A colleague said that Diamond got it wrong. Societies don’t collapse, they reorganize. Many of us have a hard time visualizing what that might look like. Enter Dmitry Orlov, whose books and articles have been predicting American collapse a la the Soviet Union. In a recent talk, he offers some interesting observations and advice. Many of the images he offers sound like science fiction– office buildings converted to dorms, parking lots turned into farms, freeways into water catchment systems. His most useful observation is that when society collapses, it doesn’t cease to function, it just does things differently. We’ll just have to see how that plays out.
