AFTER THE 2008 market collapse, I spent a couple of unemployed weeks camping around rural Oregon with a friend. Many of the small towns we passed through were boarded up. These were towns I remembered vaguely from childhood drives, former mill towns for the most part, places you’d stop for an ice cream cone and postcard but likely not for the night. One afternoon, on an almost empty tank, we pulled into the only gas station for miles and found it shuttered. We stopped at the single open grocery store for supplies, but its shelves were nearly bare.
At the time, I’d been reading a blog by a guy named Jason Godesky and had become interested in one of his theories about peak oil and the collapse of industrial civilization. Passing those boarded-up buildings, town after town, seemed to confirm Godesky’s theory of an emerging frontier. Oil was once available at an energy return of one hundred to one, he wrote, “a geological savings account of solar energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years…. Civilization used that energy to close the map.”
By “the map,” he meant anywhere the land had been carved up and claimed, anywhere the land could be accessed, serviced, and exploited by empire. This notion derived in part from the work of the anarchist-philosopher Hakim Bey, who’d published a series of communiqués in the 1980s on pirate utopias and other enclaves of self-governing people, collected in the book T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. “Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier,”
Bey wrote. “Not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets.”
Godesky theorized: “In decline, we will see a new phenomenon: the opening of the map.”
This was how a lot of like-minded writers imagined the collapse of industrial civilization playing out: resources will dwindle in rural areas. People will flee to the cities. The empire will contract and implode.
The newly liberated frontier, these writers suggested, might be the silver lining in the shitstorm, a fringe where autonomous zones could be established: enclaves of peaceful self-governance where the refugees of empire could “rewild” themselves as free people.
IN A 1942 ESSAY, Simone Weil attributes the condition of uprootedness to military conquest, an evil that persists in the descendants of conquerors who remain strangers in the land their ancestors occupied. That those descendants could relinquish oppressive control of a place, atone for their ancestral sins, and maybe even put down roots themselves is an idea taking hold in some Christian communities, where congregations
