Ecological causes of the chaos in Greece

Athens, Greece. February 2012. From http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/world/europe/greeks-pessimistic-in-anti-austerity-protests.html?_r=1

From Dan Bednarz, a policy analyst specializing in energy issues related to health care and public health, this interesting bit about underlying forces driving the social upheaval in Greece:

From the limits to growth perspective Greece is a harbinger of economic contraction and debt deleveraging that is a logical outcome of net energy decline –or the arrival of unaffordable energy prices- in industrial societies.  The energy status of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy, all deep in debt, shows that each nation produces little or no domestic oil. Bluntly put: they have been borrowing to buy increasingly expensive oil; and the cost (oil was $10 a barrel in 1998, now it fluctuates around  $100 per barrel –and it can crash with further economic decline) now exceeds the potential for wealth and value generated by using the oil to manufacture goods and deliver services.  Greece, as one of the world’s energy poorest nations, is the canary of forced energy decline and, it follows, reaching the limits to growth.

In other words, the shrinking global supply of net energy, plus loan-sharking practices by European banks, drove Greece into the abyss. It wasn't lazy people sucking the tit of big government. Now, with Greece's systems for health care, commerce, and much else disintegrating, most of the population is being strangled by poverty, hunger, crime, and other symptoms of social and ecological collapse. Hence the explosion of violence in Greece this week, after the country's parliament passed another "austerity" plan that will leave the elite financial managers comfortably well off as the emaciated populace withers away.

In Greece, we are probably witnessing a preview of America later this decade or sometime next.

What collapse looks like: the experience of Greece

From The Nation, we have an article describing conditions on the streets in Greece during that country's financial crisis.

The article was published on June 28, prior to the Greek government reaching a deal with international organizations on a debt bailout plan. So the article is dated in that respect. But it's useful for giving a vivid, concrete description of what everyday urban life looks like in a developed country undergoing rapid social and economic collapse.

A sample:

Athens is living through a double nightmare. Unemployment in Greece is officially at 16 percent, up by 40 percent in a year—42 percent among the young. Those with jobs face wage cuts of up to 30 percent, tax and price increases, public services in chaos. The social fabric is tearing. Father Andreas, the young priest running the soup kitchen, calls the situation “desperate,” as more and more families find they can’t support their own. At the same time, there is an uncontainable migration crisis. Tens of thousands of Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Somalis and North Africans are packed into crumbling buildings owned by slumlords, mostly Greek, who double as traffickers. Around Omonia Square, migrants search in rubbish for bottles, cables, clothing, anything to sell. The charity Médecins du Monde has declared a humanitarian emergency; in the lobby of its small clinic young men wait for hours, three deep against the wall.

And also this, about conditions in Athens as government services break down:

As the authorities abdicate from policing parts of the city, the task of “keeping order” is assumed by vigilantes affiliated with the neofascist party Chrysi Avgi, or Golden Dawn, which last year won its first seat on the City Council. Chrysi Avgi patrols large areas of Athens, with the explicit or tacit support of many Greek residents and often of the police, staging pogroms against migrants and pitched battles with bands of anarchists who oppose them; on May 19 more than 200 people rampaged through the center, smashing shop windows and kicking or beating every dark-skinned man they saw while the police stood by. A young sympathizer described the group’s activities to me, proudly lifting his shirt to show a scar on his back inflicted, he said, by an Afghan with a knife. “We go into the basements where they have illegal mosques to check their papers, clear them out. They could be Al Qaeda; they could be anything. It’s not chance that they’re Muslims; they’re coming on purpose to undermine the country. There’s a plan, a secret funding mechanism, and there’s no state to protect us. The police are on the side of the migrants. We had to liberate Attica Square with our fists. The migrants were washing their clothes, their children, in the fountain; they were sleeping and praying in the square. It offends me to see them praying in the square.” This spring a 21-year-old Bengali was stabbed to death in “revenge” for the murder of a Greek expectant father knifed on the street for his camera. Two Afghans have been charged with the killing of the Greek; no one has been arrested for the Bengali’s murder.

Every country is different, but the conditions in Greece might offer a glimpse of the sort of future American cities will enter as peak oil forces global economic contraction in the 2010s and 2020s. We too, will face soaring unemployment, refugee influx, and the unraveling of government services. More so than we do already, that is.