Tompkins County Relocalization Project

[Tompkins County Relocalization Project <tcrp-news AT lists.ibiblio.org>]

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.