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?