want us to believe that the situation can be remedied
by minor fixes, by seamlessly replacing the dirty, industrial system
with a “green,” solar and wind-powered equivalent. But
it doesn’t work that way, as the references at the end of the
introduction examine in great detail. The “renewables”
offer only a tiny fraction of the energy required to prevent collapse.
And once industrial civilization has collapsed it will be next to
impossible to produce industrial “renewables” like gigantic
wind turbines.
For many industrialized people, the severity of this situation is
almost impossible to understand, accept, or perceive. Some people
will go to any intellectual or emotional length to deny or ignore
the situation, and insist that we can simply use hydrogen cars and
solar powered computers without fundamentally changing our lifestyles.
This is mere wishful thinking, but those in power prefer it. If the
truly dire nature of our situation were universally recognized, the
economy would collapse shortly thereafter. Who would buy stocks, who
would go to work, who would put their money in the bank, if they knew
that in the coming years the collapse of industrial civilization was
inevitable?
The situation is clearly desperate. The upward energy consumption
trend and the downward availability trend will collide catastrophically.
The result will be the collapse of industrial civilization, and there
is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
But there are things that people can do about it, during and after
it. Which is what this book project is for.
Because some people identify very closely with industrial civilization,
the thought of its collapse seems like their own death. They can not
imagine that anything might happen afterwards. But the collapse, in
theory, doesn’t necessarily have to be very violent, and could
ideally involve less deprivation and poverty than now exist. This
would require an honest look at the situation by everyone. It would
mean scaling down industrial capacity as rapidly as possible, and
focusing efforts on ensuring that as many people as possible are fed
and healthy, instead of trying to create hydrogen cars or other false
hopes.
However, we know that governments and corporations are not going
to do this. It would be very unpopular, make very little profit, and
generally distribute wealth, power and self-determination, whereas
industrialization has concentrated the control of the basics of life
in the hands of very few people.
The fundamental inability of the controlling institutions of society
to deal appropriately with the situation puts us in a rather desperate
situation. It’s up to us as small, face-to-face groups (the
only groups which can really be democratic or accountable, in my opinion)
to do what needs to be done to ensure that things turn out as well
as possible.
The Purpose of this Booklet
Many of us are very busy with making a living, taking care of ourselves
and each other, doing activism and so on. We can’t all spend
as much time as we’d like camping in the forest, growing gardens,
learning improvised wilderness first aid, or learning other skills
for collapse. And the likely timeline for collapse is staggeringly
short. We can expect massive disruptions of global industrial and
transportation systems starting between 2005 and 2010.8 One of the
reasons that I am writing this is for it to be a “crash course”
for the crash, a way of quickly introducing a variety of important
skills and technologies to people who aren’t familiar with them,
as well as creating a reference and resource for those who are.
It’s difficult to predict exactly how the collapse will play
out (although Planning, Prediction and Preparation is the subject
of the next In the Wake excerpt booklet). The collapse of various
civilizations in history took years or decades to collapse. So looking
at those examples, it’s tempting to go back to sleep and say
“don’t worry, we have plenty of time to figure out how
to deal with collapse. It will happen gradually.” But that’s
far from guaranteed. Those civilizations took centuries or millennia
to reach their full extent. The dominant technological civilization
on the planet is dependent on machines that are only decades old.
The time-scale of change has become profoundly compressed by rapid
industrial change. We can expect the rate of collapse to reflect that
compression. Also, those historical civilizations were based on technologies
that were much less interdependent than ours. If the oil supply is
interrupted, it becomes impossible to maintain the electrical generation
and distribution infrastructure. If the electrical infrastructure
goes out, then almost all of the rest of the infrastructure goes out
immediately. Telecommunications may continue temporarily by generator
and battery power, but even communications are becoming electrically-dependent,
and hence more brittle.
Additionally, there is reason to believe that industrial collapse
may happen very rapidly because of deliberate attacks on industrial
infrastructure, oil and electrical infrastructure in particular. These
attacks are quite common in some areas of the world already, and are
becoming increasingly common in North America. (However, they are
not very publicized, probably because those in power don’t want
people to realize how incredibly fragile and vulnerable the infrastructure
actually is.) If there was a coordinated attempt to collapse the industrial
system by a small group of committed people, near-total industrial
collapse could happen very quickly, over a period of weeks or even
days.
