Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/47705/
By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com. Posted February 10, 2007.

The best way to feel hopeful about our looming energy crisis is to get
active now and prepare for living arrangements in a post-oil society.


Editor's Note: James Howard Kunstler is a leading writer on the topic of
peak oil the problems it poses for American suburbia. Deeply concerned
about the future of our petroleum dependent society, Kunstler believes we
must take radical steps to avoid the total meltdown of modern society in
the face looming oil and gas shortages. For background on this topic, read
Kunstler's essay, "Pricey Gas, That's Reality."

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister
Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions" to our looming energy
crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who
would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful
way, here are my suggestions:

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by
means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at
all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many
self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this
monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution
(whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit).
They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire
Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only
make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond
the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common
activities of daily life.

2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of
industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas
deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an
unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this.
Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic
life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a
smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added
activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese,
wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation
presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's
young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.)
It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact
that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly
retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our
nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite
a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction
of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human
ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a
productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited.
Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed
proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose
especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss
of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching
ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made
of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular,
snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This
whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be
turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and
methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture
are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties
will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to
change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be
abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of
Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it.
Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up
car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is
vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in
restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure
we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if
we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the
emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We
also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by
water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and
also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns
associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and
New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and
bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place
(not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs
are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing
ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.

5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used
the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and
kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits
will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be
able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers
incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile
supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and
China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of
commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically
destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt
brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich,
fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and
sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into
thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet
shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no
longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are
completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the
years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work
for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of
small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to
make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things.
The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping
frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for
decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a
practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The
factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all
designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already
been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by
other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we
don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the
younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.

7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a
while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to
make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need
playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo
players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater
managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned
entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on
the fritz half the time (or more).

8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary
school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the
coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will
impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will
be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these
centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools,
at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of
education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling
efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows
what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and
private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may
engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns
to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great
advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average
college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to
become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports
marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future
teachers of America.

9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of
intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not
survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a
model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical
training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble
functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German
cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field.
Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory
of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of
pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all
the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state
categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail --
everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge
institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on
a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have
food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social
infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of
television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the
helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more
meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete
impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit
wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is
to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable,
competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.