Shelter from the Storm

Second posting of the last Sunday in August....

Katrina is about to bear down on N.O., and I'm sitting in my basement on a bright, clear, hot late afternoon listening to a Bob Dylan cover. Two weeks ago I wrote about James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, and how it's the most pessimistic book ever written. After going over and over his words in my mind for the past couple of weeks, I've come to some conclusions--more positive than negative.

When I first read The Long Emergency, it scared and depressed me. Why? Here's what JHK has to say, in a nutshell:

1. The world is nearing, or has just passed, its peak oil production moment. What this means is that oil will become increasingly expensive, scarce, and hard to get out of the ground. At some point oil production will cease, because it will be so difficult to obtain (from oil fields, oil shale, or tar sands) that one barrel of oil will be required to get one barrel for use--there will be none left over to actually use for other things besides oil production.

2. The United States and Canada are nearing, or have just passed, our peak of natural gas production. In northern climes, houses have to be heated in the winter. Most houses are heated either by natural gas or fuel oil (see #1 above). We're already seeing steep increases in price, so it's likely that the peak moment has passed, and it's all downhill from here.

3. Islamic fundamentalists will do everything they can to increase the effects of #1 above. Plus they might do something bigger and worse than Sept. 11.

4. Alternative fuels will not save us. Or rather, they won't be enough to allow us to live anything like we do now, commuting by ourselves in cars for many miles, turning up the heat on cold days, etc. JHK feels that these technologies are also pipe dreams because they require an oil-based energy infrastructure to do what they do--it takes oil to power the factories that turn out wind turbines, solar panels, etc. And the "hydrogen economy" is the biggest lie of all. These are JHK's thoughts, remember, not necessarily mine.

5. Everyone will starve. Our current level of crop yields are based on factory farming--oil not only powers the giant machines that plant and harvest grain, but it also is the major ingredient in the fertilizers necessary for the huge yields. And don't even talk about the energy required to get the stuff to the mills, and from the mills to the grocery stores. Kunstler makes no mention of organic farming methods.

6. Everyone will die of thirst. Global warming is playing havoc along with our water supply--which we're depleting at crazily fast rates--aquifers take millions of years to get full again.

7. In the Long Emergency, it's going to be every man/woman, family, neighborhood, city, state, region, and nation for himself/herself. Because modern people are not cooperative, as our ancestors were, we will kill each other off almost as quickly as global warming / hunger / thirst will.

JHK, in his final chapter (which I want to call "The Book of Revelations"), writes about the various regions of the US and how they will fare in the next half century. The Southwest will have it worst--Phoenix and Las Vegas are in the middle of deserts, and won't be able to feed themselves once oil becomes so scarce as to make transporting food long distances prohibitive--and don't forget about the utter lack of water. And all those scary Mexicans who want to establish Aztlan (he quotes, with no sense that he's quoting a racist, reactionary source, last year's controversial Foreign Affairs article by that avatar of civilizational collapse, Samuel P. Huntington, called "The Hispanic Problem"). The Southeast--bascially what most people call the South--is filled with right-wing gun-toting religious nutcases; JHK thinks they'll have to reinstate slavery to survive. The Pacific Northwest has plenty of water (west of the mountains, at least), and good, volcanic-enriched soils, but Seattle and Portland residents will have to contend with pirates or invading armies from Asia (the Long Emergency will be worldwide--they'll be hungrier than we will be). The Rocky Mountain states--well, Utah is full of breeding Mormons, and they live in a desert, and they'll probably try to overrun everything around them to survive. Denver he singles out most unpleasantly: our suburbs will become dangerous Mad Max-style wastelands, and of course we won't have any water to drink. And it's cold in the winter.

For Kunstler, the only place to be will be the Northeast, which he defines as the upper Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and New England (not coincidentally, he lives in Syracuse). But the major cities, and the suburbs that stretch continuously from north of Boston to Monticello--will be uninhabitable. Rather, it will be the hinterlands--upstate New York, the valleys of Pennsylvania, Vermont--in other words, where there are still, to some extent, small farms that haven't been consolidated by agribusiness, and small towns and small cities instead of skyscrapers and shopping malls, civilization will be able to continue.

