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--- catastrophes [2019/03/14 14:56]
Richard Greeman
+++ catastrophes [2019/03/14 15:51]
admin [HOW]
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 Dear Colleagues! A new subject, Collapsology, is all the rage in France. Multiple major disasters, catastrophes and system collapses seem inevitable today, indeed are already happening. As future historians we need to face them squarely. We haven’t yet. Even some of ecosocialists of 20 years standing have been complicit in denial out of fear of provoking despair, fatalism and passivity.
-“For decades, the climate movement has suffered from a debilitating self-inflicted wound: the assumption that “we can’t tell the public the truth” about the urgency of the crisis, or the scale and speed of the necessary solution. Many climate scientists joined forces with professional “climate communicators” and corporate philanthropies to decree: Fear doesn’t work as a motivator! Only hope “works,” so let’s keep things positive and promote gradualist policies like carbon pricing! https://truthout.org/articles/its-possible-to-face-climate-horrors-and-still-find-hope/
+> “For decades, the climate movement has suffered from a debilitating self-inflicted wound: the assumption that “we can’t tell the public the truth” about the urgency of the crisis, or the scale and speed of the necessary solution. Many climate scientists joined forces with professional “climate communicators” and corporate philanthropies to decree: Fear doesn’t work as a motivator! Only hope “works,” so let’s keep things positive and promote gradualist policies like carbon pricing! ((https://truthout.org/articles/its-possible-to-face-climate-horrors-and-still-find-hope/))
 The Collapsologists, typically scientists who have finally realized the interconnectivity (Complexity) of multiple systems and stepped out of their disciplines to create an interdisciplinary study, are all calling for one thing: “a new narrative,” a way to comprehend what is happening to us and imagine a path forward. In other words what we are doing. Imagining plausible scenarios.
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 **//RG Catastrophe Draft 3/14/19//**
-=== The Great Collapse ===
+=== 1.	The Great Collapse ===
-**1.	The Great Collapse
+//Introduction//: The Great Collapse, as you already know, was not a single event, but rather a concatenation and culmination of a number of intersecting crises: including an energy crisis, a climate crisis, an ecological crisis, a refugee crisis, a financial crisis, a food crisis myriad social crises, and crises of inequality, government legitimacy, continuous wars, nuclear profusion, all rapidly reaching their limits. Disasters and catastrophes abounded, each aggravating the others. There were tornados, wildfires, floods, nuclear accidents, food and energy shortages. Climate refugees fleeing zones of flood, fire and unliveably hot temperatures carried with them epidemic diseases which spread among the inhabitants of more clement zones and became pandemic. Famine weakened the resistance of whole populations while blatant inequality between rich and poor aggravated tensions.
-**
-//Introduction//: The Great Collapse, as you already know, was not a single event, but rather a concatination and culmination of a number of intersecting crises: including an energy crisis, a climate crisis, an ecological crisis, a refugee crisis, a financial crisis, a food crisis myriad social crises, and crises of inequality, government legitimacy, continuous wars, nuclear profusion, all rapidly reaching their limits. Disasters and catastrophes abounded, each aggravating the others. There were tornados, wildfires, floods, nuclear accidents, food and energy shortages. Climate refugees fleeing zones of flood, fire and unlivably hot temperatures carried with them epidemic diseases which spread among the inhabitants of more clement zones and became pandemic. Famine weakened the resistance of whole populations while blatant inequality between rich and poor aggravated tensions.
-Global warming, the result of carbon-capitalism’s accelerating injection of greenhouse gasses into the earth’s thin atmosphere, was approching its irreversable tipping point. If it had continued for another decade, we would not be here now, students and teachers, studying our planet’s history while at the same time struggling with all our collective energies to survive the results and mitigate the damage. A struggle you were born into and know will last for centuries.
+Global warming, the result of carbon-capitalism’s accelerating injection of greenhouse gasses into the earth’s thin atmosphere, was approaching its irreversible tipping point. If it had continued for another decade, we would not be here now, students and teachers, studying our planet’s history while at the same time struggling with all our collective energies to survive the results and mitigate the damage. A struggle you were born into and know will last for centuries.
-The Great Collapse marked the dividing line between Then and Now. It was the global crucible in which our cooperative, egalitarian, peaceful and democratic societies were forged. Although it entailed the suffering and death of billions of humans along with the extermination of many other creatures,  in hindsight we are obliged to look upon it as a “fortunate fall.” Not only did the Great Collapse prevent accelerating Climate Chaos from exploding into total appocolypse, it released the human powers of caring, solidarity and mutual aid from which today’s societies emerged….”
+The Great Collapse marked the dividing line between Then and Now. It was the global crucible in which our cooperative, egalitarian, peaceful and democratic societies were forged. Although it entailed the suffering and death of billions of humans along with the extermination of many other creatures,  in hindsight we are obliged to look upon it as a “fortunate fall.” Not only did the Great Collapse prevent accelerating Climate Chaos from exploding into total apocalypse, it released the human powers of caring, solidarity and mutual aid from which today’s societies emerged.
