The "housing bubble" has received some press over the past few months, although no doubt measures are being taken to create the perception that it's just a minor bump in the road. Kunstler, however, writes,
It's not just the collapse of a market for a particular kind of commodity, it's the end of the suburban pattern itself, the way of life it represents, and the entire economy connected with it. It's the crack up of the system that America has invested most of its wealth in since 1950.
We live in a fictitious world where it is assumed the economy can grow forever. However, since economists are loathe to admit it, it's vital to point out we live in a finite planet with finite resources that have been rapidly depleted, poisoned and otherwise ravaged for the sake of someone somewhere making a profit. Writer and activist Derrick Jensen refers to this as "converting the living into the dead" and contends industry will continue to brutalize our environment and planet until every last thing is dead. So although we'll hear the word "recession" a lot in the coming weeks, it is very likely that we're in the midst of a slow crash.
Blogger Ran Prieur writes in a 2005 essay:
the crash will be slower and more complex than the kind of people who predict crashes like to predict. It won't be like falling off a cliff, more like rolling down a rocky hill. There won't be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn't even know it. We're told to draw a line at the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, but to Romans at the time it was just one event -- the Visigoths came, they milled around, they left, and life went on. After the 1929 stock market crash, respectable voices said it was a temporary adjustment, that the economy was still strong. Only years later, when we knew they were wrong, could we draw a line at 1929.
I suggest we're already in the fall of civilization. In 2004 the price of oil doubled, bankruptcies and foreclosures accelerated, global food stockpiles fell to record lows despite high harvests, an apocalyptic religious cult hacked an election to tighten their control of the world's most powerful country, and we had record numbers of hurricanes and tornadoes -- and a big tsunami to top it off. If every year from here to 2020 is half as eventful, we'll be living in railroad cars, eating grass, and still waiting for the big crash we've been led to expect from watching movies designed to push our emotional buttons and be over in two hours.
And this was written months before Hurricane Katrina, which gave people a preview of a failing infrastructure, lack of relief measures and other aspects that would characterize a failing civilization.
Post-apocalyptic movies have given people the idea that if the United States or western civilization falls, it will be the type of event featuring total anarchy, looting gangs, explosions and so on. However, life doesn't exactly work that way and instead, it's a series of minor, often almost unnoticed setbacks that will depict the slow crash. Prieur continues:
As energy gets more expensive and the electrical infrastructure decays, blackouts will be more frequent and last longer, but power will come back on. By the time the big grids go down permanently, the little grids, patched together from local sources, will be ready to take their place. They will be weaker, less reliable, and more expensive, and they won't cover the slums, but by then we'll all be experts at living without refrigerators and running laptop computers from car batteries scavenged from junked SUV's and recharged with solar panels. Electricity is a luxury, not a necessity. When the lights go out, we won't go berzerk -- we'll go to bed earlier.
Likewise with gasoline. The oil's not running out -- it's just getting more scarce and expensive. People who want it will not form motorcycle gangs that chase tankers and fight to the last man. They'll do what my dad did in 1973 and what they're doing now in Iraq -- wait six hours for a fill-up. If you already know how to get by with a bicycle, you just won't have as many cars to deal with.
The biggest obstacle facing people right now is that no one wants to believe that this particular lifestyle, one based on the access to cheap, abundant energy (that's oil, kids), is fleeting and could come to an end. No matter where you go, people talk about cars they will buy, boats they will purchase for weekend getaways, snowmobiles for scaring elk in the mountains, and so on. Worse, many people assume if you buy a Prius, you are helping the environment and conserving so much oil that by golly, your great-great grandchildren will certainly have hovercars and fly with Captain Kirk. Al Gore finally got people to realize that, "gee, we actually need a clean, unpolluted, intact environment to survive." Naturalist David Suzuki has often made the disconnect with nature a central theme of his writings. Yet marketers have essentially twisted that point to mean "buy green", which still requires massive consumption, more exploitation of nature and hurrying along the decay of our world, except with a cleaner conscience.