Though it may seem ironic to some, I believe that this rapid collapse
is probably the “best-case scenario” for the planet. I’m
a bit of an optimist, despite the awful state of things. So I’m
planning for an optimistic scenario which involves near-term, rapid
industrial collapse. It’s a remote possibility that industrial
civilization may continue for decades longer if it makes extensive
use of destructive technologies like nuclear power and coal-seam gasification.
But if it does last that long we are seriously fucked. I doubt that
many, if any, human beings would survive, let alone most other species.
And I’m not going to write a book for a world with no humans
in it—who would read it? So that leaves us with the urgency
of a book for the “optimistic” scenario of rapid collapse.
I wish to provide a handbook not just to help people survive industrial
collapse, but to share some of the skills people will need to demolish
the remnants of industrial civilization, and civilization in general,
and to build egalitarian and ecological communities of their own.
The techniques covered in this book project are chosen by the following
general criteria:
·They must either apply broadly and generally to a variety
of bioregions, or have the potential to be exceptionally beneficial
to people in some bioregions.
·They should permit a reduced impact and/or reduced consumption,
rather than increasing consumption.
·They should operate with “found resources” and
remnant resources as much as possible, as opposed to cultivation or
metalworking, so as to maintain the wilds and minimize labour.
·They should be relatively simple, so that they can be learned
quickly.
·They should be as compact as possible, to maintain the wilds
(That is, a technique that allows a 1000 square foot garden to meet
food needs sustainably, would generally be preferred to a 1500 square
foot garden which yields the same amount of food, since the smaller
garden leaves more room for wilderness. That assumes that both gardens
are equally sustainable).
·They should include easy to find or make items, so as to permit
rapid scaling up, democratic application, and reduced scarcity.
·Whenever possible, their use should be creative and fulfilling,
rather than repetitive.
·They should be portable, and rapidly scaleable and expandable.
·It should be possible for a small group to build and maintain
them.
·Wherever possible, their use should involve the degradation
of remnants of the industrial system, and the rejuvenation of the
land.
·Techniques chosen tend to make societies more egalitarian
and distribute resources and power more fairly.
I'd love to hear some of your thoughts about what sort of criteria
you would think about, and what tools and techniques you would use.
I'll try to include them in the full book, in future updates of this
booklet, and on the website, as appropriate.
Industrial collapse is a very big topic, and this booklet only covers
a very tiny corner of it.
This particular booklet is about tools and techniques you can use
cope with industrial collapse, or “gridcrash”. In this
booklet, I don’t write about some of the other effects of that,
like rioting or violence. So the knowledge in this booklet is quite
handy in certain circumstances, and not so handy in others. If you
live on the outskirts of a small town, for instance, this information
will be quite useful. If you’re living on a 15th floor apartment
in downtown Los Angeles and the grocery stores are just about empty,
power is out, and it looks like it won’t come back on any time
soon, this particular booklet won’t be the most useful for you
right away. (I would suggest that if you can, you quickly get to a
place where it would be useful.) We’ll get to those situations
in further writings. In the meantime, I suggest that you (and everyone
else) think about industrial collapse, what it means, and what you
plan to do about it.
There are some basic tools that will be of use to people in somewhat
settled communities. Most house dwellers would need tools to replace
their faucets and taps (Water, page 1),
their toilets and drains (Latrines and Greywater,
page 15), their refrigerator and freezer (Cooling,
page 22), their stove, oven, toaster and microwave (Cooking,
page 27), their electric lights (Lighting,
page 39) and their garbage and recycling pick-up (Rubbish,
page 42). Furnaces and other house-related topics will be covered
in more detail in future writings on the subject of shelter.
I hope that this information is useful to you. If you have any comments,
or suggestions, or wish to contribute to the project, please do contact
us. You can also check out the website at www.inthewake.org. There
you can see more information about the book project, more discussion
and essays, more links to web pages and books of interest, as well
as more information about relevant skills and strategies.
Thanks, and good skill.
