Dmitry Orlov is the only person I know who can talk seriously about collapse and make you laugh at the same time. He’s got a new piece posted on his blog, Club Orlov, titled Social Collapse Best Practices.

Orlov – a child of both the Soviet Union and the U.S. – and has come up with his own “comparative theory of superpower collapse.” His theory is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed due to the “superpower collapse soup,” which contains four main ingredients

• Severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies). Check. U.S. production peaked in 1970-71, and has been kept on life support ever since only due to a deal with the devil (with the Saudis, actually).
• A severe and worsening foreign trade deficit. Check. The trade deficit has grown over the Bush years from $380 billion in 2000 to $759 billion in 2007.
• A runaway military budget. Check. 50% of all federal spending – 481.4 billion in 2007 – went to cover the “base” Pentagon budget (this doesn’t include “black” spending, Iraq, or Afghanistan). That’s 47% of total world military spending. No one in the U.S. ever mentions, much less questions, the military budget. No one would ever dare propose slashing it.
• Ballooning foreign debt. Check. U.S. government debt as of the end of 2008 was over $10 trillion. 27.9% of that is held by foreigners, up from 13% (of a much smaller total) in 1988.

The recipe may contain other non-essential “spices” such as:

• The inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens.
• A systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform.

We’ll soon see about these. The chances of real change happening isn’t looking good, and people’s lives are increasingly unraveling. Anyhow, these last ingredients aren’t necessary components of Orlov’s recipe. They don’t automatically lead to collapse because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality.

Obama spoke of change – but he is, of course, a politician. Orlov says politicians in reality are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what should we do? What realistic new objectives should politicians espouse? I think Orlov nails it:

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Orlov thinks the Soviet Union was much better prepared for collapse than the U.S. is – ironically, because it was much less efficient. Because it didn’t work well, people had learned to get by on their own. In the U.S., people are dependent on industrial agribusiness for their food. Our suburban single-family houses will prove to be unaffordable millstones. Once fuel shortages develop and the transportation system falls apart, people will find themselves stranded in places that aren’t survivable. As for security – well, you really have to read Orlov himself to get the flavor of the hilarity.

Orlov says it’s important for our sanity to just let go of everything.  And there’s a bright note:

While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

And because money is likely to become worthless, trade it in while you have the chance and “stockpile useful stuff.”

However distopian Orlov’s vision of collapse seems, it’s really pretty mild stuff. Orlov’s collapse would involve only the U.S. and its economy.

Buzz Holling, one of the world’s great ecologists and a originator of “panarchy” theory, sees a global, systemic collapse approaching, one involving the world’s climate and all the world’s continents. Panarchy theory’s core idea is that systems naturally grow, become more brittle, collapse, and then renew themselves in an endless cycle within a grand hierarchy of cycles.

Holling fears that rapidly rising connectivity within global systems – both economic and technological – poses an increasing risk of deep collapse, a collapse that will cascade across adaptive cycles, a kind of pancaking implosion of the entire system as the collapse of higher-level adaptive cycles causes progressive collapse at lower levels.

Holling thinks the world is reaching “a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a rare and major ‘pulse’ of social transformation.”

The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.