WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

More perspectives on the Gulf oil spill from Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. In this post from his blog, Club Orlov, Dmitry Orlov compares the Gulf oil disaster to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986. "Translate "industrial accident" into Russian and back into English, and what you get is "technogenic catastrophe". An apt term indeed!

The drawing of parallels between industrial accidents is a dubious armchair sport, but here the parallels are just piling up and are becoming too hard to ignore:

* An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 spewed radioactive waste across Europe

* A recent explosion and sinking of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is spewing heavy oil into the Gulf of Mexico

These accidents were both quite spectacular. At Chernobyl, the force of the explosion, caused by superheated steam inside the reactor, tossed the 2500-tonne reactor lid 10-14 meters into the air where it twirled like a tossed penny and came to rest back on the wrecked reactor. The cloud of superheated vapor then separated into a large volume of hydrogen gas, which detonated, demolishing the reactor building and adjoining structures. At Deepwater Horizon, a blowout of a recently completed oil well sent an uncontrolled burst of oil and gas, pressurized to over 10,000 psi by the 25000-foot depth of the well, up to the drilling platform, where it detonated, causing a fire. The rig then sank, and came to rest in a heap of wreckage on top of the oil well, which continues to spew at least 200,000 gallons of oil a day. Left unchecked, this would amount to 1.7 million barrels of oil per year, for an indefinite duration. This amount of oil may be enough to kill off or contaminate all marine life within the Gulf of Mexico, to foul the coastline throughout the Gulf and, thanks to the Gulf Stream, through much of the Eastern Seaboard, at least to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and possibly beyond. A few tarballs will probably wash up as far north as Greenland.

The Chernobyl disaster was caused more or less directly by political appointeesm: the people in charge of the reactor control room had no background in nuclear reactor operations or nuclear chemistry, having got their jobs through the Communist Party. They attempted a dangerous experiment, executed it incompetently, and the result was an explosion and a meltdown. The Deepwater Horizon disaster will perhaps be found to have similar causes. BP, which leased and operated Deepwater Horizon, is chaired by one Carl-Henric Svanberg—a man with no experience in the oil industry. The people who serve on the boards of directors of large companies tend to see management as a sort of free-floating skill, unrelated to any specific field or industry, rather similarly to how the Soviet Communist party thought of and tried to use the talents of its cadres. Allegations are already circulating that BP drilled to a depth of 25000 feet while being licensed to drill up to 18000 feet, that safety reviews of technical documents had been bypassed, and that key pieces of safety equipment were not installed in order to contain costs. It will be interesting to see whether the Deepwater Horizon disaster, like the Chernobyl disaster before it, turns out to be the direct result of management decisions made by technical incompetents.

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This morning I found this blog post by R.A. Vaughan on ActionSpark, a portion of which is reprinted here with permission. You can see the whole entry here.

On Saturday a friend and I drove through coastal California, from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. Before we left, she began to fret about not having filtered water. I commented that since most of the world’s people have to worry about shit and bugs in their water, at least our water is clean.

Not three hours later I found myself eating my own words.

We stopped at a gas station in King City. A hand-made sign over the wash basin read, DO NOT DRINK THE WATER, AS IT IS CONTAMINATED: HIGH NITRATE LEVELS. It seemed that I had been wrong.

Why aren’t we horrified at the fact that our water–in a rural area of one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world–has already become poisonous? What do people in King City do? Buy all their water bottled? Install filters?

The survival of our planet is continually sold to us as consumer choice. Buy organic. Buy green. Choose this water, in these bottles. But this is a prime example of how much vaster the issues are. This is not a matter of consumer choice; it’s a matter for government, a matter for vast and sweeping changes of policy on a national and an international scale.

While I waited in line in front of the sink in that gas station, I had a sudden flash vision of a post-apocalyptic America, in which desolated people wander over a dead landscape, where nothing grows in the exhausted, salinated, eroded soil and even the water–surely a gift of god if there ever were one–is unfit to drink.

