Chris Martenson has been working to raise awareness of the coming economic transition for a while now through videos like his Crash Course series, which explains fundamentals of money creation, net energy and environmental depletion. This is a great ten minute summary of net energy and the crisis we are about to face. All the societal complexity has been brought about because of the excess energy which has yielded specializations, economic centralization and resource surpluses. All that is about to change over the next two decades.

Fortunately, people like Martenson and John Michael Greer are focused on ideas for softening the descent down Hubbert’s peak. In Greer’s recent blog post, he talks about how the world relocalized its economy after the fall of Rome.

When civilizations come unglued, in turn, all these indirect subsidies for economic centralization go away. Roads are no longer maintained, harbors silt up, bandits infest the countryside, migrant nations invade and carve out chunks of territory for their own, and so on. Centralization stops being profitable, because the indirect subsidies that make it profitable aren’t there any more.

How will we recentralize? Specifically in the US as state budgets are no longer able to support infrastructure that allows centralization to work?