-The global crash and the collapse of the value of securities destabilized the international financial system. Fortunes in paper profits and fictitious capital vanished overnight, wiping out years of heedless, unregulated speculation. Banks closed their doors as crowds of depositers rushed to withdraw their savings. For want of credit (and customers able to pay) factories and businesses closed their doors, provoking mass unemployment and a rapid decline in production. This financial collapse did have one positive effect: carbon emissions fell back to 20th century levels.
+The global crash and the collapse of the value of securities destabilized the international financial system. Fortunes in paper profits and fictitious capital vanished overnight, wiping out years of heedless, unregulated speculation. Banks closed their doors as crowds of depositors rushed to withdraw their savings. For want of credit (and customers able to pay) factories and businesses closed their doors, provoking mass unemployment and a rapid decline in production. This financial collapse did have one positive effect: carbon emissions fell back to 20th century levels.
 In many areas, basic services like electricity, water, and health care collapsed. National governments proved largely incapable or unwilling to provide disaster aid to the victims. Inequality, already severe, became starker as the rich retired behind the militarized walls of their gated communities or fled to their well-stocked and well-defended estates in insolated zones. States were reduced to their basic function in class society: armed repression, defending the status quo against opposition by oppressed populations or rival states (and proto-states). When governments did send troops to disaster areas, their assignment was to “preserve law and order” and “protect property” by shooting “looters” rather than to help the locals by providing food, shelter and medical aid.
-. Disaster Capitalism vs. Self-help
+=== 2. Disaster Capitalism vs. Self-Help ===
 This pattern had been observed as early as 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the iconic American city of New Orleans, La. The storm had provoked disastrous flooding when the levees were overwhelmed by accumulated rainwater, and it was later revealed that poor planning on the part of corrupt local government and blunders by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were responsible.
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 During the Ebola epidemic in 2119,  attacks on two treatment centers operated by Doctors Without Borders led the group to close them, and brought a scorching and highly unusual self-assessment by Dr. Liu, who included her organization among those that had fallen short. She urged medical teams to treat Ebola patients “as humans and not as a biothreat.” She blamed not the communities, but the responders, for failing to win people’s trust. “They hear constant advice to wash their hands, but nothing about the lack of soap and water,” Dr. Liu said. “They see their relatives sprayed with chlorine and wrapped in plastic bags, buried without ceremony. Then they see their possessions burned.”
 Another physician from Doctors Without Borders, Dr. Vinh-Kim Nguyen, wrote: “Early in the epidemic, we witnessed armed agents forcibly bringing patients in for treatment. In a population already traumatized by violence and forceful responses to numerous crises, such tactics fuel distrust of responders, which prompts patients to flee and spawns violence.”
 Dr. Nguyen also noted that when Ebola teams were accompanied by security forces, they were met with fear and distrust, especially of forced vaccination. But when the security forces were absent, people would actually ask to be vaccinated. “The lesson is clear: Guns and public health don’t mix,” he wrote. But the lesson was never learned by governments.
 This pattern continued through the next decades. Observing the generalized government incompetence, brutality, corruption and indifference to their suffering, great masses people around the world began to lose faith in their authority. Especially where evidence of governmental responsibility for and complicity in provoking disasters was leaked and went viral, thanks to the Internet which, originally devised to permit the U.S. military to continue to communicate after mass destruction of infrastructure, continued to operate internationally through a proliferation of undersea cables which escaped destruction.
 For example, the Great Pandemic, which eventually wiped out over a billion people, was widely blamed on the U.S. when it was discovered that the CIA had been testing an experimental virus in Africa. Apparently a few “subjects” escaped and the virus spread, while the authorities conspired to cover it up until it was too late. This phenomenon reminded contemporary historians of the AIDS tragedy, which in the late 20th century ravaged millions while the media, medical and government elites remained indifferent. An epidemic which eventually lead to the self-organization if the whole Gay community unleashing a powerful social force. //(We are fortunate in having among our Future Historians Sam Friedman, who, at a spry 180, is both a social epidemiologist and a poet, to help us elaborate this particular scenario.)// In any case, under the then-operative market system, there was little incentive for pharmaceutical companies, which spent billions annually lobbying to preserve their monopolies, to invest in research on epidemic diseases, which mainly affected poor people who mostly could not pay. Instead, research concentrated on sexual enhancement, esthetic improvement, longevity, and transhuman devices sold to the rich at a profit at inflated prices.
-The pandemics were a catastrophe of planetary proportions. In their wake, famine also developed into a planet-wide catastrophe, and it ultimately lead to a planetary response. Sporadic, local food riots led to cooperative self organization against the market system that speculated while people starved. Debt strikes (instead of suicides) broke out among peasants ruined by need to buy seeds from corporate monopolies and barred from using their own seeds as peasants have for millenia. Industrial farmers too had been driven to bankruptcy, and suicide by the high cost of petrolium-based fertilisers, pesticides and other chemical inputs. Monsanto was attacked and shunned, money-lenders were rooted out.
+The pandemics were a catastrophe of planetary proportions. In their wake, famine also developed into a planet-wide catastrophe, and it ultimately lead to a planetary response. Sporadic, local food riots led to cooperative self organization against the market system that speculated while people starved. Debt strikes (instead of suicides) broke out among peasants ruined by need to buy seeds from corporate monopolies and barred from using their own seeds as peasants have for millennia. Industrial farmers too had been driven to bankruptcy, and suicide by the high cost of petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides and other chemical inputs. Monsanto was attacked and shunned, money-lenders were rooted out.
