The Snow Moon is certainly living up to its name this year. But then, the Wolf Moon was snowy also. In fact, there have been only a handful of days in 2025 when it was not snowing here in central Vermont — and only a couple days above freezing. So the garden is deeply buried under white mounds, and spring is nowhere in sight.
Still, it feels like time to get the growing season underway. I have been receiving gardening catalogs in the mail every week for months now. My pantry is empty, but for a bin of potatoes. The freezer still holds a good deal of food, and that is what I am eating now. But I don’t like frozen food. In fact, I don’t really know anyone who does. I would much prefer to store the garden harvest whole and uncooked, cured in the sun, not in boiling water where much of the nutrition and flavor get leached out even in just a few minutes. Freezing is how I deal with not having a root cellar… yet.
That is the goal though. I don’t think there is any future that will not be improved by having food storage that is not dependent on electricity. I think we will reach the point where not much energy-dependent storage of food will be possible within my lifetime. Some days I think the grid is going to give out right about the same time my body decides that it is no longer up to things like building resilience. So I feel the urgency to build now before I run out of energy. But also before this economy runs out of energy. And I sort of think that might happen first… Because it is happening already.
The clock is ticking on so many things. Long-distance shipping, relentless burning, and dwindling resources, especially dwindling reserves of affordable resources — meaning cost effective, profitable, cheap — these things are already faltering. That is what this increased cost of everything is all about. We are running out of the affordable material bases of our economy, and so our economy is contracting. Money can not buy as much as it once did simply because there is not as much to buy. Relative to contracting material supply, money has lost its value. And material supply is contracting quickly, maybe not in absolute terms, but in affordable terms. There may be plenty of oil to sustain drilling in the Arctic, but it will take almost as much in energy to extract oil in those adverse conditions as we will get out of burning it. This is true of everything. There may be deposits. But all the easy-access and high quality materials are gone. For what is left, the cost of extracting resources is more than the benefit in using them — even if you calculate benefit as a capitalist does and ignore all the externalities like maintaining a viable planet.
Milk costs more not because farmers or grocery store chains or agribusiness corporations are price gouging — though I’ve no doubt that is happening. But no, milk costs more because it takes quite a lot of energy and other material resources to produce, refrigerate and ship milk — and we are running out of those resources. So the cost of getting milk to you is much higher than it used to be even a few years ago. This is partly due to the contraction of COVID and various resource wars that have forced both supply and demand through devastating bottlenecks that bankrupted business, shuttering the doors on whole countries. But the reason there has been no rebound is because the trend toward collapse had already begun well before COVID or the most recent hostilities in the Ukraine. Indeed, we reached the global peak of oil production in 2018, and we saw the last of conventional oil increases back in 2005. The price of milk, like everything else, will only rise as the cost of energy rises due to dwindling reserves.
This is also partly why housing costs are so high, partly, because it’s never just one catastrophic failure in this system. Money is worth less and does not buy as much house — or home maintenance or utility costs or whatever. A house is a giant knot of resource use and labor, and all of that costs more. For home owners, this means that they have increasing equity in their homes though no way to capitalize on that because there are few buyers who can afford the rising costs. For the rentier class, this means that all their properties are increasingly expensive to maintain, and yet there are few renters who can afford annual increases. (Yes, we all feel very sorry for the rentier class…) But note that hardly any of them own the buildings they rent these days. All these properties are mortgaged, meaning the owners have to pay a mortgage whether they can find a renter or not. Moreover, most of the mortgages were written in the last couple decades at most, so property values were high. These are huge mortgages.
Yet there are ways to profit off of this system. A popular one seems to be to shift ownership between various limited liability companies, effectively selling to themselves. The trick to that is to grow equity between each sale. This happens automatically when you pay down principal, of course, but it also happens every time the building appraises higher. Because money is worth less, property usually will appraise higher, but there also seem to be some rather unscrupulous appraisers out there who jack up the value. And here you might see the problem for the system.
If money is a claim on future material and labor, it is also underwritten by lending. It comes into existence when a bank makes a loan. The value of collateral on each loan is what supports the value of money. If collateral is overvalued, that is, if property is not actually exchangeable for the amount of the loan because there are no buyers for the property or because the property is simply not worth what an appraiser claims it is worth, then the loan proceeds are higher than any possible repayment. Multiply this by hundreds of thousands of mortgages — with the highest value properties making up the bulk of these quasi-underwater loans — and the exchange value of money plummets.
That was probably more than you wanted to know about my day job… Suffice it to say that in this system money becomes devalued, and money’s claim on future material and labor is, therefore, lessened. Over time, it takes more money to buy everything — even in the absence of scarcity… But there is also increasing scarcity.
Soon the whole world will be forced — there is no choice — to give up superfluous stuff, to localize needs, to make sure that there is a root cellar and a productive garden close at hand. I feel this more in the winter. It is underscored by the oil-burning heat that keeps my house sufficiently warm (despite these stupid windows…). I have to make better time on transitioning, finding ways to meet my needs with fewer resources and fewer laboring bodies. And I’m way ahead of most people. This is concerning.
There is this idea that money will somehow buy you a path out of collapse. This story comes in several forms, from the billionaire bunkers to the idea that if we only spent more on X-technology we could maintain this system. This is reality blindness. Money does not meet any needs. It is only the potential to feed us and shelter us if the resources and labor are available to buy. Money is only a future claim on work and material. If those are in short supply, money does not increase that supply. And if the energetic basis of those claims — the energy needed to fuel work and process material — is contracting, then the entire system of monetary claim will contract until it falls apart. Gradually, then suddenly.
