Wednesday, January 25, 2012

the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world

RealitySandwich | This interview is excerpted from Duncan Crary's The Kunstler Cast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler, from New Society Publishers, available here.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, and The Long Emergency. His work addresses the suburban and urban environments, and the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."

Duncan Crary: You have what you call a "Long Emergency" view of where civilization is heading. What is "The Long Emergency?"

James Howard Kunstler: I've labeled this situation we're heading into "The Long Emergency" because I think it's going to be a protracted experience for mankind and for us in the United States in particular. It's really about how we are heading into a period of resource scarcity and the disruption and depletion of our oil supplies. It's about the allocation of this crucial resource all around the world, and the geopolitical implications of those inequities. And how these problems are going to combine with climate change to cause problems with everything we do, from how we produce and distribute our food to how we're going to have trade and manufacturing when Walmart dies. And not least, the destiny of the suburban, car-dependent, happy motoring living arrangement. Which is probably, for me, the biggest part of the equation.

And you don't see good things in store for the suburbs in the Long Emergency?

Suburbia is going to fail a lot worse than it's already failing, because we're not going to have the energy to run it the way it's been designed to run. For that reason I refer to suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We took all of our post-world war wealth -- and actually quite a bit of the wealth that we had accumulated for decades before that -- and we invested it in this living arrangement that had no future. And now we're stuck with it. And to make matters worse, we didn't build it very well in the first place. So as it begins to decay it decays very rapidly and becomes a very unrewarding place to live in.

Jim, it seems almost impossible to persuade suburbanites that there's anything wrong with suburbia or that it could ever "fail." I've tried, and it almost feels like arguing with someone about deeply held religious beliefs.

Again, one of the unfortunate repercussions of building suburbia is: now that we've built it, it provides a very powerful psychology of previous investment. Which means that you put so much of your wealth into this system already -- into this structure for daily life with no future -- and you've invested so much of your national identity in it, that you can't even imagine letting go of it or substantially changing it or reforming it. And that, I believe, is what's behind our inability to have a coherent discussion about what we're going to do about our problems in America. Because the psychology of previous investment has got us trapped in a box -- we will not allow ourselves to think about how we're going to do without this crap.

8 comments:

nanakwame said...

See an art film it gives a vulgar materialist, a chance to pause and see other views, even Kunstler has morphed his views - the long emergence is a nice phrase, not new in human history though.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/01/24/robot_and_frank_a_great_sci_fi_buddy_heist_movie_about_old_age.html

David H Dennis said...

Fracking appears to be offering us more oil reserves than we can ever use, and, after reading detailed arguments on both sides, I'm confident that it's perfectly safe. I think we will eventually have electric cars with good ranges - Tesla's Model S is a promising, albeit expensive, step in this direction. This indicates strongly that suburbia can survive, if it's what we want.


I've lived in multi-family housing, with depressing bleak corridors and noisy complaints between neighbors, and I've lived in suburban neighborhoods with friendly neighbors and happy families. I think there's great advantage in a suburban arrangement where people are close enough to be friendly but far enough for breathing room. I've found that my single-family suburban neighborhood sticks together in friendship in ways apartment complexes never have.


In short, I think it's Suburbia that's sustainable, offering spacious, reasonably priced housing, and New Urbanism that is not, offering overpriced, bleak apartments and tiny, super-expensive single family homes. And in practice people prefer driving to riding light rail, even when light rail flows right near their homes.



The only way to make Suburbia fall is to create a superior alternative to it. Unfortunately, people would rather sit in their comfy air conditioned cars than stand for an hour in an uncomfortable, crowded railcar or bus. I think you're more likely to get suburbanites in a future cost-effective Tesla electric car than get us out of our comfy suburban homes and automobiles. It would certainly be a lot more cost-effective than billion dollar light rail systems to nowhere ...


D

Dale Asberry said...

Lol, the comedians are out today!

John Kurman said...

At current rate of consumption (given we tend to switch pretty rapidly to the cheap stuff until runs out) the Marcellus shale formation would meet US gas demand for about six years. That's 141 trillion cubic feet. Total estimated gas reserves is 482 trillion cubic feet. That's eighteen years. The Bakken oil field in ND, was originally supposed to last 80 years, is now, at current production, going to be tapped out in 30. My money is on ten.

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