BIKE: Disappointing facts

[rcbaker]

[One person's disappointing facts about the future are another person's 
spam, sorry to say. Besides whats below, Kunstler also starred with 
other notable experts like Heinberg and Calthorpe in a great new video 
titled "The End of Suburbia" -- describing how TxDOT's vision of paving 
the future is about to hit the brick wall of reality. 

Incidently the opposition to the toll roads being promoted by Rick Perry 
et al, is enormous. See Yesterday's Bruce Hight op ed in the Statesman 
for an idea of how unpopular they really are. CAMPO has not and will 
not reveal the true scale of suplemental arterial road expansions 
required by Austin to handle the toll road traffic before it cuts off citizen 
input on the toll roads this Friday!!! As you may imagine there is not 
one foot of bike or rail or sidewalks in the toll roads plans released to 
date. -- Roger Baker]

The Clusterfuck Nation Manifesto

Strategies for Survival
Notes on the Coming Transformation of American Life

by Jim Kunstler

      I get e-mail from people who object to what they construe to be an
excessively pessimistic view of our national scene.  Well, what if you
suggested to the people of Germany in 1936 that Dresden would be 
turned into an ashtry within a decade and that Berliners would cut down 
all the trees in the Tiergarten to heat their homes?

     What I've been suggesting about the direction of our country is 
hardly that drastic.

     I personally believe that there is much we can do as a nation, and as 
a collection of communities, to mitigate the problems I have been 
describing, even to create conditions in which American civilization can 
advance beyond the hardships of the early 21st century.

     The overriding imperative task for us in the face of the problems 
ahead will be the downscaling of virtually all activities in America. This 
should not be misunderstood. I do not mean that we ought to become 
any less of a nation, or less of a democracy, only that the scale at 
which we conduct the work of American life will have to be adjusted to 
fit the requirements of a post-globalist, post-cheap-oil age. The future is 
already telling us very clearly what must be done. If we fail to pay 
attention, we risk very costly distraction in political turmoil, military 
mischief, civil disturbance, and permanent economic loss.

     I will focus here on examples of three national "systems," so to 
speak, that will have to be downscaled sooner rather than later: retail 
trade, agriculture, and schooling.

     America made the unfortunate choice (by inattention, really) of
allowing nearly all of its retail trade to be consolidated by a very few
huge national operations, the Wal-Marts and other gigantic discounters. 
Many Americans viewed this as a bonanza of bargain shopping without 
noticing the significant losses and costs entailed to their communities, 
and to the long-term health of their nation's economy. I have described 
the extreme vulnerability of the giant national retail operations to the 
vicissitudes ahead: disrupted oil markets, far-flung supply chains, and 
so forth. When these behemoths go down - and they will go down hard 
and fast - everyday retail trade will have to be reorganized in America. 
This is a tremendous task.

      It will have to be reorganized at the local and regional scale. It
will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances at 
multiple increments and probably by multiple modes of transport. It is 
almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy - which is 
another way of stating we face a period of austerity - but it is apt to 
bring back many lost civic benefits in return. The national chains 
eliminated practically all the "middlemen," who were disparaged as 
parasites adding needless costs to everyday products. The fact is that 
these middlemen, the wholesalers, jobbers, warehousers, distributors, 
played necessary roles in a complex system that operated very 
differently than the current model. They were members of local 
communities; they were economic participants in their communities; 
they made decisions that had to take the needs of their communities 
into account; they were caretakers of civic institutions, and they were 
employers. We will need this category of business person again, as
we will need the local retailer, the persons and families who run local
businesses trading with the public at large. We will need a multi-layered 
system for the distribution of regular goods, even if it costs more to 
operate.

      Some of the infrastructure needed to re-localize American 
commerce is there, though it is not in very good shape - the urban 
downtowns, small town main streets and business districts. Some of the 
big boxes might be integrated with it - dead Kmarts may be the local 
warehouses of the future, and some shopping centers and malls may 
be retrofitted into neighborhood centers - but much of this newer car-
oriented fabric will more likely end up as salvage. The railroad system 
the US needs to replace the long-haul trucking system that we have 
relied on for decades is also in poor shape, but railroad track is much 
easier to repair and restore per mile than comparable amounts of 
interstate highway. Perhaps our biggest problem is that so many 
products we're accustomed to are no longer manufactured in the United 
States. The factories themselves have physically disappeared. Hence, 
another feature of the years ahead: for a period of time, Americans may 
have to make do with a lot less and with smaller selections of fewer 
products. This is another reason to regard the coming era as one of 
austerity.

       It would be a mistake to take this view of the coming decades as
nostalgic. The future will simply demand it. I happen to believe that 
there is much to gain in amenity from the downscaling of American life. 
We will benefit from knowing the people we do business with. There is 
a good chance that many people currently underemployed will find a 
gainful niche to occupy in the reorganization of American trade, and 
communities will benefit from their being gainfully occupied. But at the 
same time, we will be saying goodbye to a way of life which, however 
unsustainable and even crazy it might have been, was a set of 
arrangements we had grown accustomed to, and it is never easy for a 
culture to change the way it does things as fundamental as everyday 
commerce.

      Agriculture faces a similar predicament. Today, we grow a few
monocultures of grain or milk or beef or pork in vast quantities on 
gigantic factory farms, process most of the outputs at a similar 
enormous scale, and truck it great distances to gigantic super-stores. 
The end of cheap oil means this will no longer be possible. We are 
going to have to grow at least some of our food closer to home. We will 
have to do it with fewer petroleum inputs, the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers 
and pesticides. Our methods will have to be along lines that are today 
labeled as "organic." Farming will have to be done at a smaller scale, 
and it will probably entail more intensive human labor. A class of people 
will re-emerge on the scene: American agricultural laborers. Their lives 
will probably be far from idyllic. Don't count on this kind of work being 
done by foreign migrants when we are engaged in border disputes and 
demographic / territorial contests with Mexico. When the US economy 
shudders and stumbles, life will become worse by orders of magnitude 
in Mexico, which is already struggling.

