What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Todd’s off riding the wires (he said he was going to see if there was some way he could rig things so that the What a Way to Go website comes out as the first entry in ANY online search for anything!) and I’ve got something on my mind.

I want to talk about collapse. My collapse. Your collapse. Our collapse.

When we speak of collapse (those of us who do) I notice, for myself, and for many others, that it’s often in vague and hypothetical terms. Collapse takes on the feel of an event, that brief span of time when the building is visibly falling to the ground. And it seems to lie always somewhere out ahead of us on the path. It’s coming. And when it gets here, whoo-boy, watch out!

Collapse, the once and future thing.

And yet, I do not find that either notion is particularly helpful. Collapse will surely include major events, one time crumplings of one section of the building or another. (Oh oh, there goes the dollar! Oh my god, there goes Greenland!) But, just as surely, the collapse of this global industrial culture we call civilization (or Empire, if you’re squeamish about questioning the C word) will play out over a long expanse of time, and life will unravel, or transform, or simply end, in a million different ways, in a million different places.

And how do you determine the starting point of such a thing? To those of us on the inside (and isn’t that pretty much all of us at this point?) will not the beginnings and endings seem to coincide with our own experience? If you’re a small child foraging a vast urban garbage dump for some treasure that may help you to survive another day, would you not say that the collapse has already happened? If you’re a gated American salivating over the profit potentials of carbon trading or “clean coal”, would you not say, perhaps, that the best is yet to come?

No doubt future historians will look back upon this time and offer great insights and analyses regarding such questions as cause and effect, endpoints and beginnings and sequences and durations. What remains in doubt is whether those historians will be human beings, or cockroaches with typewriters.

It helps me, to remember these things: that collapse will play out over a long, long time, and that it has already begun. It puts my life into context. And that feels more sane. I am living inside the collapse of civilization, as surely as I am living inside the sixth great extinction event (excuse me, that should be all caps: THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION EVENT!!!!), and I always WILL be living inside of that collapse. It started before I got here (many of the major earth climate changes related to industrial activity began to show up on the radar before I was born) and will continue on long after I am gone. I will always live in transitional times. And I will never see the end of it. Not in this body, at least. Not with this ego.

Not only will I never see the end of it, I will likely not get to see most of it happening even while I’m alive. At some point, economic meltdown, political madness, climatic disruption, technofailure, crop failure, revolution and war (I could keep the list going, but you get the picture) will conspire to disrupt my connection with the news of the world. The grid will thrash and flail, the internet will fragment, the cell towers will fall (or get pushed over), the phone lines will lapse into lonely silence, and my view of collapse will shift from stories of melting poles, plastic seas, peaking oil wells and decimated rain forests, to that which I can see from the windows of my own home.

Climate change will feel like the escalating summer heat on my back deck, or the dried up pond behind my home. Peak oil will look like $8 per gallon diesel fuel, when I can get it, and then $10, and then none at all. Mass extinction will sound like the absence of spring peepers. And it will leave me, like the wild roses in the holler, wondering just where the heck did all the bees go? The news of the world will fade, and I’ll never find out if the polar bears have made it to shore.

And here’s the thing that wakes me up at four in the morning with an anxiety so cold that I have no choice but to get out of bed: I may never know if my own children have made it to shore.

My own children.

It’s not supposed to be this way.

But it is. And that’s one of the nicer scenarios. Tales of FEMA camps and presidential directives and secret plans for war and control and the triaging of entire segments of the population haunt the net. They haunt me. They must be taken into account.

Who will I be, living inside the collapse? Who will I be, as things unravel further? Who will you be? Who will we be together?

As we worked our way through What a Way to Go, Sally and I stopped now and then to ponder just what characteristics would be selected for in the coming bottleneck. What combination of luck and planning and doing and being would work together to help some people navigate the collapse more successfully?

The human population is in overshoot. It will crash. Which of us, if any, will survive that crash? Will it be those who hide out? Those who fight back? Will it be primarily a matter of being in the right place at the right time, a matter of luck and pluck? Will those with certain skills and knowledge have an edge? Will it be simply a matter of who has the most guns or the most extensive stores of food and water? Is there any way to know?

