Like China, the United States is divided… in half between wet and dry. Though the human population of the United States is proportionately much small… - James Howard Kunstler
" "Like China, the United States is divided… in half between wet and dry. Though the human population of the United States is proportionately much smaller than China's, the amount of effort America has expended on manipulating habitats and altering terrain is as impressive in its own way as China's birthrate. Especially significant is the stupendous amount of paving laid down in the United States during the past hundred years. It prevents rain from being absorbed as groundwater and sends it instead into rivers, and… into the ocean. The effect of this is the inability of water tables and wetlands to recharge and the diminishing ability of the terrain to support life. In the United States, only 2 percent of the country's rivers and wetlands remain free-flowing and undeveloped. As a result, the country has lost more than half of its wetlands.
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About James Howard Kunstler
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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The current urban population of the world… is greater than the entire population of the world in 1960. Seventy-eight percent of the urban dwellers in the so-called developing world live in slums. From the West African littoral to the mountainsides of the to the banks of the , the , the , and the Irrawaddy, new gigantic slums spread like immense laboratory growth media, waiting to host epidemic disease cultures. , Nigeria, for example, grew from a city of 300,000 in 1950 to over ten million today. But Lagos, writes Mike Davis, "is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from to : probably the biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth." Most of the world's new, exploding slums have only the most rudimentary sanitary arrangements, open sewers running along the corridor-like "streets." In the slums of Bombay, there is an estimated one toilet per five hundred inhabitants. Currently, two million children die every year from waste-contaminated water in the world's slums. The enormity of this urban disaster is poorly comprehended in advanced nations like the United States, where the drinking water is still safe and even the poor have flush toilets connected to real sewers. But the slums of the world will… be the breeding ground of the next pandemic, and chances are, once it is underway, […] [we] will not be spared.
In America, after the crash of 1929, the loss of faith in various forms of credit represented by abstract instruments of finance translated into a persistent lack of money—that is, a means of exchange— and the institutions devised to create it stood in disrepute. People could buy very little. Business stagnated. Companies would not hire workers when there was so little demand for products. It was a vicious cycle and it had vicious side effects. Another way of looking at the financial debacle of the 1930s is an ecological view such as ’s metaphor of the industrial economy as a “detritus ecosystem.”
Catton argues that the human race living off the “drawdown” of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources is the equivalent of the algae in a pond enjoying a temporary rush of nutrients in one brief season. Catton’s analogy can be applied and extended to clarify the Great Depression in the context of ecological economics. After the crash of 1929, something… definitely changed in America. But the puzzling part is that the “nutrients in the form of cheap oil—the plenty” Roosevelt spoke of—still flowed. So why did the economic environment become so intractably unhealthy? From an ecological view, the Great Depression represented the effects of severe socioeconomic pollution” produced by the oil-fueled boom of the 1920s, and this “pollution” had the effect of “poisoning the financial ecosystem and consequently killing off financial “organs” that people had come to depend on in order to “thrive” (i.e., to grow wealthy and reproduce). Specifically, the “pollution” killed off the organs that generated credit and turned it into money. This systemic “pollution” of the financial ecosystem harmed the industrial environment enough to temporarily quash any further exuberant “growth.” There was no human die-off but there was a die-off of expectations and a reduction in [the] carrying capacity of the U.S. economy.
Is it fair to say that the by-product of zealous oil use literally converts into such an abstract form of "pollution" capable of poisoning what amounts to a social consensus? This must return us to the idea of entropy. Entropy is the spending down of energy and its translation into negative by-products. […] Air pollution is one expression of entropy. But so is social disorder. So is [the] institutional breakdown. Bodily death is another. These negative by-products of entropy can become interchangeable as entropy progresses, depending on any combination of variable conditions and circumstances. A careful reading of twentieth-century history would bear this out. In the modern era, entropy has been expressed in conditions as seemingly unrelated as war, industrial pollution, pornography, mass political murder, the shattering of a consensus about the value of money, and incompetent parenting. The introduction of high entropy into a given system is profoundly destabilizing in many ways.
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