After World War II, the American public made two momentous and related decisions. First was the decision to resume the project of suburbanization [that was] begun in the 1920s and halted by the Great Depression and war. By the 1950s, the prevailing image of city life was Ralph Kramden’s squalid tenement apartment on television’s The Honeymooners show. Suburbia was the prescribed antidote to the dreariness of the hypertrophied industrial city—and most American cities had never been anything but that. They were short on amenities, overcrowded, and artless. Americans were sick of them and saw no way to improve them. Historically, a powerful sentimental bias for country life ruled the national imagination. As late as 1900, most U.S. citizens had lived on farms, and American culture was still imbued with rural values. As far as many Americans were concerned in the 1950s, suburbia was country living. There was plenty of cheap, open rural land to build on outside the cities, and as soon as mass-production house builders like William Fevitt demonstrated how it might be done, suburbia would be thoroughly democratized—country living for everyone. That suburbia turned out to be a disappointing cartoon of country living rather than the real thing was a tragic unanticipated consequence…
American writer
James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.
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According to the , sea levels rose by ten to twenty centimeters during the twentieth century and are currently rising by about two millimeters a year, which is at the upper range of the rate of rise for the last century. With global warming accelerating, this is apt to increase. The accepted prediction is that sea levels will rise during the twenty-first century by about fifty centimeters, or a little under two feet, though some scientists predict a full meter. […] One-sixth of the people in the world live[s] in coastal zones within one meter of sea level. This is the… outside context problem so alien to contemporary experience that the public and its leaders can really find no way to process the information and figure out what to do about it—and for the excellent reason that it is not a problem with a direct solution. It is more [of] a condition without a remedy. If the major shipping ports… end up being submerged, humankind will just have to work around it. The disruptions to world trade might be epochal, gigantic, […] [and] tragic. It seems obvious that the human race will simply have to adjust, even if that means adjusting to a new reality of severely lower expectations in living standards, comfort, and amenities. […] When the time comes, …[we] will just have to move to higher ground.
The germ theory, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, focused the world's attention on the specific agents responsible for... diseases, but the [physical,] social and ecological contexts are equally important [for it], and these are now coming more prominently into play with world population well beyond the limits of the earth's [sic] [...] [optimum] carrying capacity and with climate change... in progress. [...] Ecological... [pressures], rapid changes in land use, penetration of formerly inaccessible habitats, and disturbed migration routes can lead to the appearance or diffusion of a disease. While we may be able to identify [some, if not all] the microorganisms involved, we can be helpless in the face of it, and our behavior may still promote its spread.
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will be the opposite of what we currently experience. There will be hunger instead of plenty, cold where there was once warmth, effort where there was once leisure, sickness where there was health, and violence where there was peace. We will have to adjust our attitudes, values, and ideas to accommodate these new circumstances and we may not recognize the people will soon become or the people we once were. In a world where sheer survival dominates all other concerns, a tragic view of life is apt to reassert itself. This is another way of saying that we will become keenly aware of the limitations of human nature in general and its relation to ubiquitous mortality in particular. Life will get much more real. The dilettantish luxury of relativism will be forgotten in the boneyards of the future. [The] irony, hipness, and cutting-edge coolness will seem either quaint or utterly inexplicable to people struggling to produce enough food to get through the winter. In the Long Emergency, nobody will get anything for nothing.
Not to say that one would have to go back to a hunter-gatherer [or even a herbivore-insectivore] mode of existence in order to live on a solar budget. Pick any preindustrial culture you like, or pick the best or most relevant parts from any of them to get on with daily life, for instance, the habitations of Edo Japan, the division of labor of the Inca, the diet of the Florentines, the animal husbandry of Georgian England, the costumes of the Ming dynasty. Surely one could contrive life on a solar budget from these modes of daily endeavor and put together a satisfying existence that would amount to being civilized. Anyway, a great many of the useful inventions that made life comfortable and interesting were developed before we began using fossil fuels, quite a few of them in China alone. Add to that some additional knowledge that the human race has acquired since those historical periods, perhaps only the germ theory of disease, and you could enjoy a decent living standard.
Anyway, that’s a theory. History does run backward now and then, and the centers of civilization shift from one place to another, but we've never seen anything like what we face: the crash of a turbocharged cheap energy economy along with an ecological catastrophe perhaps beyond the biblical scale. History is also not symmetrical; you don’t necessarily go down the same way you came, recapitulating earlier arrangements in the same sequence backward. What we might get instead could be just a one-way ticket to Palookaville instead of getting to relive the sixteenth century.
The rebellion of the hippies… based itself on the notion that abundance was a natural entitlement, and one could "drop out" of an insecure, deadly, and frightening industrial culture to live off the fat of the land. It was inescapably a jejune philosophy, fraught with contradictions. For the hippies, the natural order of things included items such as stereo record players, electric guitars, motor vehicles for adventuring around the country, cheap bulk whole grains, and other products of an… industrial way of life. The hippie platform… with all its mystical incunabula, rested on the platform of “normal” American life and would have been impossible without it.
I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn't come in too well. The AM band offered about the same thing, only with worse reception, nothing remotely describable as news, and no music because commercial entertainment as we knew it was no more, and its handmaiden, advertising had gone with it.
In the Long Emergency, some regions of the United States will do better than others and some will suffer deeply. Places that benefited disproportionately during the cheap-oil blowout will find themselves steeply challenged when those benefits, and the entitlement psychology that grew out of them, are withdrawn in the face of new, austere circumstances. The so-called Sunbelt presents extraordinary problems. This is not a good time to begin thinking about moving to Phoenix or Las Vegas. Parts of the Southwest may be significantly depopulated, starved for energy, and thirsting for water that depended on cheap energy. Other parts may become contested territory with Mexico. The prospect for disorder in the southeastern states is especially high, given the extremes of religiosity, hyperindividualism, and cultural disinhibition regarding violence. The social glue holding communities and regions together will be severely strained by the loss of amenities presumed to be normal.
[…] We have lived through as a narrative episode in a greater saga of human history. The industrial story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It begins in the mid-eighteenth century with coal and the first steam engines, proceeds to a robust second act climaxing in the years before World War I, and moves toward a third act resolution now that we can anticipate with some precision the depletion of the resources that made the industrial episode possible. As the industrial story ends, the greater saga of [hu]mankind will move on into a new episode, the Long Emergency. This is… a self-evident point, but throughout history, even the most important and self-evident trends are often completely ignored because the changes they foreshadow are simply unthinkable. That process is sometimes referred to as an “outside context problem,” something so far beyond the ordinary experience of those dwelling in a certain time and place that they cannot make sense of available information. The collective mental static preventing comprehension is also sometimes referred to as “cognitive dissonance,” a term borrowed from developmental psychology. It helps explain why the… public has been sleepwalking into the future.
The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political [and social] turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it.