Among the interesting excerpts of a radio interview done by one of the members of the Club Orlov is a summary of the five stages of collapse approaching our world with some suggestion of when.
The stages are Financial Collapse (unsustainable/unachievable increases in debt), followed by Commercial Collapse (shortages in both oil and credit mean insufficient fuel to keep goods moving). Political Collapse will follow because governements are every level start to fail. There is insufficient money to pay for expected services of fire and police protection.
The last two stages of Social Collapse and Cultural Collapse will be a local issue and depend upon the people of a particular area to keep control or not. The interviewee states:
"Unfortunately to my thinking these two stages have largely run their course in many places in the United States where people really don't know their neighbors and also they don't really do very much for themselves. They expect to be fed at fast food establishments, they don't know how to cook from scratch, and things like that."
Luckily, I live in a community that does not fit the above description. I am part of a group of people who mostly live in 400 square feet or less and who know how to prepare and even grow their own food. The people are largely self-sufficient, but we still depend upon the world around us, more than most of us are willing to admit. We should be the most likely to survive these collapses.
The speaker believes the country will be unrecognizable within 10 years, and it will be dismembered by its creditors. Some stages will happen suddenly, like shortages of fuel, and that can lead to chaos in hotspots all over the country.
Finally, he says,
"Unfortunately a lot of people simply cannot be reached because they refuse to hear what we have to say. It's not that they can't understand it, it's that they refuse to listen. The media, in general, in the United States makes it very easy because there is this fictional reality that they perpetuate and foist on people that contradicts what we're saying. We're saying that 'this will not continue for very much longer, people'. And then the media says that 'everything is fine, everything is normal' ... Some of these just fictional feel-good messages are saturating the media and the reality-based people really don't stand a chance."
This is a pretty dire prediction, and it is near-term. What is distressing for me is that IMHO my community is going through some signs of these stages of collapse already.
As I said, my community should be one of the most likely to survive. I live in a cooperative of RVers located in a beautiful oasis across from Mount Palomar in southern California. With power from Southern Cal Edison (to pump our water) and groceries and fuel from Temecula (17 miles away) we are "totally self-sufficient."
The people here are good friends and great neighbors, but I worry because they are strangely (to me) reluctant to look ahead and decide we must plan what we will become in the future. They want to be independent and unencumbered by any plans that might somehow restrict their lives. Most don't want to look at the possible downsides of tomorrow.
I see the time (within the next five years) when RVers will be mostly a thing of the past because those who would like to move about cannot afford or find the fuel to do so. Then the mix of our residents must necessarily change. I see the time when we cannot individually afford to drive 34 miles to town and back to pick up a loaf of bread. Then our means of feeding the people here must necessarily change. I see the time when we cannot depend upon SCE to provide the power needed to pump our water out of our aquifer. If by then we do not have some alternative means to pump water, our oasis will become the scrubby desert it was before our founders leveled the hills and built this paradise. I see the time when our social and cultural structure collapses completely for lack of sufficient foresight and planning to sustain our infrastructure and life-style, and all who live here must leave.