A billionaire is not going to be able to pay anyone to feed him or to wield guns in his name or to even keep the electricity working so that his billions exist. Similarly, tech that does not now exist in place and in use is a claim that will not be met. We simply don’t have the resources to build it now, to make good on that claim. Nor, for that matter, do we have the labor, as more and more of us need to focus our work on taking care of ourselves and our communities — which will also increase in cost, as taking care of ourselves increasingly means recovering from frequent disasters. We are already running that Red Queen race, where it costs all we have just to stay in place.
Things that do not meet needs in place will be the first things that we cast off. When the choice is heating the house or paying the internet bill, what do you jettison? When the cost of shipping a pair of shoes exceeds the price of the shoes, especially of shoes made locally, then you forgo the shipped shoes. When milk is $5 a gallon and you only make $400 a week, you don’t drink much milk. These same calculations are made at all levels. The more superfluous a thing, the less likely we are to spend dwindling reserves on it. And once the revenues from that thing’s production and sale dip lower than the threshold necessary to stay in business, then it will disappear. Almost instantaneously. Similarly, the further something is shipped or the more processing something must undergo, the less we can afford it. If that thing is necessary, we will find cheaper and, therefore, localized ways to acquire and produce it — and the shipped and complex versions will no longer be produced. Again, vanishing almost instantaneously.
This is not the first time this has happened, but it is the largest scale collapse in human history. It is all-encompassing. There are no other lands and bodies to exploit this time, no more pools of resources and cheap labor to appropriate. What we have now is as much as we will ever have, while the devastation of people and places is only going to increase. For even if we were to instantly stop our economy, the planet’s biophysical systems will continue to break down and shift into forms that aren’t beneficial to human projects. So today, this is as good as capitalism will ever be in your lifetime. And no amount of money is going to change that.
(Of course, most of the humans on this planet will tell you that capitalism was never good for them and good riddance to it. Not unrelatedly, these people are already well prepared for its demise…)
This is not to say that we will perceive this contraction as instantaneous. If you are not aware of the collapse now, then you may never be. But make no mistake, these increases in the cost of everything and the shortages in everything and the constant breakdown of everything, this is not a hiccup or a temporary setback. This is systemic contraction. It is also the inevitable result of pretending that we live on a world without resource or labor limits, telling ourselves that money can find a substitute for everything we use up. For a while, when there were other places to colonize, we could keep that farce going, but this was always how it was going to end. And we knew this. Why do you think there is such interest in colonizing space? We might not have anticipated the biophysical chaos that we also set in motion by refusing to recognize the limits of this planet’s capacity to absorb and process our waste. But there was no other path for capitalism to follow than the one that it has, the one that led us to exactly here and now.
With some of us worrying about root cellars and refrigeration and oil-burning furnaces in a land of long cold winter… while many of us are still pretending.
That pretense scares me even more than the list of precarities in this house. Because the more we carry on frittering away what little we have left on things like AI and social media, well… the less there will be when the system grinds to a halt. And one of the scariest aspects of this is the complete lack of skills needed to build and maintain a life. All these pretenders are helpless. They are a burden. And they will turn to violence in their desperation.
Fortunately, weaponry is one of those increasingly costly things that will soon cease to exist no matter that some people might think it is necessary. The more complex a weapon, the more costly it will be, and the more quickly it will vanish.
But these pretenders will still drag down our best efforts at adaptation. They are already doing so… they are in the White House…
So best be planning on how to deal with that… Best be planning on how to cope with shorter supply lines and fewer supplies, with fewer bodies able to do your work and more bodies unable to do any useful work at all. Best be examining the precarities in your life, and be ready to ditch the resource-intensive ways to meet needs and the things that are not meeting any needs at all. Best be ready for the implosion of the artificial value of money right at the time when there is acute need. For some of us, this collapse is happening in parallel with the onset of old age, when our own bodies are less capable and adaptable. Think about that… At the very time when your body needs to slow its labors, your retirement account is going to be worthless. (I’m willing to bet that it is already worth less every time you look into it.) But a root cellar and a garden… that will feed you. Plan on things like that, things that will sustain you directly without the mediation of capitalism.
Also plan on helping others. Because you will not survive old age without a community. But also because if you are planning now, then you are ahead of everyone else and have valuable skills and knowledge to share.
That is the one true value in these screens. For a short time, we are able to share our ideas and our adaptive hacks. We are able to learn how to build a root cellar from people who have already built root cellars. We are able to see why a root cellar is necessary. We are able to reimagine our path through life so that we are on the sustainable root cellar way, not the way of void following implosion. I can talk about root cellars and root that thought into hundreds, thousands of lives. Remember when that was the promise of the internet? That we could freely share useful information with just anyone who also had access to this medium? Of course, that was soon cannibalized by capitalism, but it is still possible to share in the margins. So make good use of this resource while it still exists…
Because it will be one of the first things to go… Just a few more winters like this one and my town won’t have the resources and time to spend on superfluous stuff like internet connection.
However, I suspect the gardening catalogs will still keep showing up… And the Snow Moon will always wane, ushering in the spring.
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
