This is so depressing i struggled to read till the end. But it is not new to me. We homestead in Malaysia and it is the same here. We often smirk at the Thais for picking unripe durians, it is simply unacceptable here. The taste standards for durian is probably much higher here since durian is native to Malaysia (even the name derives from Malay for thorn - duri). I have seen some old durian trees in the forest that are so magnificent I could kneel and worship them. Their golden crowns emerging way above the canopy. Makes me cringe when I see low branching durian trees spaced widely. Interestingly it is the more educated, wealthier, urban folks that do slick-and-clean durian plantations. Best practice they call it!
I know, right?! If you think reading this is depressing, you should try *living* here! 😄
The people around here are convinced that their unripe Monthong durian is the best one in the world. Even the villagers in the South of Thailand where we used to live would laugh at that notion - Southern Thais eat plenty of wild durian, waiting for them to fully ripen and drop naturally, and that's where we got our love for durian from. So, yeah, harvesting unripe durian is a big sin for us - yet people here won't believe us when we say that you have to wait for the tree to throw the fruits at you if you want to get to know the true taste of durian.
My wife always says that none of the durian farmers here actually *knows* the durian tree. The grafted varieties they cherish so much grow less than 10m high in most cases, and if you consider how fucking HUGE durian gets in the forest, those trees in their orchards are little babies. And then they complain about "ooh, durian needs so much water, so much fertilizer, the trees are not strong at all, always throwing off branches, etc." - well, yeah, because you've never seen a fully mature durian tree! Wait for them to emerge from the canopy, and you'll have a strong, healthy tree that will feed generations! But no, people here treat them like fucking apple trees! 😄
It's a shame, really. Sometimes we don't know whether we should laugh or cry...
Best greetings to you, by the way, I'm really glad you enjoy my writing! I already followed your FB page and I'm glad we've connected! Keep up the good work!
Well done, a fantastic in-depth article that manages to extrapolate from the local to the systemic. So informative! Loved all the details you provided about farming in your area. I'm also based in Thailand, Chiang Mai, and up here - as you know - monoculture agribusiness is creating a different problem: the deadly haze (lasted from mid January to early May this year). Expecting a massive spike in lung cancer and respiratory illness -related deaths in coming years. Die-off is coming...let me count the ways... Thanks for your post, am now a subscriber and looking forward to more from you. Respect!
Thank you so much for your kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed the article! Maybe you'd enjoy some of my earlier writings as well - I write on a broad range of topics, and if you're interested in what's happening in Eastern Thailand, I can recommend "Another day, another dead elephant..." (https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/another-day-another-dead-elephant)
I have a friend up in Mae Hong Son, and he regularly updates me on the situation up there - this year was absolute hell on Earth. Monocultures are a scourge anywhere you go, whether Corn in the North, Sugarcane in the Northeast, Durian in the East or Oil Palm in the South.
Grim reading, and those photos showing the state of the land are shocking. We’re mad. I can’t get those images of trees with needles in them out of my head
It's really bad. Seeing this happening right in front of your eyes every day is difficult. I sincerely hope I managed to not sound too condescending towards the farmers here, but I have the feeling many Westerners tend to romanticize farmers in developing and non-developed countries as being poor, passive, blameless victims of global capitalism - which is of course true to some extent, in some places, but definitely not the whole truth - whereas in reality many of them know damn well what they are doing and for what reasons. Blaming only the corporations and the superimposed system lets people off the hook who willfully destroy their environment for short-term monetary gain that is squandered on hedonistic pursuits and unnecessary material goods. Sure, needs are manufactured by that same system, but every human possesses the capacity to do at least a little bit of critical thinking. If your lifestyle causes everything around you to die, optimally that should ring some bells.
We joined the local organic farmers group in order to be a bit more social and at one of the meetings a few months ago there was a guy giving a talk promoting some organic iMO that he was selling. He was telling some stories about the fruit industry down south where, it’s possibly similar to what you’ve described. Banana plantation had stopped producing fruit so they bulldozed it and the soil was steaming it was so polluted. Farmers getting bad lesions on their feet/legs from walking in their polluted rice paddy fields.