      The re-localization of farming in America is going to be very
difficult. Our relationship with land the past half century has been one
almost exclusively of brutal commodity exploitation. A lot of farmland in 
California is close to being ruined from over-irrigation; you can see the 
salt precipitates in the fields off Interstate Five in the Central Valley 
today. Some of the best eastern farmland has been paved over. The 
years ahead will require us to rediscover a relationship of caring for 
land and doing so by hand, tenderly. In an age when the farmland 
around our towns and cities seemed to have value only as potential 
development - for monocultures of suburban houses and discount 
shopping - stewardship was regarded as merely prissy. In the future, 
our lives will depend on how we take care of the land.

      The re-localization of agriculture presumes that many so-called
value-added activities will take place on a more local and regional 
basis, too: the conversion of milk into dairy products, the production of 
meats, hams, sausages, wine, preserved foods, and so on. Europeans 
never stopped doing this. Their models and methods exist to be 
emulated, and we will have to do it as the end of globalism becomes a 
more emphatic condition of life. Today, there are probably fewer than 
fifty immense factories producing most of the cheese in America, all 
absolutely dependent on long-haul trucking based on cheap diesel fuel. 
Twenty years in the future, there may be thousands of smaller dairies 
operating across the US. They will probably put out better products. 
They will employ people in complex vocations. They will have regional 
differences.

     The downscaling of agriculture presents some obvious problems. 
Farms take years to establish. The knowledge for running diverse, 
small-scale farms becomes a little more lost every day as elderly 
farmers die and the culture of farming dies with them. Theend of the 
cheap oil economy may bring dysfunction so swiftly to our current 
arrangements that we will not have time to make an orderly transition. 
This could result in a specific food emergency in the US that might go 
on for years. As the Chinese proverb goes: a well-fed person may have 
many problems but a starving person only has one problem - another 
reason to be prepared for political strife here in the US. In the 
meantime, we may see swiss chard and potatoes sprout where formerly
the monocultures of Kentucky bluegrass, stoked by oil-based turf-
builders, grew so luxuriantly on the lawns of suburbia.

     School, is another major system facing drastic reorganization. The
failure of schooling in America is already manifest. Our inner-city 
schools are in nearly complete state of entropy due to the effects of our 
overall disinvestment in cities - the school buildings themselves are 
crumbling while books and supplies are beyond the point of critical 
shortage - and to an array of social conditions ranging from the 
disintegration of families to the absence of standards of normative 
behavior. Whether these might all be lumped together as the 
consequences of poverty is debatable, in my opinion, but the effects 
are not debatable. These schools are not producing literate citizens 
with adequate social skills.

    Gigantic alienating schools are producing so much anxiety and 
depression that multiple slayings have occurred at regular intervals in 
recent years. Our schools are too big. The centralized suburban 
schools with their fleets of buses will become rapidly obsolete when the 
first oil market disruptions occur. The inner city schools will be too 
broken to fix. The suburban schools will be too large to heat 
economically (especially since the overwhelming majority of them all 
over the nation, regardless of climate, are sprawling one-story 
modernist boxes). School will have to be reorganized on a local basis, 
at a much smaller scale, in smaller buildings that do not look like 
medium security prisons. School will be required for fewer years, and 
with more deliberate sorting of children into academic and vocational 
tracks. Children will have to live closer to the schools they attend - the 
yellow bus fleets will be history. Children and teachers will benefit from 
being in physically smaller institutions where all will at least have the 
chance to know one another. In a post-cheap-oil world, teens might be 
needed to work part of the day or part of the year.

     Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and one of the leading
reformers of education in America, has argued that people need to 
finish
regular school by age 16 and assume a new set of responsibilities to
increase their sense of adulthood.13 He advocates abolishing high 
school as it is now known altogether.  Years from now fewer will go on 
to college. Colleges, too, are likely to go through severe downsizing, 
especially the enormous state universities, as college ceases to be a 
mass consumer activity. Real life may not be so easily postponable. 
Vocational trades requiring real skills may gain in status and some 
professions such as law may lose status (and earning power). Some 
occupations - public relations, travel agentry, authoring books - may 
shrink or disappear altogether. Work for many may become a matter of 
making oneself useful to others with the added benefit of earning a 
living.

     One hazard to the enterprise of reforming education will be the
psychology of previous investment. We have poured our accumulated 
national wealth into building gigantic central schools and galactic-scale 
university campuses, with their semi-professional sports facilities and 
vast parking lots, and there will be a tendency to try to make them work 
no matter what conditions prevail in the real world. But circumstances 
will demand nonetheless that we change.

      What is liable to happen to these three major activities, retail,
agriculture, and school is also true of virtually all other things we do in 
the US. Everything you can imagine from banking to real estate 
development to church-going to professional sports will have to reduce 
its scale and scope of operation or fail. The problems ahead will compel 
us to move from being a culture of quantity to a culture of quality. We 
will have to make do with fewer and less, and we can compensate by 
demanding that it be finer. We will have to live locally and we can 
benefit from the restoration of robust civic relations.

     Many of the beliefs and accepted dogmas of the late 20th century 
will fall away as a new and very different reality asserts itself. Cultural 
relativism will be discredited in an era when it becomes necessary, 
even for intellectuals, to make distinctions between good and bad, 
between excellence and worthlessness - because our lives may depend 
on the ability to make these distinctions. Hierarchies of value will 
become normative. Elitism will no longer be a pejorative but rather a 
recognition that some things really are better than other things.