 In fewer than two decades, between pandemics and famines, the world population of 8 billion humans was, according to our best estimates, reduce by more than one half. The suffering this entailed was undescribable. However, one result of this horrific die-off was that unemployment, the Iron Law of capitalist economics, disappeared for the first time in the Industrial Age. The scarcity of labor put working people at a relative advantage in dealing with their employers, encouraging them to demand better wages and conditions; to struggle and win as they grew more aware of their strength. Historians noted that a similar phenomenon took place during the Middle Ages, when the Black Plage wiped out large swaths of the population and peasants were able to stand up to their landlords. This led to peasant revolts like those of Watt Tylor and John Ball in England, and although they were eventually put down, the feudal system was altered and became much less harsh.
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 This glaring contradiction transformed every catastrophe into a struggle not only against suffering but against authority. Despite government and commercial censorship and propaganda, the evidence of this contradiction circulated through Internet platforms and alternate media, and became part of planetary consciousness, paving the way for the eventual emergence of a global uprising of the billions against the billionnaires of sufficient strength to overwhelm them and their paid mercenaries and lay the basis for new, democratic, egalitarian societies to arise among the wreckage of the old.
-			**3. Didn’t They See Collapse Coming?**
+=== 3. Didn’t They See Collapse Coming? ===
-Why did the Great Collapse take so many people by surprise? Although academic specialists in various fields like climatology, geology, economics, agriculture, sociology, politics and even finance (a few old Marxist critics) were warning about impending collapses ranging from over-leveraged financial bubbles,  to melting icecaps, rising oceans, salination of oceans, extinction of coral, peak oil, inequality, global conflicts, homeless refugees, ethnic strife and famines, there was little interdisciplinary study of the miriad ways in which each of these crises interacted with, and frequently aggravated, each other.
+Why did the Great Collapse take so many people by surprise? Although academic specialists in various fields like climatology, geology, economics, agriculture, sociology, politics and even finance (a few old Marxist critics) were warning about impending collapses ranging from over-leveraged financial bubbles,  to melting icecaps, rising oceans, salination of oceans, extinction of coral, peak oil, inequality, global conflicts, homeless refugees, ethnic strife and famines, there was little interdisciplinary study of the myriad ways in which each of these crises interacted with, and frequently aggravated, each other.
 The planetary consciousness that humanity was dealing with the crisis of a complex, interconnected system only dawned slowly. Around 2000, the term “Anthropocene” began to be used to mark a new geological epoch during which the influence of human behavior on the Earth’s atmosphere since the rise of industry became predominant. But the term “Collapsology” – the study of the interaction of collapsing systems in various fields – did not come into usage until about 2015.
-Nonetheless, by the early 21st century, most of informed world opinion was aware of the impending Climate chaos due to growing carbon emisions, despite the massive denial campaign of petroleum lobbies and the governments they controlled. World conferences were held, pious resolutions to volontarily reduce carbon emisions were endorsed by all the nations (with the exception of the biggest polluter, the U.S. under the Trump administration). But carbon emissions continued to rise every year, and nothing was done despite the near-unanimous predictions of climatologists and increasing agitation among citizens’ groups.
+Nonetheless, by the early 21st century, most of informed world opinion was aware of the impending Climate chaos due to growing carbon emissions, despite the massive denial campaign of petroleum lobbies and the governments they controlled. World conferences were held, pious resolutions to voluntarily reduce carbon emissions were endorsed by all the nations (with the exception of the biggest polluter, the U.S. under the Trump administration). But carbon emissions continued to rise every year, and nothing was done despite the near-unanimous predictions of climatologists and increasing agitation among citizens’ groups.
-Already in the 1970’s, scientists working for the petroleum giant Exxon had been warning management in private memos about impending climate catastrophe. The scientists’ modeling correctly predicted that if oil consumption continued to increase it would lead to global warning and eventual climat chaos. Their predictions were ignored and their research kept secret. Their research was only made known in 2010, thanks to  the nonprofit news organization Inside Climate News.
+Already in the 1970’s, scientists working for the petroleum giant Exxon had been warning management in private memos about impending climate catastrophe. The scientists’ modeling correctly predicted that if oil consumption continued to increase it would lead to global warning and eventual climate chaos. Their predictions were ignored and their research kept secret. Their research was only made known in 2010, thanks to  the nonprofit news organization Inside Climate News.
 As the editors of The Wall Street Journal commented at the time: “More damagingly, the company set a model for the rest of the industry. Today, scientists who say the exact same thing are ridiculed in the business community. Exxon, rather than change its business plan, chose the path of disinformation, denial and delay – just like the tobacco industry faced with the evidence of cancer.”
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 The Big Lie of the half- century 1970-2020 was the Denial of human-generated climate change. It was generated and propagated by the fossil fuel industry, whose profits, indeed whose very existence, were immediately threatened, if the truth came to light and was acted upon.  Having dismissed their own truthful scientists, Big Oil hired their own bogus “climate specialists” to undermine fast-accumulating reports by commissions of highly respected scientists. Carbon corporations had also long dominated the media through “sponsoring” and pre-censoring radio and TV shows through commercials. This fabricated “controversy” permitted governments to continue to claim that the danger was still unproven.