Lots of people have ideas and opinions regarding these questions. Each of us will have to sort our way through them. But one thing has been clear to both Sally and I from the beginning: emotional and psychological health and stability, at the levels of both the individual and the community, will be major deciding factors as things continue to unravel.

I had a taste of this just recently, as I spent most of two weeks in a place with backed-up drains (no flushing toilets, no showers) and an internet speed just slightly faster than walking and delivering the damn things by hand. I mean, yeah, those kids in the garbage dumps are sad and all, but 26.4 kbps? How much pain can we be expected to take?

I am an American by birth. I have been spoiled rotten, addicted to comfort and ease, and pretty much totally infantilized by my culture. I mean, the magic chair that makes my poo disappear… it stopped working! WTF? If you’re betting on survivors, you may want to stay clear of me. We’re talking long odds here.

Who will we be as things unravel, we pampered Americans? As the drains clog, as the water pressure slumps, as the refrigerator breaks down and there’s nobody available to repair it? Who will we be when we can no longer connect with our loved ones at the touch of a button? When we can no longer hop in our cars and head to the store? When there is no ambulance to take us to a hospital that has long since closed down anyways?

How will we feel when our clean and perfumed skins miss their morning hot showers? For a day? A week? A month? A year? How will our identities suffer when we no longer smell like sun-kissed raspberries or jojoba-honeysuckle, when our breath loses its minty fresh feel, when our hair has lost its extra body and bounce?

“Out there” ice caps will be melting, species will be dying, bees will be fleeing, corals bleaching and oceans burping, but collapse will come straight into our own homes, our own backyards, our own bodies. It will play out as loss upon loss upon loss upon loss. Loss of mobility, loss of work, loss of identity, loss of comfort, loss of familiarity. Huge losses at the scale of life and death and love. Smaller losses at the scale of luxury and deprivation. How will you deal with loss? How will you live with grief? And how will you sit with the relentless anxiety that can spring from not knowing?

All the rules have changed. Few of our expectations will emerge unscathed from the grinding wheels of collapse. The magic chairs will one day stop working, for most of us at least. Emotionally and psychologically, our drains will clog and back up. And it may not be a pretty thing to see.

Can you jump from the solid rock of the known, and into the unknowable abyss? Can you push off from the shore and let the rising waters take you where they will? Can you bend without breaking as the storm rages around you?

Or will you break down, fall to your knees, or curl up in a fetal position, distraught with grief and pain and fear, crying out for an ice cold Coke, one last episode of The L Word, or one final pepperoni pizza delivered hot and fresh to your home in less than thirty minutes or you get a free order of cheesy breadsticks?

Jim Kunstler calls it The Long Emergency. I think he’s exactly right. Short of a full-on nuclear exchange, collapse is going to go on for as long as any of us is likely to be around. It’s not something to be “gotten through”, like a case of mono or a bad break-up or a ten-hour shift at the cash register. It’s something to be lived into and through and beyond and above and between and betwixt. Collapse is the world into which we were born. It’s not just for breakfast anymore. It’s what’s for dinner.

Sorry about that.

One day, maybe quite soon, our magic chairs will lose their magic. I can think of two things to do now that will help prepare you for the emotional hammering that this will likely engender: find your people, and practice, practice, practice.

Find your people, because none of us can navigate collapse on our own. The pain and disorientation will be severe. Without a strong container of loving souls to share our pain and help hold our grief, how can any of us hope to remain whole and hale? I don’t think we can.

We will have to stop pretending that this current atrocity can continue, drop out of the distractions and expectations that keep us from action, and do the work we need to do, to find the people with whom we can face the storm. We’ve seen Katrina. There is nobody out there who is going to help us through this. We have only ourselves.

And when you find those people, begin the task of letting go. Embrace collapse as the reality it is and step into it. Shut down the magic chair and find out who you are without it. You need to know. Practice collapse, in small s