The beginning of the collapse 

Associated Press 8/31/05 - Authorities drew up plans to clear out the tens of thousands of people left in the Big Easy and practically abandon the flooded-out city. “There will be a total evacuation of the city. We have to. The city will not be functional for two or three months,” Mayor Nagin said.

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New Orleans will somewhat recover from this particular calamity, but in the long run it will be permanently abandoned. It’s the canary of our civilizational collapse, the archetype of unsustainability.

What we face for several centuries going forward is a “ratcheting down” kind of collapse. Circumstance-by-circumstance, place-by-place the unsustainability of our lifeways will become manifest in the form of resource scarcities, dislocations, price inflations, breakdowns, wars, blowbacks. Hundreds of cities around the world will be abandoned during what James Kunstler calls The Long Emergency.

Human beings do need to live in residential clusters (nothing is more ecologically untenable than sprawl), but we’ve been enmeshed in a delusion regarding what kinds of urban populations are viable. William E. Rees, Director of the University of British Columbia School of Community and Regional Planning, has written: “Far from reflecting our assumed increasing independence from nature, the modern high-income city resembles a parasite on an increasingly global hinterland. As a consequence of urbanization, local, cyclically integrated ecological production systems have become global, horizontally disintegrated, throughput systems.” (from: “The Built Environment and the Ecosphere: A Global Perspective").

The mystique of growth and modernization has led us down a ruinous path. Those who are now questioning the grid, the state, and the world they require need to engage the long-term project of building the new society within the shell of the old. By constructing sane alternatives ... while maintaining human decency in the face of whatever comes, affirming a kind of moral and ethical coherence, preserving memory, defending human personhood and all the interconnectedness of the natural world ... we can make a small opening for others to follow, encouraging practical responses as well as the communal solidarity that represents our only hope for survival.

We have to scale down and get back to basics. In spite of the difficulties, such a devolution will be our only hope of significantly reducing the stresses on people and the planet. This means the reintegration of city and countryside, a bioregional reorganization of decentralized polities, the abolition of all empires, the elimination of hyper-exploitation, and a radical turn away from the toxic cornucopia of commodity society.

It means the renewal of subsistence cultures. It means making a life that is slower and quieter, enriched in non-material ways. It means revivifying an aesthetic not of the assembly line but of the forest, and restoring a life that can hear what the natural world is telling us, what we once knew long ago and have forgotten as the urban labyrinth grew up around us and enclosed us.

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The New Orleans disaster should be seen as a harbinger. Only the elites will lament the collapse of the Leviathan. Its conditions of life have been ecologically destructive, socially irresponsible, and burdensome for the vast majority of people. Humanity has been on an aberrant path for millennia, a nightmarish turn from our true journey. Hopefully we’ve learned the key lessons: In sustainable lifeways will be found human liberation. Life’s adventure cannot be found at control panels or desks, or in digging the foundations for the work/production pyramid, or building higher stories in its edifice. Nor can it be found consuming the laboratory chow of McDonaldization at the petrochemical banquet table, or running on its treadmill to nowhere. Rather, it is with the fabric of the living world - and it is time we rejoined the dance.

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[some of the above adapted from David Watson’s “The Collapse of Communism,” Fifth Estate, Spring 1992]

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