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  • From: Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • To: tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [tcrp-news] Kunstler: The Agenda Restated
  • Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 23:10:00 -0500 (EST)

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/2007/02/the_agenda_rest.html

The Agenda Restated

February 5, 2007

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being
"Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find
this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a
long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs
to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The
Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then
indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense
that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off
the charts.

Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and
heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's
necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not
so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable
responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to
do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") 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 it is.

- 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.

- We have to produce food differently. The ADM / 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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).

- 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.

- 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.

- 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. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I
am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your
personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. 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.






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