Writer Kirkpatrick Sale points out four reasons for collapse:
First, environmental degradation. Empires always end by destroying the lands and waters they depend upon for survival, largely because they build and farm and grow without limits, and ours is no exception, even if we have yet to experience the worst of our assault on nature. Science is in agreement that all important ecological indicators are in decline and have been for decades: erosion of topsoils and beaches, overfishing, deforestation, freshwater and aquifer depletion, pollution of water, soil, air, and food, soil salinization, overpopulation , overconsumption, depletion of oil and minerals, introduction of new diseases and invigoration of old ones, extreme weather, melting icecaps and rising sealevels, species extinctions, and excessive human overuse of the earth's photosynthetic capacity.
The highlighted words are emphasized by me for a major reason. The past 150 years (give or take) have been highlighted by drawing upon an energy source that is not provided by yearly sunlight reception. Actually, it is stored sunlight, in a fashion, but from a source that took millions of years to develop in a geological quirk. And the western world has burned through this line of "credit" in a few mere generations with absolutely no regard for consequence. Industrial agriculture depends heavily on petroleum for fertilization, mechanical harvesting, and transportation of food. As oil becomes more expensive and scarce, it's conceivable that food supplies will drop. The planet took tens of thousands of years before the human population hit one billion people (around 1800). Yet, in barely over 200 years, we're around 6.5 billion. It's not a coincidence that explosive population growth comes during the age of petroleum, where sustaining large numbers became possible. However, what happens when that energy source becomes depleted or difficult to utilize? Back to Sale:
Second, economic meltdown. Empires always depend on excessive resource exploitation, usually derived from colonies farther and farther away from the center, and eventually fall when the resources are exhausted or become too expensive for all but the elite. This is exactly the path we are on-peak oil extraction, for example, is widely predicted to come in the next year or two-and our economy is built entirely on a fragile system in which the world produces and we, by and large, consume (U.S. manufacturing is just 13 per cent of our GDP).
Third, military overstretch. Empires, because they are by definition colonizers, are always forced to extend their military reach farther and farther, and enlarge it against unwilling colonies more and more, until coffers are exhausted, communication lines are overextended, troops are unreliable, and the periphery resists and ultimately revolts.
Finally, domestic dissent and upheaval. Traditional empires end up collapsing from within as well as often being attacked from without, and so far the level of dissent within the U.S. has not reached the point of rebellion or secession-thanks both to the increasing repression of dissent and escalation of fear in the name of "homeland security" and to the success of our modern version of bread and circuses, a unique combination of entertainment, sports, television, internet sex and games, consumption, drugs, liquor, and religion that effectively deadens the general public into stupor.
One needs only take a trip across the United States to see that the country no longer makes anything (tour hint: look for closed factories all across the midwest). Yet we continue to misallocate national wealth into dead end endeavours. James Kunstler:
A reader sent me a passle of recent clippings last week from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It contained one story after another about the perceived need to build more highways in order to maintain "economic growth" (and incidentally about the "foolishness" of public transit). I understood that to mean the need to keep the suburban development system going, since that has been the real main source of the Sunbelt's prosperity the past 60-odd years. They cannot imagine an economy that is based on anything besides new subdivisions, freeway extensions, new car sales, and Nascar spectacles.
In light of the 2008 primary season where various candidates throw out the words "hope" and "change" every other sentence (if not more), we need to ask ourselves and them, are even remotely prepared to take any sort of steps to ride through the coming wave of difficulties? Or are we simply going to continue throwing the same old solutions at new problems and wondering why things decay around us? Kunstler's column this week provides a handful of concrete things that could be undertaken in order to ease a transition through "The Long Emergency".
From time-to-time, I feel it's necessary to remind readers what we can actually do in the face of this long emergency. Voters and candidates in the primary season have been hollering about "change" but I'm afraid the dirty secret of this campaign is that the American public doesn't want to change its behavior at all. What it really wants is someone to promise them they can keep on doing what they're used to doing: buying more stuff they can't afford, eating more shitty food that will kill them, and driving more miles than circumstances will allow.
Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations.
Recently, in Whistler, BC, there was talk of trying to set up a ski train to get rich tourists from the Vancouver airport to the ski slopes in a more environmentally sound fashion than thousands of SUVs racing up Highway 99 (which is an occasionally treachourous mountain road that claims many lives each year). However, the mere fact that a train wasn't fast enough to satisfy the needs of people meant there was to be no further discussion of creating an alternative to single car transporation. The first thing that will have to change is people's perception that their "need" to get places instantly and in perfect comfort is counterproductive to the general needs of the public. A train, which I consider a really pleasant way to travel (yes, even Amtrak!), would reduce the congestion on a narrow mountain highway, save lives and reduce energy consumption. Yet, when it was shown people might have to take another few hours on a train, the entire idea was scuttled. What is so important about four hours in your life that solutions to environmental problems have to be set aside? Americans in particular have bought into the idea that their convenience and their cars are as vital as oxygen and clean water.
Kunstler goes on to suggest:
End subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to small-scale farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the ethanol program.)
Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.
In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability. This essentially means making the individual building lot the basic increment of redevelopment, not multi-acre "projects." Get rid of any parking requirements for property development. Institute "locational taxation" based on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories. Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating installations and solar, wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible on a small-scale network basis.
What Kunstler has long advocated is moving away from the car-based city and back to a feasible, walkable (or bikeable) setting where you can work, live and play in one area without needing a car. I have seen big box store developments in Colorado out in fields that are miles away from any sort of population density and thus requires all their customers to have access to cars and cheap energy to get them there. It's an utter waste of resources and money to design our living arrangements in this fashion. Moreover, going back to the reality that business "leaders" in the United States decided to outsource most manufacturing simply so a very tiny group of people could make profits, we're going to need to reestablish the ability to make things. Kunstler writes, We'll have to make things in this country again, or we won't have the most rudimentary household products."
As energy becomes more expensive and essentially more scarce, our centralized systems will take a hit.
We'd better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will have to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a "consumer" activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box" operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business. We'll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater reform of American medicine.
Of course, while many aspects of a slow crash are bone-chilling, the end of Wal-Mart does bring a smile to my face. They are extremely dependent on cheap goods being transported by diesel trucks and if the trucking industry becomes financially unwieldy, so does Wal-Mart. So there is a bright side to change.
Kunstler also writes:
Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about illegal immigration.
My suggestion regarding stopping immigration is this: we should go all the way on the matter. If we're not going to allow people from other countries to come into the United States, then we're also going to stop taking their resources. If no Mexicans are to come in, then the United States doesn't get their bananas, oil, cheap labor in factories south of the border or any other product that comes from there. People need to stop expecting that we can deny people the ability to relocate to a better economy and still extract all the resources they might require for a functioning society. You can't have it both ways.
And finally, Kunstler writes:
Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious "wealth" -- and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with our circumstances -- i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. We will soon hear the sound of banks crashing all over the place. Get out of their way, if you can.
I've long wondered exactly how someone can get rich buying and selling money, which often is nothing more than data on a hard drive somewhere. People have gotten away form the idea that you actually have to produce an physical item of value to someone else in order to have wealth of any sort. The biggest problem facing the country is an economic system that may very well be nothing more than smoke and mirrors. My favorite snippet from Derrick Jensen is one the premises for his Endgame books:
There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These "rich" claim they own land, and the "poor" are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.
Keep this in mind as we go through the election cycle this year. Many of the candidates might promise "change" but are they really offering any? Or are they going to continue the same dead-end policies that protect industry and business as they further destroy our natural world? We're entering a truly new territory for humanity: end of an artificial oil induced stupor coupled with severe environmental degradation. Gmoke wrote a diary last night based on Kunstler's column and it stirred up a little late-night chit-chat. These issues are of utmost importance and the day to day political hissy fits between candidates and their supporters are exceptionally trivial by comparison.
Permalink | 67 comments