Wow, you have local organic farmers! How lucky! But I believe it's pretty much the same all over the place. We watched a video a few days ago where a bunch of Thai villagers were interviewed who all had a leg amputated due to excessive herbicide exposure. Of course the people there still didn't stop spraying, but instead continue to ask for the "good stuff" (the now-illegal herbicide Paraquat) at the chemical stores, and when the sellers deny, they ask if there's still leftover stocks "behind the house."
I guess things have to get a lot worse before they get better.
Things have to get a lot worse before they get better. You’d really think someone losing a leg to excessive herbicide usage would sort of get the message, no? It’s 2023 and these poisons and plastics are all so well studied and their negative effects so well known yet here we are that someone like yourselves have very little support in doing your good work and you have to prove your good intentions in order to do further good work while these poison-producing companies make billions of dollars causing harm and don’t have to prove a thing.
“ It is about time to realize that industrial agriculture is simply incapable of flight. It never escaped the pull of gravity, although it sure felt like it for a while.”
Beautifully said my man. I always really enjoy reading your work. Ghosts without a Shrine was transformative for me and I still revisit it sometimes.
Do you anticipate a rural migration to the cities when the farms fail as things continue get worse? Or do you think they’ll just switch to the next crop and hope for the best? My hope here in the states is that many of the settler-colonialists scattered throughout the county will be forced by economics to move nearer the cities, ideally leaving the countryside relatively empty for nature and sustainable humans.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I hope my email found you well? I'm really glad you liked "Ghosts without a Shrine" - although it's not one of my most popular essays, it's definitely one of my personal favorites.
I definitely think that populations will move a lot in the coming decades, probably in both directions - in some areas it might be more of a rural exodus, in others more of an urban one. Personally, I think it highly depends on precipitation. Wherever there is enough rain, people willing to work hard can do amazing things rewilding even the most severely degraded farmland in a relatively short time, so in those areas it makes a lot of sense to move from the city to the countryside and communally occupy a strip of land somewhere. But in arid areas (which, as it looks like right now, might soon include large parts of Western Europe), there is simply not much you can do in the countryside for most of the year, so peri-urban slums will expand as rural populations flee starvation (as has happened before historically), creating a social powder keg. As a result, concomitant problems will spiral out of control fast, resulting in the rapid unraveling of said societies.
It's still possible to rewild arid landscapes and make at least some gains in net productivity of the landscape, but it's definitely nowhere near enough for current population levels. Some people will try switching crops until the land is literally dead, but that only gets you as far. If we want any chance, we would have to move from annual monocultures to perennial, tree-based polycultures that mimic natural ecosystems as soon as possible. But try to tell Westerners they have to eat less bread and Asians that they will have to reduce rice consumption (and cheap, factory-farmed meat, of course)...
I truly hope you're right with your optimistic prediction for the US, and I definitely see how that's likely in at least some areas. Settler-colonialists follow a certain pattern and hold a certain mindset, and this ingrained bias keeps them from seeing actual solutions (such as "going back" to relying on foraging for a larger part of your diet, and growing and eating things your direct ancestors didn't eat).
Another thing I keep thinking about (maybe I'll write an essay about it one day) is the difference between the 'cooperation mindset' versus the 'competition mindset' when it comes to collapse. People holding the latter will literally attempt to exterminate each other once things get really dire, but I think it is definitely possible for cooperative folks to gain an advantage by simply staying out of the way of the competitive folks for a few months, until they have drastically reduced their own ranks. There is a fascinating biological precedent for this: all dominant males in a certain troop of baboons died after eating contaminated garbage near a hotel, which resulted in lower levels of conflict and aggression in this troop, lasting until many years (!) after the initial incident (full story here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387274/). Competitive folks have had it their way for too long already, and I think there's a realistic chance that this kind of behavior will - at least in its most extreme manifestations - become an evolutionary dead end soon enough. Let's hope so.
Happy that I could say something nice. :) It did! I emailed you back close after, did you not receive it?
I’m certainly not hopeful about it, though it would be nice and I think is certainly going to happen in some form or another (not necessarily in a way that’s ideal or convenient to me for sure). All I can do is stay flexible and try to be in as hopefully out of the way and easily overlooked place as I can.
