Today, Monday, October 15, is
Blog Action Day, when thousands of blogs all devote their content to environmental concerns. For me, this provides an opportunity to celebrate the discovery of a new hero, who brings into focus a number of my evolving perceptions about the economy, the environment, and politics.
James Howard Kunstler is around my age. He began working as a reporter and feature writer for a variety of newspapers, eventually becoming a Rolling Stone staff writer. Later, and in more recent years, he has become an independent author of books examining issues of land use, environmental sustainability, and the perils of an economy dependent on cheap abundant oil.
I discovered Mr. Kunstler when I recently viewed
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (available from
NetFlix), which has a substantial amount of interview footage with him. He is bluntly outspoken and articulate, and his message is often alarming.
We are near or at the end of the era of cheap abundant oil. There is a school of thought about this fact known as
Peak Oil. The majority of the oil deposits that are exploitable have been discovered, and production may have already peaked. Meanwhile, as the supply of refined oil begins to decline, demand is accelerating as emerging industrial culture in places like China caters to a populace eager to emulate the grotesque over-consumption of our Western ways.
In the usual dynamic of commodity supply and demand, the price of oil and its derivatives will relentlessly increase. One of Kunstler's key warnings is that our model of urban/suburban development is unsustainable in a world of scarce and expensive oil. And yet that model continues to be the way a growing population is accommodated. Then there is the urgent matter of global warming, to which oil consumption is a major contributor.
I'm going to select a few common Kunstler themes for a list here, and encourage you to discover him for yourself and consider buying or checking one or more of
his books out of the library if you are interested. I also recommend viewing End of Suburbia, which encapsulates a lot of his thinking and that of other thoughtful observers, and is quite entertaining, if a little scary.
In no particular order, here are a few places where it seems my own thoughts overlap with Mr. Kunstler's on the state of things...
Auto, oil, and tire, interests systematically bought up and dismantled America's existing urban rail systems to encourage consumption of their products as the suburban development mistake gathered momentum in the post-war years. The passenger rail system (local and long distance) in the US needs to be resurrected and sustained. Air travel will one day be prohibitively expensive, and rail systems ae far more efficient and environmentally friendly. In a new era of scarce and expensive oil, the US will be at a huge disadvantage to Europe, which has dazzling highly evolved and well preserved mass transit infrastructure.
People need to live near (walking or bicycle distance ideally) where they work and shop. Food production needs to be brought closer to where the people are. As I become increasingly aware of the 'carbon cost' of things I buy, I note that much of what my local grocery sells is imported from India, Italy, or other ridiculously distant places. Pickles from India? Grapes from Chile? In addition to issues of quality, local production will support community interests and avoid the environmental and dollar cost of ludicrous transportation logistics.
Under relentless assault from the scourge of globalization, the US economy seems to have degenerated from one of investment in the production of valuable goods to a sort of sleazy ponzi scheme, where exotic financial products are circulated from one player to another, as a bigger fool is perpetually sought for the next guy upstream to unload and profit from his little collection of paper or bits on a computer disk. It seems to many that the vast new export markets that globalization promised are actually just opportunities to export as many formerly decent-paying US jobs as possible, along with most of our manufacturing capacity. Great if you are a multi-national corporate CEO or stock shareholder, not so much if you are an assembly-line schlub.
The housing bubble fiasco and related financial machinations have yet to play out on the economy. As Kunstler has pointed out more than once,
"...The housing bubble has virtually become our economy. Subtract it from everything else and there's not much left besides haircutting, fried chicken, and open heart surgery." A bit overstated perhaps, but combined with the off-shoring of most of the good employment opportunities to low-wage countries, one does have to ponder whether we will all end up flipping burgers or pulling espressos for each other at some point. Adding to the current real estate miseries at some point down the road will be a more massive devaluation of suburban property as oil scarcity and price make life there unsustainable.
Alternative fuels are a pipe dream, in any reasonable time frame. Ethanol is looming as a real horror, as corn for its production consumes disproportionate amounts of farmland, and there is a net-increase in pollution and cost when all stages of producing it are factored in. Ethanol corn production is also driving up the prices of other food products that are dependent on corn, or the land being turned over to it. What is really required is a substantial shift in the patterns of living, working, production, and transportation - not exotic alternate fuel strategies with decades-out practicality. Buying a Prius is no real solution either. Our current system of transportation is not sustainable using ANY combination of alternative fuels for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Kunstler makes these and a lot of other points far better than I can - I encourage you to have a look. His writing is entertaining as well as informative. I will leave this you with this exerpt from an
October 5, 2005 talk at a New York conference on the perils of oil dependency;
...Americans were once a brave and forward-looking people, willing to face the facts, willing to work hard, to acknowledge the common good and contribute to it, willing to make difficult choices. We've become a nation of overfed clowns and crybabies, afraid of the truth, indifferent to the common good, hardly even a common culture, selfish, belligerent, narcissistic whiners seeking every means possible to live outside a reality-based community.
These are the consequences of a value system that puts comfort, convenience, and leisure above all other considerations. These are not enough to hold a civilization together...Remarks by James Howard KunstlerAuthor of The Long Emergency
In various ways, explicitly or implied, Bushes Sr. and Jr., Mr. Cheney, and others have stated that the American way of life, with a guarantee that we may forever each consume the resources of four or more of our global peers, is not negotiable. Given the fact that our way of life in terms of consumption is also clearly unsustainable, this attitude of indisputable entitlement at the expense of the environment and the vast majority of the world's people not privileged to live within our borders could produce some interesting challenges in the years ahead.
*** For a weekly commentary (published Mondays) on current issues, check out
Jim Kunstler's blog.
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