-So although by the early 21st century the visible effects of global warming (droughts, floods, forest fires, ice melts) could no longer be hidden, the U.S. and other industrial nations stuck to the Big Lie that global warming and catastrophic climate change are unpriven and possibly myths cooked up by a conspiracy of liberals, left-wing scientists and/or the Chinese. Although the climatic tipping point was known to be a life and death, existential question for the future of humanity, the evidence of independent scientists was not believed and their conclusions were routinely dismissed by world leaders. Instead, in the name of “growth,” they continued to push for more fossil fuel production, to block the implementation of even the feeblest attempts to limit it (e.g. the Paris agreement), and to fight bloody wars over the domination of petroleum-rich countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
+So although by the early 21st century the visible effects of global warming (droughts, floods, forest fires, ice melts) could no longer be hidden, the U.S. and other industrial nations stuck to the Big Lie that global warming and catastrophic climate change are unproven and possibly myths cooked up by a conspiracy of liberals, left-wing scientists and/or the Chinese. Although the climatic tipping point was known to be a life and death, existential question for the future of humanity, the evidence of independent scientists was not believed and their conclusions were routinely dismissed by world leaders. Instead, in the name of “growth,” they continued to push for more fossil fuel production, to block the implementation of even the feeblest attempts to limit it (e.g. the Paris agreement), and to fight bloody wars over the domination of petroleum-rich countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
-As Adolf Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf: “The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” The “conspiracy of expert liars” in the case of climate change included the petroleum corporations, the governments and the mainstream press who had been suppressing or obfuscating the truth – although the facts had been “nailed down” for over half a century.
+As Adolf Hitler asserted in //Mein Kampf//: “The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” The “conspiracy of expert liars” in the case of climate change included the petroleum corporations, the governments and the mainstream press who had been suppressing or obfuscating the truth – although the facts had been “nailed down” for over half a century.
 Like Hitler’s Big Lie about the responsibility of the Jews for Germany’s humiliating defeat in WWI big petroleum’s climate denial lie was backed up by bullies who intimidated potential truth tellers. For example, under capitalism the geology departments of the major research universities were largely funded by petroleum money, and so professors were hardly encouraged to speak out on the necessity to stop burning oil if they who wanted to keep their jobs and their grants. Similarly the major media, dependent on advertising revenues from petroleum and related industries (auto, highway construction, agrobusiness, shipping), were roped into the climate-denial “conspiracy of expert liars.” So it is hardly an accident that although in the early 21st century weather reporting filled up more than 20% of news broadcast time in the U.S., TV “meteorologists” avoided such tainted “politicized” expressions as “global warming” and the “greenhouse effect” and devoted almost no air time to the causes of the increasing climate chaos whose consequences they were describing.
-As for the U.S. government, oil states continued to dominate Congress, and the White House had been controlled by oilmen since at least LBJ (1963). In 2017 Exxon CEO Tillerson was named President Trump’s first Secretary of State, and Oklahoma oil-lobbyist named Pruitt ruled the EPA. Pruitt, who made his career as a paid “expert liar” for the oil companies and who was apparently not very bright, apparently actually believed climate denial, and so he once naively proposed a “public debate” on the forbidden topic. Pruitt’s great idea was promptly quashed by the Trump White House as such a public debate would have been a “damaging spectacle, creating an unnecessary distraction from the steps the administration has taken to slash environmental regulations.”  Any such public debate would inevitably have  implicated the military, a major consumer of petroleum, whose primary mission has long been to protect (and if possible expand) U.S. petroleum interests around the world and whose massive budget depends on serving the global interests of the petroleum lobby.
+As for the U.S. government, oil states continued to dominate Congress, and the White House had been controlled by oilmen since at least LBJ (1963). In 2017 Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was named President Trump’s first Secretary of State, and Oklahoma oil-lobbyist named Pruitt ruled the EPA. Pruitt, who made his career as a paid “expert liar” for the oil companies and who was apparently not very bright, apparently actually believed climate denial, and so he once naively proposed a “public debate” on the forbidden topic. Pruitt’s great idea was promptly quashed by the Trump White House as such a public debate would have been a “damaging spectacle, creating an unnecessary distraction from the steps the administration has taken to slash environmental regulations.”  Any such public debate would inevitably have  implicated the military, a major consumer of petroleum, whose primary mission has long been to protect (and if possible expand) U.S. petroleum interests around the world and whose massive budget depends on serving the global interests of the petroleum lobby.
+=== 4. What Was It about Oil? ===
-    **4. What Was It about Oil?
-**
 Why did these powerful leaders, special interests, and institutions conspire to lead the planet to self-destruction by any means necessary, including war and fake news? Alas there is only one possible answer to this question: to preserve the wealth and power of that fraction of the capitalist 1%-ers whose wealth is tied up in carbon deposits beneath the soil.