I agree. I think that’s going to be coming to a head for sure. The US is headed for a soft civil war, and it remains to be seen (likely in this election cycle) whether it will be the neoliberal federal order putting down the alt-right insurrection, or a christo-fascist nationalism taking over and putting down the remaining out groups for a few terrible years. I’m obviously hoping for the former haha, but no way to tell how it will go. I’m just hoping my chosen location is diverse and remote enough to weather that storm. Either way, as we lead up to and during collapse and rapid decline, you’re right that the dominance and competition mindset is going to be at its peak and hopefully be wiping itself out. A few years after whatever could finally be called collapse (I’m guessing sharp decline from roughly 2025 until around the mid 2030’s when most states will have dramatically contracted or ceased functioning). But we’ll see if the pace of climate change and its effect on global agriculture will be as bad as I think it will be. But yeah, it’s my hope as well that if we can survive past that then the cooperation and communal lifeways can again take hold, the old ways made new.
I agree with everything you say here, including the approximate time frame for the currently unfolding collapse. For years I have quoted the following report, which predicts the collapse of one or more nation states in Southeast Asia until 2030:
I just saw your mail (must have overlooked it in my inbox, sorry!) and will answer you as soon as I have some time - I'm hopelessly lagging behind on personal correspondence... Plenty to do at the moment. At least it has started to rain every now and then, so I finally have some time for writing again.
The following is a (slightly edited) excerpt from Daniel Quinn's book 'Ishmael - An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit' - the Allegory of the Hapless Airman mentioned above:
"You remember how the people of the dominant culture, the Takers, went about trying to achieve powered flight. They didn’t begin with an understanding of the laws of aerodynamics. They didn’t begin with a theory based on research and carefully planned experimentation. They just built contraptions, pushed them off the sides of cliffs, and hoped for the best.
I want to follow one of those early trials in detail. Let’s suppose that this trial is being made in one of those wonderful pedal–driven contraptions with flapping wings, based on a mistaken understanding of avian flight.
As the flight begins, all is well. Our would–be airman has been pushed off the edge of the cliff and is pedaling away, and the wings of his craft are flapping like crazy. He’s feeling wonderful, ecstatic.
He’s experiencing the freedom of the air. What he doesn’t realize, however, is that this craft is
aerodynamically incapable of flight. It simply isn’t in compliance with the laws that make flight
possible—but he would laugh if you told him this, He’s never heard of such laws, knows nothing
about them. He would point at those flapping wings and say, ‘See? Just like a bird!’ Nevertheless, whatever he thinks, he’s not in flight. He’s an unsupported object falling toward the center of the earth. He’s not in flight, he’s in free fall.
Fortunately—or, rather, unfortunately for our airman—he chose a very high cliff to launch his
craft from. His disillusionment is a long way off in time and space. There he is in free fall, feeling wonderful and congratulating himself on his triumph. He’s like the man in the joke who jumps out of a ninetieth–floor window on a bet. As he passes the tenth floor, he says to himself, ‘Well, so far so good!’
There he is in free fall, experiencing the exhilaration of what he takes to be flight. From his great height he can see for miles around, and one thing he sees puzzles him: The floor of the valley is dotted with craft just like his—not crashed, simply abandoned. ‘Why,’ he wonders, ‘aren’t these craft in the air instead of sitting on the ground? What sort of fools would abandon their aircraft when they could be enjoying the freedom of the air?’ Ah well, the behavioral quirks of less talented, earthbound mortals are none of his concern. However, looking down into the valley has brought something else to his attention. He doesn’t seem to be maintaining his altitude. In fact, the earth seems to be rising up toward him. Well, he’s not very worried about that. After all, his flight has been a complete success up to now, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t go on being a success.
He just has to pedal a little harder, that’s all.
So far so good. He thinks with amusement of those who predicted that his flight would end in
disaster, broken bones, and death. Here he is, he’s come all this way, and he hasn’t even gotten a
bruise, much less a broken bone. But then he looks down again, and what he sees really disturbs
him. The law of gravity is catching up to him at the rate of thirty–two feet per second per second—at an accelerating rate. The ground is now rushing up toward him in an alarming way. He’s disturbed but far from desperate. ‘My craft has brought me this far in safety,’ he tells himself. ‘I just have to keep going.’ And so he starts pedaling with all his might. Which of course does him no good at all, because his craft simply isn’t in accord with the laws of aerodynamics. Even if he had the power of a thousand men in his legs—ten thousand, a million—that craft is not going to achieve flight. That craft is doomed—and so is he unless he abandons it.