Aric McBay
Occupied Detgahnyöhsráhdöh,
on the traditional lands of the Cayuga people
October, 2004
email: editorial@inthewake.org
Introduction Footnotes:
1. Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966. Page 186.
2. Diamond, Stanley. In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization,
Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1993. Page 1.
3. Myers, R. A. et al. (2003) “Rapid worldwide depletion of
predatory fish communities” Nature 423, 280-283, Letters to
Nature
4. Gregg, W. W., and M. E. Conkright, (2002) “Decadal changes
in global ocean chlorophyll” Geophys. Res. Lett., 29(15), 1730
5. Atkinson, A. et al. (2004) “Long-term decline in krill stock
and increase in salps within the Southern Ocean” Nature 432,
100-103, Letters to Nature
6. Thomas, C. D. et al. (2004) “Extinction risk from climate
change” Nature 427, 145-148, Letters to Nature
7. UN-HABITAT, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements
2003, UN-HABITAT, 2003
8. Duncan, Richard C., Olduvai Cliff Revisited: The Olduvai Cliff
Event: a. 2007, March 5, 2001. (see online at http://www.mnforsustain.org/oil_duncan_r_olduvai_cliff_revisited.htm)
Acknowledgements
Thank you for the proofreading, comments and suggestions from MM,
Tammy T., Melissa, Edward, Emily, Andrea, Pig Monkey, Wabbit, Lori,
Ken McWatters, and several anonymous contributors. Thank you to Alex
and Jen for the illustrations credited on pages 23 and 2 & 8,
respectively. Thank you also to the many people who offered supportive
comments and feedback.
In the making of this booklet I used free, open-source software including
the text editor Vim, the word processor Open Office, the vector drawing
application Inkscape, the raster image editing application GIMP, and
the desktop publishing program Scribus.
Further Reading
Civilization and Industrialism:
Derrick Jensen’s writings are some of the most
insightful, intelligent, moving, and relevant works I have ever read.
I heartily encourage you to read his work starting with A Language
Older than Words and also his latest (not yet published) book, tentatively
titled Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community.
Derrick’s website at www.derrickjensen.org includes a subscription
“reading club” where you can read Endgame and other works
currently in progress.
Anthropologist Stanley Diamond wrote the excellent
book In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization.
Chellis Glendinning’s My Name is Chellis and
I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization is a moving and personal
book in which Glendinning examines her own childhood abuse and traces
its roots to civilization itself.
Lewis Mumford is an incredibly prolific writer,
historian and social critic. Some of his most relevant books to these
premises include the two-volume set The Myth of the Machine: Technics
and Human Development, The Pentagon of Power: The Myth of the Machine,
and The City in History.
John Zerzan is the author of a number of great anti-civilizational
books, including Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization,
and also edited the excellent book Against Civilization: Readings
and Reflections which is available online at:
http://www.blackandgreen.org/ac/index.html
Daniel Quinn wrote the very readable stories Ishmael,
My Ishmael and The Story of B about the origins of civilization. (www.ishmael.org)
Extensive related writings by a number of authors are available at:
http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/
http://primitivism.com/
Peak Oil:
Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and The
Fate of Industrial Societies is an excellent introduction to the topic
of Peak Oil. He has also written a book about some of the options
in response to the Peak Oil situation called Powerdown: Options and
Actions for a Post-Carbon World. (www.museletter.com)
Matt Savinar’s book The Oil Age is Over is also an excellent
and readable introduction to the subject. There are also more articles
and links at his website at www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net.
Excellent websites on the subject of Peak Oil include www.wolfatthedoor.org.uk,
www.dieoff.org, www.hubbertpeak.com, and www.oilcrash.com.
General Ecology and Overshoot:
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William
R. Catton, Jr., is an excellent book on ecology and carrying capacity.
The website inthewake.org has more extensive listings and links on
related subjects.
The next two excerpt booklets will be on the subjects of Planning,
Prediction and Preparation, and Shelter. Visit the website for further
information and up-to-date copies.
A note on references: The information in this book
is a combination of the experience of myself and other contributors,
and the print references listed. References that apply to a whole
section are listed at the end of each section, and references which
apply to a specific subsection are listed at the end of a subsection.
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