-Why, since they are so rich and powerful, didn’t they ever reverse the course of denial and domination they chose in the 70’s and invest their capital in renewable energy sources? The answer is that their vast wealth took the form of fossil minerals in the ground whose value could only be realized when they are burned. At the pump a gallon of gas may have been worth two or three dollars. In the ground it was  worthless. As with all commodities under capitalism, the value of carbon deposits was based on what financiers called “futures” – the expected price they would bring when brought to market at some future time. If governments had made the decision to save the planet by converting to renewable energy before it was too late, that “future time” of sales and profits would never have come. The buried minerals would have become what economists call “stranded assets.” Their monetary value, on which the wealth and power of the petroleum corporations depended, would rapidly have suink and with it the price of petroleum shares. Petroleum shareholders would soon have been as broke as the owners of buggy whip factories the year after Ford introduced the Model T.
+Why, since they are so rich and powerful, didn’t they ever reverse the course of denial and domination they chose in the 70’s and invest their capital in renewable energy sources? The answer is that their vast wealth took the form of fossil minerals in the ground whose value could only be realized when they are burned. At the pump a gallon of gas may have been worth two or three dollars. In the ground it was  worthless. As with all commodities under capitalism, the value of carbon deposits was based on what financiers called “futures” – the expected price they would bring when brought to market at some future time. If governments had made the decision to save the planet by converting to renewable energy before it was too late, that “future time” of sales and profits would never have come. The buried minerals would have become what economists call “stranded assets.” Their monetary value, on which the wealth and power of the petroleum corporations depended, would rapidly have sunk and with it the price of petroleum shares. Petroleum shareholders would soon have been as broke as the owners of buggy whip factories the year after Ford introduced the Model T.
 Naturally the carbon interests were desperate. For them – and for the military industrial complex which they dominate – there was no turning back. They could only go forward into increased petroleum production, taking their profits now while leading the rest of us like lemmings over the cliff of climate catastrophe. From a business point of view, they could have no thought for the human future. Only for petroleum futures. Hence the need to keep repeating the same Big Lie of climate denial.
-The Petroleum lobby was able to dominate the world not only because oil (and coal of course) was intimately linked with transportation and industry, it also dominated the plastics industry (polluting the oceans with indestructable plastic bags) and, most fatally, agriculture. For the industrial agriculture that produced more than half of the world’s food supply in the early 21st century was totally dependant on petroleum fertilizers, having turned the exhausted soil into container for ‘inputs’ (fertilizer, chemical insecticides, pesticides) spread by gigantic petroleum-powered farm machines.
+The Petroleum lobby was able to dominate the world not only because oil (and coal of course) was intimately linked with transportation and industry, it also dominated the plastics industry (polluting the oceans with indestructible plastic bags) and, most fatally, agriculture. For the industrial agriculture that produced more than half of the world’s food supply in the early 21st century was totally dependent on petroleum fertilizers, having turned the exhausted soil into container for ‘inputs’ (fertilizer, chemical insecticides, pesticides) spread by gigantic petroleum-powered farm machines.
-The petroleum lobby was thus intimately linked with the agro-chemical industry, which produced the pesticides, developed genetically-modified seeds, and which through the enforcement of “intellectual property” rights created a monopoly of seeds, which for thousands of years had been set aside by peasant from their crops to plant for their next crop. Montsanto and other such companies sent scientists to gather the native knowledge of peasant farmers around the world and then patented these seeds to prevent their actual inventers from planting them without buying them from the Corporation! So that under patent laws adopted by government they lobbied, it became a crime to plant your own seeds on your own land.
+The petroleum lobby was thus intimately linked with the agro-chemical industry, which produced the pesticides, developed genetically-modified seeds, and which through the enforcement of “intellectual property” rights created a monopoly of seeds, which for thousands of years had been set aside by peasant from their crops to plant for their next crop. Monsanto and other such companies sent scientists to gather the native knowledge of peasant farmers around the world and then patented these seeds to prevent their actual inventors from planting them without buying them from the Corporation! So that under patent laws adopted by government they lobbied, it became a crime to plant your own seeds on your own land.
-. Feeding the World
+=== 5. Feeding the World ===
-Fortunately for our survival, petroleum-based industrial agriculture on produced half what what people ate. The rest of the world, the so-called “underdeveloped” world, still depended on peasant agriculture, mostly carried on by women, who both cultuvated the land, fed their families, and brought the rest of their produce to local market-places. Moreover, in the industrialized countries, aware consumers had begun rejecting the bland, fattening, unhealthy commercial diets, creating a market for so-called “organic,” untreated food. At the same time, there were movements among young people to go back to the land, become farmers using organic methods, and distribute their produce through non-commercial networks and consumer cooperatives. In China as well, where famine had been chronic throughout every dynasty including that of Mao Tse-tung, desert lands were being brought back to life through the use of Permiculture methods.
+Fortunately for our survival, petroleum-based industrial agriculture on produced half what what people ate. The rest of the world, the so-called “underdeveloped” world, still depended on peasant agriculture, mostly carried on by women, who both cultivated the land, fed their families, and brought the rest of their produce to local market-places. Moreover, in the industrialized countries, aware consumers had begun rejecting the bland, fattening, unhealthy commercial diets, creating a market for so-called “organic,” untreated food. At the same time, there were movements among young people to go back to the land, become farmers using organic methods, and distribute their produce through non-commercial networks and consumer cooperatives. In China as well, where famine had been chronic throughout every dynasty including that of Mao Tse-tung, desert lands were being brought back to life through the use of Permaculture methods.