Ten thousand years ago, the people of the dominant culture embarked on a similar flight: a civilizational flight. Their craft wasn’t designed according to any theory at all. Like our imaginary airman, they were totally unaware that there is a law that must be complied with in order to achieve civilizational flight. They didn’t even wonder about it. They wanted the freedom of the air, and so they pushed off in the first contraption that came to hand: the Taker Thunderbolt.
At first all was well. In fact, all was terrific. The Takers were pedaling away and the wings of their craft were flapping beautifully. They felt wonderful, exhilarated. They were experiencing the freedom of the air: freedom from restraints that bind and limit the rest of the biological community.
And with that freedom came marvels: urbanization, technology, literacy, mathematics, science.
Their flight could never end, it could only go on becoming more and more exciting. They couldn’t know, couldn’t even have guessed that, like our hapless airman, they were in the air but not in flight. They were in free fall, because their craft was simply not in compliance with the law that makes flight possible. But their disillusionment is far away in the future, and so they’re pedaling away and having a wonderful time. Like our airman, they see strange sights in the course of their fall. They see the remains of craft very like their own—not destroyed, merely abandoned—by the Maya, by the Hohokam, by the Anasazi, by the peoples of the Hopewell cult, to mention only a few of those found here in the New World. ‘Why,’ they wonder, ‘are these craft on the ground instead of in the air? Why would any people prefer to be earthbound when they could have the freedom of the air, as we do?’ It’s beyond comprehension, an unfathomable mystery.
Ah well, the vagaries of such foolish people are nothing to the Takers. They’re pedaling away and having a wonderful time. They’re not going to abandon their craft. They’re going to enjoy the freedom of the air forever. But alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects. This is a law as unforgiving as the law of gravity, and it’s catching up to them in exactly the same way the law of gravity caught up to our airman: at an accelerating rate.
Some gloomy nineteenth–century thinkers, like Robert Wallace and Thomas Robert Malthus, look down. A thousand years before, even five hundred years before, they would probably have noticed nothing. But now what they see alarms them. It’s as though the ground is rushing up to meet them—as though they are going to crash. They do some figuring and say, ‘If we go on this way, we’re going to be in big trouble in the not–too–distant future.’ The other Takers shrug their
predictions off. ‘We’ve come all this enormous way and haven’t even received so much as a
scratch. It’s true the ground seems to be rising up to meet us, but that just means we’ll have to pedal a little harder. Not to worry.’ Nevertheless, just as was predicted, famine soon becomes a routine condition of life in many parts of the Taker Thunderbolt—and the Takers have to pedal even harder and more efficiently than before. But oddly enough, the harder and more efficiently they pedal, the worse conditions become. Very strange. Peter Farb calls it a paradox: ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ ‘Never mind,’ the Takers said. ‘We’ll just have to put some people pedaling away on a reliable method of birth control. Then the Taker Thunderbolt will fly forever.’
But such simple answers aren’t enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everyone is looking down, and it’s obvious that the ground is rushing up toward you—and rushing up faster every year. Basic ecological and planetary systems are being impacted by the Taker Thunderbolt, and that impact increases in intensity every year. Basic, irreplaceable resources are being devoured every year—and they’re being devoured more greedily every year. Whole species are disappearing as a result of your encroachment—and they’re disappearing in greater numbers every year.
Pessimists—or it may be that they’re realists—look down and say, ‘Well, the crash may be twenty years off or maybe as much as fifty years off. Actually it could happen anytime. There’s no way to be sure.’ But of course there are optimists as well, who say, ‘We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety. What’s ahead isn’t doom, it’s just a little hump that we can clear if we all just pedal a little harder. Then we’ll soar into a glorious, endless future, and the Taker Thunderbolt will take us to the stars and we’ll conquer the universe itself.’ But your craft isn’t going to save you. Quite the contrary, it’s your craft that’s carrying you toward catastrophe. Five billion of you pedaling away—or ten billion or twenty billion—can’t make it fly. It’s been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end."