Escape to Europe? Don't count on it--we're destroying the Gulf Stream--once the melting Artic icecaps dilute the water around Greenland enough, the current will shut off and Europe will glaciate.

So what's right, and what's wrong about Kunstler's views?

I agree with #1, #2, and #3. We're burning oil faster than we should be, and there will come a time when we have to wean ourselves completely from it--no more gasoline-powered cars, no more inorganic fertilizers, no more Tupperware. Natural gas--cheap for decades, now no longer--and it's not like we can make it ourselves. Islamic fundamentalists aren't going away any time soon, and they do want to hurt our economy as much as they can--if they can manage to depose the House of Saud, if they can destroy a refinery or two, if they can destroy pipelines--they will. And let's not forget now that we're less safe from them now than we ever were before--the Department of Homeland Insecurity is all smoke and mirrors.

But that's IT. Everything else James Howard Kuntsler has to say about our future is just the worst of all possible scenarios. He discounts human ingenuity and fortitude. We didn't get to the top of the food chain by burning oil--we evolved to our present position because we're generalists--if a food we like becomes unavailable, we find something else to eat. JHK is right when he describes our current situation as an oil monoculture--we do need to wean ourselves from it--but to call our future a "Long Emergency" completely rules out any positive efforts by ourselves to thrive. The human project--just like the project of any species--is to reproduce itself. We'll find a way.

So: if you're at all interested, go out and check out his book from the library. Or go to your local bookstore and read the interesting parts at the store. But don't rush out and buy it--it doesn't deserve to be a bestseller (not that it looks like it's going to be one--Jared Diamond's Collapse looks like the winner in this subject category).

Can you tell I feel cheated by Kunstler? I liked his books on urban planning--he's written eloquently about the stupid mis-allocation of resources called American Suburbia (and he returns to that theme repeatedly in The Long Emergency) in The Geography of Nowhere and its two sequels. But even there--he assumes everyone should live in a version of America that is mostly middle class, mostly white, mostly heterosexual, etc. He likes compact city planning--New Urbanism if you want to call it that--but refuses to recognize that that can lead to housing that is unaffordable by poor people, commercial areas with shops that poor people can't afford (at least, in our Wal-Mart / Family Dollar world--poor people must shop where things are cheapest), and an overall atmosphere that resembles nothing so much as Main Street USA at Disney World. A friend of a friend who is an urban planner by profession says that the common feeling in her profession about James Howard Kunstler is the Howard Stern of urban planning.

What I want is the Bill Moyers of urban planning. Is there one out there?

My Life in Kenya

I haven't posted in the last two weeks because I've been so busy. Summer and all that.

I see one response--thank you MH--to my last post. Is anyone out there reading this?

If you're familiar with the BBC comedy As Time Goes By you may understand the title of this post--I've always identified with Lionel Hardcastle a little too much.

That's all this post has to say--that hardly anyone reads this blog. I'm continuing to post, however, because the whole point for me is to have a medium in which I can express ideas. I'll publish this and go onto a second posting.

Freezing in the Dark

Sorry I haven't been posting lately--we went to a wedding in the mountains last weekend, and I've been too busy since then to get back downstairs.

A topic I've wanted to explore on this blog ever since I started it--even before, in fact--is the idea that we lefties like to anticipate an apocalyptic future. The thought I've been developing in my mind for the past several months is that now that we've been under a Republican administration for nearly five years we've started to feel so powerless that the only way we can see the future is through the opposite of rose-colored glasses (blood-colored glasses?). You see this not so much as the left-wing media--magazines like The Nation, etc.--but in the mainstream media of cable television.

What sparked this idea was a show we watched on National Geographic Channel called End Day. This hour-long disaster-fest was co-produced with the BBC, and was based partly on the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. You remember that one--Murray plays a weatherman whose life is in disarray, and finds himself repeatedly living the same day (February 2). In End Day, the protagonist is an American physicist living in London. He gets a phone call early in the morning and has to jump on a plane to New York to be there when they turn on a sophisticated particle accelerator for the first time. The accelerator has generated a lot of public protest, because people fear that it could create a black hole (sound like the plot for Spiderman 2?).