-Slowly but surely, despite the cut-throat competition of billionnaire supermarket corporations which purchased vegetables cheaply at wholesale markets and resold them at ten times the cost, the so-called “slow food” and and “buy local” networks continued to grow. These networks, and the surviving traditional peasant farms, laid the groundwork for the food system we have today. For with the collapse of the petroleum and chemical-based globalized industrial agricultural and distribution system, humanity was able to build on that basis in the face of global famine.
+Slowly but surely, despite the cut-throat competition of billionaire supermarket corporations which purchased vegetables cheaply at wholesale markets and resold them at ten times the cost, the so-called “slow food” and and “buy local” networks continued to grow. These networks, and the surviving traditional peasant farms, laid the groundwork for the food system we have today. For with the collapse of the petroleum and chemical-based globalized industrial agricultural and distribution system, humanity was able to build on that basis in the face of global famine.
 But why was there famine in a world where in a country like the U.S., half the food purchased ended up as garbage?  Why hunger in poor countries where food was produced and exported in great quantities?
-[Here we summarize the arguments of Frances Moore Lappé’s “10 questions about world hunger”transformed into the past. We then borrow texts describing today’s (2019) efforts at permaculture, local food, etc and extrapolate. We give this movement full historical credit for setting the example and laying the ground work under capitalism, spreading its methods as the crisis deepened, and in a position to transform itself into a new global way of feeding humanity in the crusible of the Great Collapse]]
+[Here we summarize the arguments of Frances Moore Lappé’s “10 questions about world hunger”transformed into the past. We then borrow texts describing today’s (2019) efforts at permaculture, local food, etc and extrapolate. We give this movement full historical credit for setting the example and laying the ground work under capitalism, spreading its methods as the crisis deepened, and in a position to transform itself into a new global way of feeding humanity in the crucible of the Great Collapse]
-A hungry world fell back into mixed peasant agriculture, organic, permaculture and multi-crop farming began developing all over, from traditional peasant lands to urban gardens. Paradoxially, fewer acres under intensive cultivation began producing larger quantities and variety of foodstuffs than monocrop industrial methods on huge farms. The supermarkets, having been systematically looted, were razed. Their parking lots were dug up and transformed back to into farm land.  The countryside and villages began repopulating, as much more intensive human labor was required in agriculture. Animal traction replaced oversized petroleum-driven machinery, and animal waste (as well as human) replaced petroleum products as fertilizer.
+A hungry world fell back into mixed peasant agriculture, organic, permaculture and multi-crop farming began developing all over, from traditional peasant lands to urban gardens. Paradoxically, fewer acres under intensive cultivation began producing larger quantities and variety of foodstuffs than monocrop industrial methods on huge farms. The supermarkets, having been systematically looted, were razed. Their parking lots were dug up and transformed back to into farm land.  The countryside and villages began repopulating, as much more intensive human labor was required in agriculture. Animal traction replaced oversized petroleum-driven machinery, and animal waste (as well as human) replaced petroleum products as fertilizer.
-. The Paradox of Patroleum: Peak Oil and Debt Slavery
+=== 6. The Paradox of Petroleum: Peak Oil and Debt Slavery ===
 [Summary to be developed]: Geologists estimate that what was known in the 21st century “peak oil’ had been reached by about 2007. By then, half of the known, easily accessible petroleum deposits in the world had already been used up in the frenzied race for industrial growth. This meant that each new barrel of oil would cost increasingly more to produce by expensive processes like refining oil sands, cracking shale all, and deep-ocean drilling platforms, all of which engendered enormous damage to the natural and built environments.
-Setting aside huge costs which the oil companies, protected by government “regulation,” were able to “externalize” (and which we are still struggling to restore), the net result of peak oil was rising costs, so that it took more and more oil to recover and refine each new barrel, thus making petroleum-based energy more costly than non-polluting sources like wind and sun. But wind and sun are free, while the wealth and power of the Petroleum/Military/Industrial/Agrobiz complex depended on a near-monopoly of energy sales and profits. So as the world heated up, capitalist governments continued to subsidise oil instead of cheaper ecological alternatives.
-Rapidly, petrolum inputs became too costly for the profitable fertilization of small farms, and peasants became debt-slaves to the money-lenders and banks who represented Agrobiz. Even the massive factory farms linked with the vast international supermarket chains and petroleum-based transportation systems that delivered their protests were affected. Competition forced them to keep their prices as low as possible, and many went bankrupt or were absorbed by their competitors. The forutunate side of this squeeze was that it gave the price and quality advantage to the networks of small, local, organic farms that were developing everywhere.
+Setting aside huge costs which the oil companies, protected by government “regulation,” were able to “externalize” (and which we are still struggling to restore), the net result of peak oil was rising costs, so that it took more and more oil to recover and refine each new barrel, thus making petroleum-based energy more costly than non-polluting sources like wind and sun. But wind and sun are free, while the wealth and power of the Petroleum/Military/Industrial/Agrobiz complex depended on a near-monopoly of energy sales and profits. So as the world heated up, capitalist governments continued to subsidize oil instead of cheaper ecological alternatives.
