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By Root 2326 0

what will happen when civilization comes down, whether through ecological collapse or the efforts of those humans who resist it. Will the urban poor starve? With the removal of current power structures—which is certainly part of what I’m talking about—along with the cops who keep these power structures in place, will the poor take food from the rich? Will cops become even more violent than they already are? Will cities turn into battle-grounds? Or will the poor form collectives to take care of themselves and their neighbors, and take idle land from the rich to grow their own food? Will the poor be able to keep the food they grow? Will they be able to stay alive until their first crops come in? Will the rich hire (or convince) police to keep the poor from doing this? Will police do this simply on principle? Will police take the food for themselves? What will be the response on the part of the poor? Further, will violence against the natural world get worse? Will it shift its locus from the colonies closer to the heart of empire? I was recently in New England, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. He took that as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards. I took it more as a sign of the increased reach of civilization: technological and social innovation have enabled these Yankees to deforest the globe—when they want wood fiber, they now come calling to someone else’s backyard. The point is that when global trade collapses—global trade is another part of civilization that needs to go—if these people want fiber, they will once again cut the trees closest to them. But they won’t be able to reach around the world. Will that inability be a good thing? I think so. But the real point is that I don’t know what will happen.

Here’s what I do know: the global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. The more this economy can be slowed, the less damage will be caused to the world, and the better the planet will be able to continue to support human (and nonhuman) life.

I also know that right now none of these urban poor die of starvation. They die of colonialism. As I mentioned before, while three hundred and fifty million people go hungry in India, former granaries in that country export tulips and dog food to Europe. While these same hundreds of millions starve, “their” government attempts to dump sixty million tons of grain into the ocean, because it cannot find export markets for that grain, and because it will not distribute food to those who cannot pay.

Seventy-eight percent of the countries reporting child malnutrition export food. During the much-publicized famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s, that country exported green beans to Europe. During the infamous potato famine, Ireland exported grain to England (and part of the reason the potato blight took hold in the first place was that the Irish were pushed to the poorest land).

Sure, there are too many people on the planet. Someday there will be fewer. But right now there is enough food to go around, enough, in fact, to make everyone fat: 4.3 pounds of food per person per day, around the world. This despite the exportation of non-food crops like coffee, tobacco, tulips, opium, and cocaine grown on land used for food production before the (often-forced) entry of the global economy, land that will be used again for local food production once the global economy collapses. This also despite the use of so much land for non-productive ends such as roads and parking lots. Pavement now covers over sixty thousand square miles just in the United States. That’s 2 percent of the surface area, and 10 percent of the arable land.

Here’s another reason my analysis of whether the urban poor would suffer more from civilization’s crash than its continuation is bullshit, and this forms the twelfth premise of this book: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The