Because… systems are self-organizing in the face of circumstance, the big questions are how much disorder must we endure as things change, and how ha… - James Howard Kunstler

America finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its national wealth in a living arrangement—suburban sprawl—that has no future. When media commentators cast about struggling to explain what has happened in our country economically, they uniformly overlook the colossal misinvestment that suburbia represents—a prodigious, unparalleled misallocation of resources. This is quite apart from its social, spiritual, and ecological deficiencies as an everyday environment. We constructed an armature for daily living that simply won’t work without liberal supplies of cheap oil, and very soon we will be without both the oil needed to run it and the wealth needed to replace it. Nor are we likely to come up with a miraculous energy replacement for oil that will allow us to run all this everyday infrastructure even remotely the same way.
In any case, the tragic truth is that much of suburbia is unreformable. It does not lend itself to being retrofitted into the... mixed-use, smaller-scaled, more fine-grained walkable environments we will need to carry on daily life in the coming age of... reduced motoring. [...] Instead, this suburban real estate... will enter a phase of rapid and cruel devaluation. Many of the suburban subdivisions will become the slums of the future. […] The seasons… will continue with the great cycles of contraction and expansion, and at some point, in the future, who knows how many years distant, some of these cities in a land once called [the [[United States|United States of Northern] America]] may be robust and cosmopolitan in ways that we can’t imagine now, any more than a Roman of A.D. 38 might have been able to imagine the future London of the Beatles.

In the Long Emergency schooling will be required for fewer years, and children may have to work part of the day or part of the year. Because everything will be local, the ability to support education will depend on local economic conditions and the level of social stability, and there will be broad variation. Some localities may become so distressed that public school will cease to exist. The more fortunate localities will be those where small-scale agriculture is possible, but more intensive local agriculture by nonindustrial methods implies a much different division of labor, and older children may have to assume more responsibility and grow up faster. The romanticization of childhood may prove to have been one of the luxuries of the cheap-oil age. Basic schooling, in the formal sense, might not go beyond the equivalent of today’s eighth grade. Sorting of children into vocational or academic tracks will probably be based on self-evident social and economic status rather than any formal administrative system. Only a tiny minority of young people will be able to enjoy a college education. Vocational training is much more likely to occur in the context of a workplace rather than the school, as in the apprentice system.

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.