This is so depressing i struggled to read till the end. But it is not new to me. We homestead in Malaysia and it is the same here. We often smirk at the Thais for picking unripe durians, it is simply unacceptable here. The taste standards for durian is probably much higher here since durian is native to Malaysia (even the name derives from Malay for thorn - duri). I have seen some old durian trees in the forest that are so magnificent I could kneel and worship them. Their golden crowns emerging way above the canopy. Makes me cringe when I see low branching durian trees spaced widely. Interestingly it is the more educated, wealthier, urban folks that do slick-and-clean durian plantations. Best practice they call it!
I know, right?! If you think reading this is depressing, you should try *living* here! 😄
The people around here are convinced that their unripe Monthong durian is the best one in the world. Even the villagers in the South of Thailand where we used to live would laugh at that notion - Southern Thais eat plenty of wild durian, waiting for them to fully ripen and drop naturally, and that's where we got our love for durian from. So, yeah, harvesting unripe durian is a big sin for us - yet people here won't believe us when we say that you have to wait for the tree to throw the fruits at you if you want to get to know the true taste of durian.
My wife always says that none of the durian farmers here actually *knows* the durian tree. The grafted varieties they cherish so much grow less than 10m high in most cases, and if you consider how fucking HUGE durian gets in the forest, those trees in their orchards are little babies. And then they complain about "ooh, durian needs so much water, so much fertilizer, the trees are not strong at all, always throwing off branches, etc." - well, yeah, because you've never seen a fully mature durian tree! Wait for them to emerge from the canopy, and you'll have a strong, healthy tree that will feed generations! But no, people here treat them like fucking apple trees! 😄
It's a shame, really. Sometimes we don't know whether we should laugh or cry...
Best greetings to you, by the way, I'm really glad you enjoy my writing! I already followed your FB page and I'm glad we've connected! Keep up the good work!
Well done, a fantastic in-depth article that manages to extrapolate from the local to the systemic. So informative! Loved all the details you provided about farming in your area. I'm also based in Thailand, Chiang Mai, and up here - as you know - monoculture agribusiness is creating a different problem: the deadly haze (lasted from mid January to early May this year). Expecting a massive spike in lung cancer and respiratory illness -related deaths in coming years. Die-off is coming...let me count the ways... Thanks for your post, am now a subscriber and looking forward to more from you. Respect!
Thank you so much for your kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed the article! Maybe you'd enjoy some of my earlier writings as well - I write on a broad range of topics, and if you're interested in what's happening in Eastern Thailand, I can recommend "Another day, another dead elephant..." (https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/another-day-another-dead-elephant)
I have a friend up in Mae Hong Son, and he regularly updates me on the situation up there - this year was absolute hell on Earth. Monocultures are a scourge anywhere you go, whether Corn in the North, Sugarcane in the Northeast, Durian in the East or Oil Palm in the South.
Grim reading, and those photos showing the state of the land are shocking. We’re mad. I can’t get those images of trees with needles in them out of my head
It's really bad. Seeing this happening right in front of your eyes every day is difficult. I sincerely hope I managed to not sound too condescending towards the farmers here, but I have the feeling many Westerners tend to romanticize farmers in developing and non-developed countries as being poor, passive, blameless victims of global capitalism - which is of course true to some extent, in some places, but definitely not the whole truth - whereas in reality many of them know damn well what they are doing and for what reasons. Blaming only the corporations and the superimposed system lets people off the hook who willfully destroy their environment for short-term monetary gain that is squandered on hedonistic pursuits and unnecessary material goods. Sure, needs are manufactured by that same system, but every human possesses the capacity to do at least a little bit of critical thinking. If your lifestyle causes everything around you to die, optimally that should ring some bells.
We joined the local organic farmers group in order to be a bit more social and at one of the meetings a few months ago there was a guy giving a talk promoting some organic iMO that he was selling. He was telling some stories about the fruit industry down south where, it’s possibly similar to what you’ve described. Banana plantation had stopped producing fruit so they bulldozed it and the soil was steaming it was so polluted. Farmers getting bad lesions on their feet/legs from walking in their polluted rice paddy fields.
Wow, you have local organic farmers! How lucky! But I believe it's pretty much the same all over the place. We watched a video a few days ago where a bunch of Thai villagers were interviewed who all had a leg amputated due to excessive herbicide exposure. Of course the people there still didn't stop spraying, but instead continue to ask for the "good stuff" (the now-illegal herbicide Paraquat) at the chemical stores, and when the sellers deny, they ask if there's still leftover stocks "behind the house."