In the first 15-minute segment, he gets to Heathrow, gets on a plane, but the plane never takes off. A massive landslide in the Azores has caused a mega-tsunami that wipes out New York (sound like part of the plot of The Day After Tomorrow?). Wonderful special effects--equal to any big-budget disaster film--show the watery end of Manhattan.

The second 15-minute segment starts the same way--alarm clock, phone call, BBC news on in the background talking about the particle accelerator. But suddenly the news changes--there's a newly-discovered comet that astronomers have calculated will be colliding with Berlin in a few hours. The action shifts to Germany, where a mother hears the news and panics; a father puts a small child onto an evacuation train; etc. Our hero is still planning to fly to New York, however--who cares if Berlin gets destroyed?--and we follow him again onto the British Air flight. On the seat-back TV, we see the American nuclear missle that blasts into the comet (we see it from a camera attached to the international space station). The missle fragments the comet (destroying the space station), and small bits still crash into Berlin, largely destroying it.

Part three: influenza! Viruses can mutate rapidly, although perhaps not as quickly as this show depicts. By the time our hero is at Heathrow (having passed by, on the way, a cinema showing Groundhog Day), viruses have swarmed all over the world, and the military has taken over running the UK--and the flight is prohibited from taking off for the US.

In the last few minutes of this harrowing hour, our man finally takes off and makes it to New York. He gets to the particle accelerator, he and his team switch it on, and voila!--the world is destroyed, just as the doomsayers predicted.

I'm not going to say this is the work of "liberal doomsayers"--let ABC's John Stossel do that. What I will say is that this kind of show is tapping into an anxiety a lot of us westerners--liberal or not--are feeling (although of course the right wingers are more in denial about it, and the evangelicals are eagerly anticipating Armageddon).

The original point I had developed in my mind several weeks or months ago (who can say when? I was walking Charlie, and that's when these ideas come) was that people on the left want the Bush "administration" to fail. He stole the White House (twice), and the hubris and stupidity with which he and his people have been running the country deserves, in our minds, harsh punishment in the form of chickens coming home to roost (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Churchill).

But now I'm not so sure that's what's happening.

I've been reading the most pessimistic book ever written, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntsler. The thesis can be boiled down very simply: the end of the oil age is upon us, and we can expect our current "lifestyles" to be radically altered within the next few years. This is a work of popular non-fiction--Kunstler doesn't originate this idea, he merely borrows and synthesizes what geologists have been saying for some time. But he goes beyond geology, and brings in history, economics, politics, foreign affairs, religion, urban planning (the subject of his past three books) and everything else that has been in the news for the past few decades. The picture he paints is downright scary: the potential, very real, for irreversible worldwide social, political, and economic breakdown. Not a return to the nineteenth century, but a return to the ninth. No "hydrogen economy," no alternative fuel scenario can save us.

He could be painting a picture that is too dark, of course, but I am with him when he says we're in for a very bumpy ride, and we Americans are living as though we've just won World War II and the world is our oyster (my paraphrase).

Shows like End Day are entertainment, but look at what we find amusing. Discovery Channel abounds with shows about tornadoes and earthquakes, and the Yellowstone volcano (a few months ago they aired a very cheesy disaster film of what would happen if the 600,000-year eruption were to happen right now--yes, I watched the whole thing). Every night on the Weather Channel you can watch Storm Stories--reinactments (sometimes augmented with actual footage) of ordinary people who find themselves in the middle of a flash flood, a tornado, or a mudslide. National Geographic Channel has a show (also co-produced with the BBC) about commercial airline disasters. They put it on just before bedtime.

All of this is a symptom of a huge sense of un-ease. And what we're uneasy about isn't just "is Al Qaida going to strike again?" but something much larger, deeper, and more dangerous: that our way of life is going to end. I haven't finished The Long Emergency yet, but I already know that the second half of my life (assuming I live into my 80s at least) won't be as easy as the first.

Would anyone care to post a comment? I'd be forever grateful. This blog has had just one comment posted to date.