My Blog
for you tribe comrades: scavenging!
especially for steph, but y'all will dig it! it's from "in the wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization" inthewake.org/arcblogfeb0...industdecompMetal theft and industrial decomposition
As demand for metal increases perpetually, and easily available ore deposits become mined out, the theft of metal to sell as scrap is becoming increasingly common.
This week in Germany a group of well-organized folks dismantled and removed a whopping 5 km (3 miles) of railroad track. If sold for scrap the tracks would be worth about a quarter of a million US dollars.
Metal theft is also increasingly common in North America. In lower mainland British Columbia people are stealing thousands of pounds of aluminum in the diverse forms of goalposts, aluminum sockets on scoreboards, seating and pipes. In Toronto aluminum cans are being removed from blue boxes in such large quantities that the city has requested "bylaw-enforcement officers be moved to the overnight shift to monitor blue boxes"!
Across the US aluminum and copper are being targeted in the forms of pipes, radiators, air conditioners, electrical wiring and cables. In one case in Alabama an 8 mile stretch of power line was taken. And it isn't just "organized crime":
"This is just crazy," said Springfield police Detective Geoff Ashworth, who is taking up to two metal theft reports a day. "And there's no one or two, there's no six people that are specifically responsible for this. Everybody's doing it. People know the prices are up."
According to that source, "demand for copper has pushed its price to historic highs, and aluminum prices are the highest they've been in 17 years."
Part of the reason I find this interesting is because it indicates that civilization is approaching limits around the cheap availability of metals.
The other reason I find it interesting is because things like aluminum and copper are actually very well suited for the improvisation of other useful items in a collapse context. Aluminum has a fairly low melting point and can be melted and cast into new shapes with minimal tools. Copper is malleable enough that you can reshape it using only a hammer and crude anvil, a forge isn't even essential.
I like the idea of people dismantling centralized infrastructure to build useful tools for their own communities. A lot of post-apocalyptic genre movies show old factories and stores and gas stations abandoned and left standing to rust. But that's not going to happen, because there is too much useful stuff in them!
When a large, complex living organism dies there are creatures who specialize in breaking it down into water, carbon dioxide and simple chemicals that various living creatures need to nourish themselves. That's decomposition, and of course if it didn't happen we wouldn't exist and the planet would be covered in a carpet of the dead bodies of various creatures.
Similarly, when a large, complex society breaks down I expect that some people will specialize in breaking down the infrastructure into smaller parts that small and sustainable groups can use. People won't only dismantle infrastructure out of altruism or because getting rid of industrial installations and detoxifying those sites will benefit future generations (although that is the case and many people will do it for those reasons). People will do it also because it will make immediate personal and economic sense. (Even now, "everybody's doing it".)
Eventually we won't even have to convince people to dismantle massive industrial centralized infrastructure, because it won't function and won't benefit them. All we'll have to do is figure out how to depave roads and turn them into gardens, deconstruct industrial machinery and turn them into fuel-efficient woodstoves, or dismantle cars and turn them into wind-powered lighting and pumping systems, and then share those skills so that people can do it themselves.
And then we'll figure out the next step in industrial decomposition, and the step after that. So when some part we've salvaged wears out (say some electrical component), we can decompose it into something also useful and progressively less toxic. If we can devise and share the skills to help people to fill the ecological niche of decomposer then industrial decomposition will happen on a massive and distributed basis.
please visit me
my foot is broken, and while i've been pretending it's not for two weeks, the bone has not refused. so if i don't treat it better in this new cast for the next few weeks, i will need surgery. so i'm on my ass being contemplative, reading and surfing. please visit me, my room isn't meant to be a fortress of solitude! here's my number if thou should want to call: 513-827-0367