I guess things have to get a lot worse before they get better.
Things have to get a lot worse before they get better. You’d really think someone losing a leg to excessive herbicide usage would sort of get the message, no? It’s 2023 and these poisons and plastics are all so well studied and their negative effects so well known yet here we are that someone like yourselves have very little support in doing your good work and you have to prove your good intentions in order to do further good work while these poison-producing companies make billions of dollars causing harm and don’t have to prove a thing.
“ It is about time to realize that industrial agriculture is simply incapable of flight. It never escaped the pull of gravity, although it sure felt like it for a while.”
Beautifully said my man. I always really enjoy reading your work. Ghosts without a Shrine was transformative for me and I still revisit it sometimes.
Do you anticipate a rural migration to the cities when the farms fail as things continue get worse? Or do you think they’ll just switch to the next crop and hope for the best? My hope here in the states is that many of the settler-colonialists scattered throughout the county will be forced by economics to move nearer the cities, ideally leaving the countryside relatively empty for nature and sustainable humans.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I hope my email found you well? I'm really glad you liked "Ghosts without a Shrine" - although it's not one of my most popular essays, it's definitely one of my personal favorites.
I definitely think that populations will move a lot in the coming decades, probably in both directions - in some areas it might be more of a rural exodus, in others more of an urban one. Personally, I think it highly depends on precipitation. Wherever there is enough rain, people willing to work hard can do amazing things rewilding even the most severely degraded farmland in a relatively short time, so in those areas it makes a lot of sense to move from the city to the countryside and communally occupy a strip of land somewhere. But in arid areas (which, as it looks like right now, might soon include large parts of Western Europe), there is simply not much you can do in the countryside for most of the year, so peri-urban slums will expand as rural populations flee starvation (as has happened before historically), creating a social powder keg. As a result, concomitant problems will spiral out of control fast, resulting in the rapid unraveling of said societies.
It's still possible to rewild arid landscapes and make at least some gains in net productivity of the landscape, but it's definitely nowhere near enough for current population levels. Some people will try switching crops until the land is literally dead, but that only gets you as far. If we want any chance, we would have to move from annual monocultures to perennial, tree-based polycultures that mimic natural ecosystems as soon as possible. But try to tell Westerners they have to eat less bread and Asians that they will have to reduce rice consumption (and cheap, factory-farmed meat, of course)...
I truly hope you're right with your optimistic prediction for the US, and I definitely see how that's likely in at least some areas. Settler-colonialists follow a certain pattern and hold a certain mindset, and this ingrained bias keeps them from seeing actual solutions (such as "going back" to relying on foraging for a larger part of your diet, and growing and eating things your direct ancestors didn't eat).
Another thing I keep thinking about (maybe I'll write an essay about it one day) is the difference between the 'cooperation mindset' versus the 'competition mindset' when it comes to collapse. People holding the latter will literally attempt to exterminate each other once things get really dire, but I think it is definitely possible for cooperative folks to gain an advantage by simply staying out of the way of the competitive folks for a few months, until they have drastically reduced their own ranks. There is a fascinating biological precedent for this: all dominant males in a certain troop of baboons died after eating contaminated garbage near a hotel, which resulted in lower levels of conflict and aggression in this troop, lasting until many years (!) after the initial incident (full story here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387274/). Competitive folks have had it their way for too long already, and I think there's a realistic chance that this kind of behavior will - at least in its most extreme manifestations - become an evolutionary dead end soon enough. Let's hope so.
Happy that I could say something nice. :) It did! I emailed you back close after, did you not receive it?
I’m certainly not hopeful about it, though it would be nice and I think is certainly going to happen in some form or another (not necessarily in a way that’s ideal or convenient to me for sure). All I can do is stay flexible and try to be in as hopefully out of the way and easily overlooked place as I can.
