America’s New Religion, Part II / James Howard Kunstler

http://www.agorafinancial.com/afrude/2007/09/27/americas-new-religion-part-ii/


America’s New Religion, Part II
By James Howard Kunstler

Suburbia is going to fail. You can state that categorically: It’s going to fail in terms of investment and it’s going to fail in terms of utility. We’re not going to be able to use it; we’re not going to be able to make those trips from 38 miles outside of Minneapolis and Dallas.

The Europeans, by the way, they’re going to have plenty of problems too. They’re not going to be without problems, but they made a set of different choices. They didn’t destroy either their central cities or the idea that city life had value. Very important. They didn’t destroy their public transit and they didn’t destroy their local agriculture. We did all of those things and so the people in Minneapolis or 28 miles outside of Dallas or Orlando are going to be twiddling their thumbs, while the people in Barcelona and Dusseldorf are going to be going about their lives – more or less – more normally than we will.

We’re going to have to inhabit the land differently. That means cities that will have a different character from what we understand now a city to be. And it means a productive rural landscape that behaves differently. We’re going to have to get very serious about growing our own food closer to home or we’re going to starve. I heard a very interesting thing from a Pennsylvania farmer five months ago at a conference down there – a sustainable agriculture conference, talking about the ethanol program. And he said, “We really get what it’s all about, we’re going to take the last six inches of Midwestern topsoil and burn it in our gas tanks.” So that’s what that’s about.

We’re going to have to get very serious about growing our own food or we’re going to starve. And we have no idea how we’re going to arrange that. It’s going to be one of the most difficult parts of the problem. So get this: We’ve got enough retail. We don’t need any more Target Stores. There may be a few more twitchings of this phenomenon, but the national chain retail scene is going to tank. Wal-Mart will not be able to conduct the warehouse on wheels, the incessant circulations of 18-wheelers all around the US, when diesel fuel reaches a certain point.
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“The long emergency” is going to produce a lot of economic losers and they’re going to be very pissed off. Because they we’re told by their leaders that the American way of life was non-negotiable. And I think that what you’re going to see is the rise of a new group of people called the “formerly middle class.” The “repoed,” the dispossessed, the people who made those unfortunate mortgage contracts. I think we under-appreciate the potential for disorder that this is going to bring…

A lot of people working as marketing directors for The Gap right now- those vocational niches might disappear. And they might find themselves incongruently working in agriculture, “Oh wow! I never thought this would happen when I got my MFA, my MA in business administration!”…What are the social relations going to be between the people who maintain wealth in good productive land, and the people who have been repoed out of their McHouses 28 miles outside of Minneapolis? We have no idea yet. It’s liable to cause a lot of problems.

What’s a city going to be like? Well, you’ll see that places that do not occupy important sites, like Denver, or places that occupy sites that are ecologically disadvantaged, like Phoenix, are going to dry up and blow away. And the good news is that in Las Vegas, the excitement will be over for everybody but the tarantulas and the Gila monsters.

Whenever I speak at a university, the college kids always, always, always, they’re very demoralized. The cognitive dissonance is so deep. And they always say, “Oh can’t you give us solutions? Can’t you give us hope?” And I have to tell them, “I’m not a hope dispenser.”...So what I tell the college kids is also valuable for you: You have to be the generators of hope. And the way you generate hope is by demonstrating that you’re capable of understanding what reality is sending to you, what the new circumstances are. You generate hope by demonstrating to yourself that you’re competent of meeting these challenges, of changing your behavior of adopting, and that you’re brave and spiritually capable of adsorbing a certain amount of shock and hardship and necessity to behave differently, and that’s how you generate hope.

K&R