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

By the mid-1920s, the great wave of immigration suddenly ended. The National Origins Act of 1924 and other measures set new highly restrictive immigration quotas that cut new admissions to 2 percent of each nationality from the 1890 census. This choked off what had been a constant half-century-long demographic subsidy of ever more customers for U.S. manufacturers.

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.

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.