+Rapidly, petroleum inputs became too costly for the profitable fertilization of small farms, and peasants became debt-slaves to the money-lenders and banks who represented Agrobiz. Even the massive factory farms linked with the vast international supermarket chains and petroleum-based transportation systems that delivered their protests were affected. Competition forced them to keep their prices as low as possible, and many went bankrupt or were absorbed by their competitors. The fortunate side of this squeeze was that it gave the price and quality advantage to the networks of small, local, organic farms that were developing everywhere.
-. “Heaven in Hell” – Mutual Aid and the Eros Effect
+=== 7. “Heaven in Hell” – Mutual Aid and the Eros Effect ===
 Whether under conditions of famine, epidemic, flooding, fire or drought, when disasters struck, ordinary people all over the world generally reacted more or less the same way: by showing compassion and helping each other, neighbors and strangers joining together to save what could be saved.  Almost everywhere, informal networks spontaneous sprung up providing food, shelter, medical assistance, transportation. Acting locally in response to immediate needs, neighbors appropriated whatever materials necessary to save lives, feed the children and care for the injured.
@@ Line 206: / Line 206: @@
 An ethos of mutual aid and solidarity, charity and human decency, caring and sharing emerged in almost every disaster community. Networks formed between communities as aid flowed in from the outside. Individuals who did not see themselves as particularly courageous or generous, found themselves taking enormous risks to save the lives of stranger. People emerged from their previous isolation and felt themselves part of a community, no longer alone, both protecting and protected. Common suffering and common struggle created powerful bonds among previous strangers. They discovered new strengths and capacities within themselves, and shed their guilts and inhibitions. Together, they felt a sort of exultation, a sense that their lives had a meaningful purpose, a kind of joy in the midst of sorrow and struggle.
-This contagious exaltation had been observed throughout history during revolutionary periods. During the European peasant war of the 15th through 17th century and the 19th century Taiping Rebellion in China, it had taken the form of religious extasy. Karl Marx had described the Communards of revolutionary Paris in 1871: [“storming the heavens, careless of …” [Help CAN’T FIND QUOTE]  The classic French sociologist Emile Durkheim labeled this contageous feeling “collective effervescence.”
+This contagious exaltation had been observed throughout history during revolutionary periods. During the European peasant war of the 15th through 17th century and the 19th century Taiping Rebellion in China, it had taken the form of religious ecstasy. Karl Marx had described the Communards of revolutionary Paris in 1871: [“storming the heavens, careless of …” [Help CAN’T FIND QUOTE]  The classic French sociologist Emile Durkheim labeled this contagious feeling “collective effervescence.”
-This revolutionary effervescence showed itself capable of infecting individual communities but of jumping across national and cultural boundries. The contagion of democratic revolutions of 1848, known as “the Springtime of nations,” spread from Paris across all Europe within days, thanks to the new connectivity of the day: the telegraph and the railroad.
+This revolutionary effervescence showed itself capable of infecting individual communities but of jumping across national and cultural boundaries. The contagion of democratic revolutions of 1848, known as “the Springtime of nations,” spread from Paris across all Europe within days, thanks to the new connectivity of the day: the telegraph and the railroad.
-In the wake of the international wave of radical uprisings of 1968, the contemporary historian George Katsiaficus, dubbed this phenomenon (borrowing a phrase from Marcuse) “the Eros Effect.” [insert quote] In 2009, the writer/activist Rebecca Solnet published a book whose title prefigured the dominant social phenomenon of the Great Collapse and the nature of our own surviving societies: A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters.
+In the wake of the international wave of radical uprisings of 1968, the contemporary historian George Katsiaficas, dubbed this phenomenon (borrowing a phrase from Marcuse) “the Eros Effect.” [insert quote] In 2009, the writer/activist Rebecca Solnit published a book whose title prefigured the dominant social phenomenon of the Great Collapse and the nature of our own surviving societies: //A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters//.
-[Develop here the reversal of accepted wisdom: that humans are basically competitive, egotistical and mean: law of jungle lie to bolster capitalism’s inhumanity. Show how Darwin’s ideas of natural selection were distorted by Huxley and especially Spencer, to stress competition and reinforce the negative view of human nature propounded by Hobbes and the atomized economic individual of Locke at the beginning of the modern era. Then quote Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution. Modern 21st century biological research now prooves him right, with discovering of complexity, interrelation and mutual support of every organism from bacteria and mushrooms to trees and humans. Quote from work of Pablo Servigne the Collapsologist on the same subject. Develop examples narratives of Mutual Aid in disaster.]
+[Develop here the reversal of accepted wisdom: that humans are basically competitive, egotistical and mean: law of jungle lie to bolster capitalism’s inhumanity. Show how Darwin’s ideas of natural selection were distorted by Huxley and especially Spencer, to stress competition and reinforce the negative view of human nature propounded by Hobbes and the atomized economic individual of Locke at the beginning of the modern era. Then quote Kropotkin’s //Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution//. Modern 21st century biological research now proves him right, with discovering of complexity, interrelation and mutual support of every organism from bacteria and mushrooms to trees and humans. Quote from work of Pablo Servigne the Collapsologist on the same subject. Develop examples narratives of Mutual Aid in disaster.]