I agree. I think that’s going to be coming to a head for sure. The US is headed for a soft civil war, and it remains to be seen (likely in this election cycle) whether it will be the neoliberal federal order putting down the alt-right insurrection, or a christo-fascist nationalism taking over and putting down the remaining out groups for a few terrible years. I’m obviously hoping for the former haha, but no way to tell how it will go. I’m just hoping my chosen location is diverse and remote enough to weather that storm. Either way, as we lead up to and during collapse and rapid decline, you’re right that the dominance and competition mindset is going to be at its peak and hopefully be wiping itself out. A few years after whatever could finally be called collapse (I’m guessing sharp decline from roughly 2025 until around the mid 2030’s when most states will have dramatically contracted or ceased functioning). But we’ll see if the pace of climate change and its effect on global agriculture will be as bad as I think it will be. But yeah, it’s my hope as well that if we can survive past that then the cooperation and communal lifeways can again take hold, the old ways made new.
I agree with everything you say here, including the approximate time frame for the currently unfolding collapse. For years I have quoted the following report, which predicts the collapse of one or more nation states in Southeast Asia until 2030:
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/2010%20Conference%20Report_Southeast%20Asia_The%20Impact%20of%20Climate%20Change%20to%202030.pdf
I just saw your mail (must have overlooked it in my inbox, sorry!) and will answer you as soon as I have some time - I'm hopelessly lagging behind on personal correspondence... Plenty to do at the moment. At least it has started to rain every now and then, so I finally have some time for writing again.
No worries, I’ll look forward to your reply! :)
The following is a (slightly edited) excerpt from Daniel Quinn's book 'Ishmael - An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit' - the Allegory of the Hapless Airman mentioned above:
"You remember how the people of the dominant culture, the Takers, went about trying to achieve powered flight. They didn’t begin with an understanding of the laws of aerodynamics. They didn’t begin with a theory based on research and carefully planned experimentation. They just built contraptions, pushed them off the sides of cliffs, and hoped for the best.
I want to follow one of those early trials in detail. Let’s suppose that this trial is being made in one of those wonderful pedal–driven contraptions with flapping wings, based on a mistaken understanding of avian flight.
As the flight begins, all is well. Our would–be airman has been pushed off the edge of the cliff and is pedaling away, and the wings of his craft are flapping like crazy. He’s feeling wonderful, ecstatic.
He’s experiencing the freedom of the air. What he doesn’t realize, however, is that this craft is
aerodynamically incapable of flight. It simply isn’t in compliance with the laws that make flight
possible—but he would laugh if you told him this, He’s never heard of such laws, knows nothing
about them. He would point at those flapping wings and say, ‘See? Just like a bird!’ Nevertheless, whatever he thinks, he’s not in flight. He’s an unsupported object falling toward the center of the earth. He’s not in flight, he’s in free fall.
Fortunately—or, rather, unfortunately for our airman—he chose a very high cliff to launch his
craft from. His disillusionment is a long way off in time and space. There he is in free fall, feeling wonderful and congratulating himself on his triumph. He’s like the man in the joke who jumps out of a ninetieth–floor window on a bet. As he passes the tenth floor, he says to himself, ‘Well, so far so good!’
There he is in free fall, experiencing the exhilaration of what he takes to be flight. From his great height he can see for miles around, and one thing he sees puzzles him: The floor of the valley is dotted with craft just like his—not crashed, simply abandoned. ‘Why,’ he wonders, ‘aren’t these craft in the air instead of sitting on the ground? What sort of fools would abandon their aircraft when they could be enjoying the freedom of the air?’ Ah well, the behavioral quirks of less talented, earthbound mortals are none of his concern. However, looking down into the valley has brought something else to his attention. He doesn’t seem to be maintaining his altitude. In fact, the earth seems to be rising up toward him. Well, he’s not very worried about that. After all, his flight has been a complete success up to now, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t go on being a success.
He just has to pedal a little harder, that’s all.
So far so good. He thinks with amusement of those who predicted that his flight would end in
disaster, broken bones, and death. Here he is, he’s come all this way, and he hasn’t even gotten a
bruise, much less a broken bone. But then he looks down again, and what he sees really disturbs
him. The law of gravity is catching up to him at the rate of thirty–two feet per second per second—at an accelerating rate. The ground is now rushing up toward him in an alarming way. He’s disturbed but far from desperate. ‘My craft has brought me this far in safety,’ he tells himself. ‘I just have to keep going.’ And so he starts pedaling with all his might. Which of course does him no good at all, because his craft simply isn’t in accord with the laws of aerodynamics. Even if he had the power of a thousand men in his legs—ten thousand, a million—that craft is not going to achieve flight. That craft is doomed—and so is he unless he abandons it.
