The gigantic smear of suburbia that runs… without interruption from north of Boston through Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington,… - James Howard Kunstler

Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson warns that China's current program to mitigate huge population increases with gigantic water projects may have dire consequences. Irrigation and other withdrawals have already depleted the , which, starting in 1972, has run bone-dry part of the year in province, where one-fifth of China's wheat and one-seventh of its corn is produced. In 1997, the river stopped flowing for a record 226 days. The groundwater levels of the northern China plains have plummeted. The water table in major grain-producing areas is falling at the rate of five feet a year. Of China's 617 cities, three hundred already face water shortages. Of China's approximately 23,000 miles of major rivers, 80 percent no longer support fish life. The Xiaolangdi dam project now underway along the Yellow River in north China is exceeded in size only by the on the in South China. In addition, the Chinese government intends to siphon water from the Yangtze… and send it over by a canal system to the Yellow River and Beijing, respectively. When it is running, the Yellow River is already one of the most particle-laden in the world. Because of that, it is estimated that the Xiaolangdi dam would silt up within thirty years of completion. The… project is reminiscent of another centrally planned mega-project that ended in grief: the Soviet Union's scheme to drain the to irrigate gigantic cotton farms in Kazakhstan. The project turned one of the world's largest inland bodies of fresh water into [a] salty desert. The potential for calamity in China is therefore huge as it skirts a range of forces presented by the Long Emergency, any one of which, or some combination, could send it reeling over its tipping point: the effects of global climate change, competition for [every resource including] oil, extremes of pollution, disease, and war, either with its neighbors or internally. Despite the current veneer of prosperity and stability, China has tremendous potential for political chaos. As Wilson fearlessly points out, the pressure on China's agriculture and water resources is intensified by the predicament shared by many countries: runaway population growth [caused by industrialization]. Population growth rates may be mitigated… from culture to culture by economic advance (which tends to lower reproductive rates by channeling women into the workplace), but economic development produces other not-so-benign consequences. Developing [systems like] nation[-state]s invariably increase their energy use [as they grow complex]. More cars are used, more electricity [is] generated, [and] more greenhouse emissions [are] sent into the atmosphere. In the Long Emergency, …“there will only be two types of nations: the over-developed and those which will never develop.” China may represent an amalgamation of those two conditions in one nation-state.

If the folks who lived along this highway put in gardens to make up for the escalating inadequacies of an industrial farming system starved for fossil fuel “inputs,” would they be able to feed themselves? Did any vernacular knowledge survive in a populace conditioned to think that food came from the supermarket? Did they know anything about cabbage loopers, powdery mildew, or anthracnose? Would they be able to prevent catastrophic crop loss? How would they defend their crops against deer, rabbits, [and] woodchucks? Would any of them know how to build a garden wall or even a fence? Where would they get fencing material? Would they have to sit out among the potato hills and the bean rows at night with loaded shotguns? And what would they do for light when they heard something munching out there? Would they know how to keep chicken, sheep, [and] cattle, including breeding and birthing them?

We should… conclude that the abandoned big-box structures will not last more than one generation under any circumstances. […] The same thing can be said about malls, strip malls, and chain restaurant buildings. Eventually, they will be the salvage yards and mines of the future.