 Workers were still doing their jobs in emergency situations to help others live, land was taken over and cultivated, available food was distributed. Stockholders’ interests, corporate profits, the stock market itself were things of the past. Who would bet his wealth on a dead horse? Who would bet his life on a collapsing system?
@@ Line 218: / Line 218: @@
 Split in ruling classes. Many decent technicians, officers, engineers and managers broke ranks with their their peers and joined in as volunteers in disaster relief, bringing with them to self-organize communities their skills and experience. Likewise, firefighters and medical personnel pitch in with the communities they live in, and no longer respect the official hierarchies.
+=== 8. Dual Power ===
+[Needs much development]
-**3. Dual Power [Needs much development]
+Transport workers commandeered trains and trucks to help move it. Communities spontaneously requisitioned and took over resources needed for disaster aid.
-**
-Transport workers commandeered trains and trucks to help move it. Communities spontaneously requisationed and took over ressources needed for disaster aid.
 Then governments and the powerful would intervene violently with ‘aid’ in the form of armed repression as in New Orleans and Haïti, to defend the private property of the rich and prevent the people from appropriating the resources necessary to survive.
 Conflict and dual power developed [SECTION TO DEVELOP BELOW: dual power. Develop how the pre-Collapse work of ecologists developing new forms of permaculture and the gains of the Green New Deal both were important for laying the groundwork for future transformation. Give them full credit.]
 Money was no longer the issue, since global financial collapse. The value of stock certificates and money itself were blown away the the general panic. Middle-class people had run to withdraw their savings and found the bank doors closed. Over-extended banks and other highly-leveraged financial institutions found themselves bankrupt and collapsed.
-The 1% had nothing left to defend their wealth but the loyalty of their guards, who were increasingly reluctant to risk their lives and kill their countrymen and women for worthless money and uncertain prospects. The majority of security forces were recruited from the ranks of the masses, underpaid and mistreated by their officers, ordered to kill their own kind in order to protect the property of the absentee owners of sweatshops and luxury appartments.
+The 1% had nothing left to defend their wealth but the loyalty of their guards, who were increasingly reluctant to risk their lives and kill their countrymen and women for worthless money and uncertain prospects. The majority of security forces were recruited from the ranks of the masses, underpaid and mistreated by their officers, ordered to kill their own kind in order to protect the property of the absentee owners of sweatshops and luxury apartments.
 [What about countries like Egypt with mass armies of poorly-paid, uneducated, peasant soldiers and the officers as a group owned large amounts of the country’s wealth.]
-The national guard and other constabulary would be ordered to repress and kill in defense of a hated system which was seeming to start crumbling. Their loves and relatives were among those they were ordred to repress, and they also feared being murdered in revenge. They began first to look away or play dumb and finally to go over to the side of the community. They went over as whole units, for the soldiers understood that if only a few of them mutinied, they would be found and shot. Soldiers assemblies ally themselves to community assemblies. They would pitch in with disaster aid and relief, while keeping their weapons and access to military material.
+The national guard and other constabulary would be ordered to repress and kill in defense of a hated system which was seeming to start crumbling. Their loves and relatives were among those they were ordered to repress, and they also feared being murdered in revenge. They began first to look away or play dumb and finally to go over to the side of the community. They went over as whole units, for the soldiers understood that if only a few of them mutinied, they would be found and shot. Soldiers assemblies ally themselves to community assemblies. They would pitch in with disaster aid and relief, while keeping their weapons and access to military material.
 Such militias and local national guards defending their communities stood off against mercenaries and elite units of government enforcers, creating a standoff situation where there was little actual violence, given the inevitable consequences of deaths on both sides. In such situations, groups of unarmed women might intervene, approach the government troops, and try to win them over. With the exception of elite units, high-paid mercenary specialists, fanatical ideological militias, they were often successful.
-NOTES
+=== Notes ===
-What about geoengineering? Under such cirumstances, but only if under the control of a planetary federation of democratic, egalitarian communities and on the advice of the best scientists, some forms of geoengineering would inevitably be discussed (starting with planting trees) and might be effective. Can we imagine ways in which certain techniques might be tested?
-ADD TO INTRO:
-For decades, the climate movement has suffered from a debilitating self-inflicted wound: the assumption that “we can’t tell the public the truth” about the urgency of the crisis, or the scale and speed of the necessary solution. Many climate scientists joined forces with professional “climate communicators” and corporate philanthropies to decree: Fear doesn’t work as a motivator! Only hope “works,” so let’s keep things positive and promote gradualist policies like carbon pricing! https://truthout.org/articles/its-possible-to-face-climate-horrors-and-still-find-hope/
+What about geoengineering? Under such circumstances, but only if under the control of a planetary federation of democratic, egalitarian communities and on the advice of the best scientists, some forms of geoengineering would inevitably be discussed (starting with planting trees) and might be effective. Can we imagine ways in which certain techniques might be tested?
 ==== NOW ====

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