Ten thousand years ago, the people of the dominant culture embarked on a similar flight: a civilizational flight. Their craft wasn’t designed according to any theory at all. Like our imaginary airman, they were totally unaware that there is a law that must be complied with in order to achieve civilizational flight. They didn’t even wonder about it. They wanted the freedom of the air, and so they pushed off in the first contraption that came to hand: the Taker Thunderbolt.
At first all was well. In fact, all was terrific. The Takers were pedaling away and the wings of their craft were flapping beautifully. They felt wonderful, exhilarated. They were experiencing the freedom of the air: freedom from restraints that bind and limit the rest of the biological community.
And with that freedom came marvels: urbanization, technology, literacy, mathematics, science.
Their flight could never end, it could only go on becoming more and more exciting. They couldn’t know, couldn’t even have guessed that, like our hapless airman, they were in the air but not in flight. They were in free fall, because their craft was simply not in compliance with the law that makes flight possible. But their disillusionment is far away in the future, and so they’re pedaling away and having a wonderful time. Like our airman, they see strange sights in the course of their fall. They see the remains of craft very like their own—not destroyed, merely abandoned—by the Maya, by the Hohokam, by the Anasazi, by the peoples of the Hopewell cult, to mention only a few of those found here in the New World. ‘Why,’ they wonder, ‘are these craft on the ground instead of in the air? Why would any people prefer to be earthbound when they could have the freedom of the air, as we do?’ It’s beyond comprehension, an unfathomable mystery.
Ah well, the vagaries of such foolish people are nothing to the Takers. They’re pedaling away and having a wonderful time. They’re not going to abandon their craft. They’re going to enjoy the freedom of the air forever. But alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects. This is a law as unforgiving as the law of gravity, and it’s catching up to them in exactly the same way the law of gravity caught up to our airman: at an accelerating rate.
Some gloomy nineteenth–century thinkers, like Robert Wallace and Thomas Robert Malthus, look down. A thousand years before, even five hundred years before, they would probably have noticed nothing. But now what they see alarms them. It’s as though the ground is rushing up to meet them—as though they are going to crash. They do some figuring and say, ‘If we go on this way, we’re going to be in big trouble in the not–too–distant future.’ The other Takers shrug their
predictions off. ‘We’ve come all this enormous way and haven’t even received so much as a
scratch. It’s true the ground seems to be rising up to meet us, but that just means we’ll have to pedal a little harder. Not to worry.’ Nevertheless, just as was predicted, famine soon becomes a routine condition of life in many parts of the Taker Thunderbolt—and the Takers have to pedal even harder and more efficiently than before. But oddly enough, the harder and more efficiently they pedal, the worse conditions become. Very strange. Peter Farb calls it a paradox: ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ ‘Never mind,’ the Takers said. ‘We’ll just have to put some people pedaling away on a reliable method of birth control. Then the Taker Thunderbolt will fly forever.’
But such simple answers aren’t enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everyone is looking down, and it’s obvious that the ground is rushing up toward you—and rushing up faster every year. Basic ecological and planetary systems are being impacted by the Taker Thunderbolt, and that impact increases in intensity every year. Basic, irreplaceable resources are being devoured every year—and they’re being devoured more greedily every year. Whole species are disappearing as a result of your encroachment—and they’re disappearing in greater numbers every year.
Pessimists—or it may be that they’re realists—look down and say, ‘Well, the crash may be twenty years off or maybe as much as fifty years off. Actually it could happen anytime. There’s no way to be sure.’ But of course there are optimists as well, who say, ‘We must have faith in our craft. After all, it has brought us this far in safety. What’s ahead isn’t doom, it’s just a little hump that we can clear if we all just pedal a little harder. Then we’ll soar into a glorious, endless future, and the Taker Thunderbolt will take us to the stars and we’ll conquer the universe itself.’ But your craft isn’t going to save you. Quite the contrary, it’s your craft that’s carrying you toward catastrophe. Five billion of you pedaling away—or ten billion or twenty billion—can’t make it fly. It’s been in free fall from the beginning, and that fall is about to end."