I too have been wondering, what is it going to take to get people to react? Should we continue to demand the government come to our rescue with legislation and policies to protect us from our collective stupidity or should we take Dmitry Orlov's advice and ignore the government and invest in a lifetime's worth of water purification tablets which we will trade for food in the not so distant future?

Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American Prospects, addressed The Long Now Foundation earlier this year on the subject of social collapse. For the full text of his talk you can click here, but I highly recommend you treat yourself to the full Orlov experience by watching the video - a short excerpt is below and the whole presentation is available over on FORA TV.

For more from Dmitry about the practical lessons the Russian collapse has to offer for the declining American empire, check out Reinventing Collapse.

Comments? Please leave them in the feedback section below.

John Michael Greer, author of The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age has allowed us to share his presentation from Plan C: The Fifth U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions. It's quite long, so I'll post Part One today and Part Two tomorrow. It's well worth the read.

Thanks John!

I’d like to start by thanking all of you for coming to this conference, and the conference organizers and the sponsoring organizations—Community Solutions and the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center—for making it happen. We have a lot to talk about this weekend. There’s some good news to share, some good ideas to exchange, and no shortage of major challenges that we need to confront, together and individually; and a conference like this offers possibilities for all those things.

It’s an auspicious date for such an event, too. In the faith tradition I follow, the Druid faith, sunset today marks the start of the festival we call Samhuinn, the feast of the ancestors. It’s a time of endings and beginnings, the end of the harvest, the beginning of our new year, and endings and beginnings make up a great deal of what we have to talk about this weekend. The way of life nearly all of us have grown up with—a way of life founded on the extravagant use of irreplaceable fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, and on the pursuit of unlimited economic growth at all costs—is coming to an end around us.

That’s the rarely mentioned driving force behind the economic convulsions of the last few months; behind the political crisis under way in this and many other countries; and also behind the very widespread feeling nowadays that our lives and our societies have gotten onto the wrong track, that something has to give—something has to change. And that realization, uncomfortable as it often is, is the place where endings give way to beginnings, because it’s the willingness to face change that’s really been lacking in the mainstream of the industrial world for the last quarter century or so; and that willingness has begun to spread, in recent months, to an extent that might have been hard for any of us to imagine, say, ten years ago, when today’s peak oil movement was first beginning to coalesce.

I don’t think it’s irrelevant just now to glance back for a moment at that earlier time. I think it was ’97 or ’98 when I first encountered people online who were talking about the end of the age of oil. The concept wasn’t new to me; I spent my adolescence in the 1970s reading The Limits to Growth, Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age, that sort of cheerful literature; at the time, for a variety of reasons, the future they portrayed made a good deal more sense to me than the bland pronouncements of business as usual forever being retailed by government and the media. I somehow managed to miss finding out about M. King Hubbert and the Hubbert Curve during those years, but his prediction of a global petroleum production peak sometime around 2000 wouldn’t have surprised me at all.

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For those of you who haven't already seen it, check out this post from James Howard Kunstler's excellent blog Clusterfuck Nation. Here's a brief quote to whet your appetite:

"There's a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling, back to earth thousands of feet below, with a distant, dismal, barely audible thud at the end of his journey. We are Wile E. Coyote Nation."

Read the rest of the post here.

This post sums up a great deal of the unease that I've been feeling of late - that sense that so many people will just not stop fiddling while Rome crackles and burns. The Wile. E. Coyote image is the perfect metaphor for a TV nation.

And yet, I also maintain a sense of hope. Hope that we can make the transition to a more localized, self-sufficient lifestyle and economy. Hope that somehow we will reverse our fossil fuel dependence *before* climate change causes the sea levels to rise so far that the oceans swallow the coastline. Hope that a growing awareness of all things green is not "the new black" but a permanent adjustment in our attitudes as individuals and as a society. Hope that the world that my children inherit will not be a bleak wasteland.

I'm sustained in my hope by many of our wonderful authors such as:

Reading their work helps me see the opportunity that comes with change rather than just the catastrophe of collapse. They offer a necessary perspective in grim times.

We'd love to hear you thoughts in the comments below.