The American Dream. This phrase calls up many things for many people, but it was defined post World War II and common imagery involves a house in the suburbs, a shiny, swoopy, chrome laden 1950s Detroit sedan, and maybe a picket fence.
We built and built that little subdivision over and over until it was forty five minutes out from anything that mattered, and then the residents ran smack into $4/gallon gas. Even the International Energy Agency now admits oil production will peak at some point, disputing the historic peak event of July 2008 but confirming the concept. Something must be done and the American Dream without limitless cheap oil will certainly become the American Nightmare.
There are many things that can be done, but helping visualizing the good life after they’re applied is something we don’t do enough of as a nation.
We face three obvious, serious threats to our quality of life. The introduction touches on the peaking and decline of liquid fuels. Attendant with and in many ways interrelated is the current economic crisis. Hovering over all of this and completely unwilling to negotiate is Mother Nature, hot under the collar from two centuries of fossil fuel exhumation. Any one of them left to run to its extreme can leave our culture in ruins and any attempt at addressing one seems to require ignoring the other two. That obviously won’t fly – we need an integrated approach.
And the ‘we’ in that previous sentence needs to expand dramatically from the current mix of catastrophists and serious policy wonks who’ve taken the time to come to grips with the complexities of the post peak oil world as we leave the Holocene and enter an era some are calling the Anthropocene. When presented with the stark realities of the dramatic reduction in consumption dictated by our newfound constraints many Americans simply rebel, refusing to consider what it means, or they reach for the worn out idea that some supernatural apocalypse approaches.
A vision of America after we’ve tended to these three interlocking issues ought not be left to the catastrophists, both technocratic and religious, who currently rule the creative visualization in this area.
What sort of a vision exists to be conveyed? It’s a very different dream, but it ought to correct many of the economic, health, and social/spiritual issues we face as a nation.
Our consumption will decline and no magic exists to restore it. This isn’t so grim as it sounds – the demon growth is a cancer that can and will kill us all, but a whopping dose of development, which looks superficially similar, will do us all some good. Build a house in a distant suburb, build two cars to transport the family that lives there, and you end up with lonely, unsupervised children at home and overweight, depressed, medicated adults burning up their exercise and parenting time in transit.
Relocate that family to a duplex two blocks from a busy rail stop that supports a local grocery and some other shops. Transit becomes a short walk coupled with a train ride suitable for reading the morning paper. Instead of children consuming a structured soccer program conceived due to our isolation and requiring a half hour commute to attend, play will once again be play, conceived and implemented by children with no adult interaction beyond the monitoring of established boundaries. Food, grown so near that one might know those involved in the production, will replace the plastic tasting plastic wrapped simulacrums of fruits and vegetables. Unspoken in the relocalization of food production will be a re-integration of the human race into the natural world; we’ll eat what’s in season.
The production of synthetic investment vehicles sucked all of the oxygen out of the room during the first decade of the 21st century. Outsized paper returns based on paper rearranging kept needed capital from all other endeavors. We foolishly exported every bit of manufacturing we possibly could, prey to the whims of the synthetic paper ‘markets’ and their need to report ever increasing returns on a quarterly basis. That’s going to hurt in ways we can’t even begin to imagine, but we need to begin addressing it.
The four year college and a masters degree thereafter isn’t the pinnacle of success in a post peak oil world. We’re still going to need some college graduates but we should see a tremendous resurgence in skilled trades. A young man a decade ago might have headed for business administration classes at the state university. His daughter will certainly have a choice of that or a two year school focusing on a skilled trade. The tool and die maker is a vanishing breed today, but we’re going to have to restore this trade if we hope to retool our nation for changing times.
Today we have road rage. People make obscene gestures, they yell, they chase or cut each other off, and there is occasional violence. The same level of tension exists in our overcrowded, over-securitized airports, kept in check only by the potential for prompt removal. The train is a welcome relief from this; the woman going to slowly in front of you is the same age as your elderly mother – no obscene gesture needed, but it does help if carry her bag so she can navigate the aisle more freely. I drive. I fly. We ride. There’s an instant level of social interaction among train riders, particularly long distance travelers, that just isn’t seen in other modes of transport.
Increased physical activity due to transit changes, increased social intimacy due to transit changes, and improved family intimacy due to less time in transit. Low or no chemical produce and antibiotic free meat and eggs from a local small holder for dinner. Psych medication prescriptions and insulin are just two of the many chemical crutches that will melt away under this regimen, leaving a healthier, happy, longer living nation.
Notice what’s missing here? Corporations and our current media are the impediments to the required change. The experiment of the corporation as a virtual person, begun a century and a half ago, has run its course with disastrous results from the individual to the whole biosphere. A significant part of our transition will be breaking our fetish of assessing our well being by the one dimensional, synthetic number that is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Our media, or more correctly the atrophied, diseased organ that formerly reported the news, is obviously in need of some sort of attention, the inroads made by citizen journalists on the internet not withstanding. The work the current bubble’s deflation is doing is a start but Congress had ought to bring out the Sherman act and finish off media concentration before this mistake finishes off all of us.
Americans today straddle a precipice – one foot on the couch while they watch various incarnations of Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous forever out of reach to them, and the other under a desk at a job that keeps them one step from replaying Grapes Of Wrath, at least for the moment. A long overdue honest accounting of the condition of our banking industry will break this pose and we had better, for the sake of our republic, have provided people with a vision of how to land at a lower energy level. Right now Mad Max and Left Behind rule that mindspace and we don’t want to go there.
GreenRoots is a new environmental series created by Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily for Daily Kos. This series provides a forum for the discussion of all environmental issues, including the need for sustainability and the interrelationship between environment and salient issues of our lives, including health care, family, food, economy, jobs, labor, poverty, equal justice, human rights, political stability, national security and war.
Please join a variety of hosts on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons and early evenings. Each Wednesday is hosted by FishOutofWater.