Last
week I was thinking about how, as Chekhov puts it (thanks, Paula!),
"Any idiot can face a crisis -- it's this day-to-day living that wears
you out." But having heard Jim
Kunstler speak at NYCAMS
this week, I now wonder, What
do we do if it's our daily living that is the crisis?
Kunstler is the author of several
books, most recently The
Long Emergency, and in a free-wheeling and awfully entertaining talk, he
mapped the connection between the American
Dream of a house in the woods, the eventual mutation of that dream into
the dangerous
banalities of suburbia, the effects
on our cultural soul of living in places not worth caring about, and, finally
and scarily, the fundamental
shifts that will be required as oil production passes its peak
and we can no longer afford our 3,000
mile Caesar salads.
"Yet living
beings drowned in the midst of all this, delight and amuse themselves,
unaware, unknowing, without alarm or fear. They feel no sense of loathing
and make no attempt to escape. In this burning house which is the threefold
world, they race about to east and west, and though they encounter great
pain, they are not distressed by it."
--The
Lotus Sutra
In other words, as far as fiddling goes, Nero's got nothing on us. "Human
kind cannot bear very much reality."
But as streetwise New Yorkers rather than suburbanites, we may drift into smugness,
thinking we're pretty
darn green: after all, our house in the woods is a co-op with a houseplant.
Kunstler won't let us off so easy. We may not have cars and power mowers, but
oil, at root, powers our elevators, our broadband, our designed-in-Italy-made-in-China
fashions, and the trucks that ship in our food.
Luckily, the world that Kunstler wants to wake us up to is, at least in some
respects, exactly the one we ATers want: downscaled,
resized,
a world in which we cured of our mania
for more and re-connected
to our food supply and our neighbors.
You say you have
cried at my plays. And you are not he only ones. But this is not why
I wrote them....I wanted something else. I simply wanted to say to people
honestly: 'Look at yourselves, look at how bad and boring your lives
are!' The important thing is, that people should understand this, and
when they understand it , they will, without fail, create themselves
another and better life. I will not see it, but I know — it will
be completely different, and nothing like this life. And until it arrives,
I will say to people again and again: 'Understand, how bad and boring
your lives are!' What is there in this to cry about?
--Anton
Chekhov
Dreams are what you wake up
from, sings Everything But
the Girl. Good morning.
Photo credit: eris23
via flickr
WOW ! AT touches upon "Peak Oil" - a doomsday scenario that may play out in our lifetime. Conspiracy theorists contend that the record breaking profits generated by oil companies last year was no fluke. That cash infusion was intentionally generated so the the oil companies can put money into R&D to develop new technologies to extract more oil from older fields, find and develop new fields (like ANWR) and new sources (oil shale in CO and oil sands in Canada) in an attempt to stave off the collapse of society and keep big business in control of our lives. Scary stuff but when does it happen ?
It is true, Kunstler is a spirited writer. His jeremiads may inspire outrage among the white latte drinking yuppies, but they lack not only sound research, but also completely fail to address the problems facing the poor, the working class, and people of color. His solutions suggest a return to the good old days. Interestingly, in his good old days apparently everyone was middle class and white. He argues that we should buy green, we should ban the automobile, we should live in planned communities designed with classic architecture and locally grown produce. Well, great, but how? His diatribes on Detroit make clear his lack of understanding about the challenges that face the urban poor and the complexities of our relationship to modern technology. Not to mention I cant believe the man who belies the evils of Modernism and praises the magnificence of Seaside, FL (I kid you not!) is being mentioned at all on AT. He is an elitist of the worst sort one who passes himself off as progressive.
If you are really concerned about the future of humanity and the crises ahead, may I suggest real scholars such as Kenneth T. Jackson, Tom Sugrue, Sharon Zukin or Dolores Hayden. My god, even Mike Davis has a better grasp of the issues than Kunstler.
Very disappointed AT!
"the effects on our cultural soul of living in places not worth caring about"
This is one of those statements that brands Kunstler as a Northeasterner who lives in a chi-chi small town (Saratoga Springs, NY) and doesn't get out to the rest of America much.
Suburbanites out here often *do* care passionately about their particular (bland) side street or (architecturally undistinguished) cul-de-sac. In the neighborhoods that aren't over-run with commuters, neighbors gossip at the central mailbox, send their kids across the street for cookies, and all that retro suburban dream stuff. (And they have sidewalks. And not only do the kids ride their bicycles along them, they dot the cul-de-sacs with those annoying portable basketball hoops.) It's not just California: I saw the same thing in Minnesota, upstate New York, and North Carolina.
I'm not a fan of suburbia, SUVs, McMansions, strip malls, and all that... but it annoys me profoundly when the New Urbanist Intelligentsia pontificate about "suburban America" without getting out and really *looking* at what's there. People live in suburbia because they *do* have an emotional attachment to their identical non-places, or at least to the idea of living in a place like that.
I agree with Svig. The people in America who Kunstler talks about, who have the luxury of deciding between a house in the woods and an apartment in the city, are .00001% of the world. The rest of the world doesn't have the amenities we take for granted: clean water, medical care, hospital access, hot food, and even internet service. There is a growing divide that we need to pay attention to.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.
My January heating bill was 10x what I usually pay! I thought I had to do something drastic to decrease my natural gas bill. As an experiment I TURNED OFF [yes, as in at the meter...] the household gas supply. No automatic heat nor hot water.
An interesting thing happened...I got used to not having the furnace heating and instead used more clothing, blankets, throws and hot water bottles [they work great!] Baths/showers were done the by heating a predetermined amount of hot water.
Oh, and that super high heating bill.... Due to a mis-read meter.
"I'm not a fan of suburbia, SUVs, McMansions, strip malls, and all that... but it annoys me profoundly when the New Urbanist Intelligentsia pontificate about "suburban America" without getting out and really *looking* at what's there. People live in suburbia because they *do* have an emotional attachment to their identical non-places, or at least to the idea of living in a place like that."
Sure they do. It's no big deal, though. Their sentimental attachment to Nowheresville (even in its wildly unsavory dimensions, such as organized racism and puritanism) isn't our problem.
Our problem is the crisis brought on our nation and the world by their unsustainable lifestyle--measured in resource depletion, environmental chaos, armageddon politics, wars for oil. Simply put, it will be the end of us.
Kunstler is much too culturally conservative for my taste, but he's right to blast away at the structural necessity to halt suburban sprawl which is at the heart of our lunatic dependence on cheap oil.
Organized racism? Have you been to a regular suburb lately? Some suburbs of the Bay Area are much more multicultural than some San Francisco "urban" neighborhoods. Compare Daly City to the Marina District: it's not the city'll look diverse.
I'm with ya on suburban *commuting* being a potential major, major ecological problem. Ditto on heating the McMansions (though the coastal housing bubble is going to kill that phenomenon before oil shortages do). But seeing "the suburbs" as uniform lily-white pits of mindless church-going conformity interspersed with anomie -- that's oversimplifying a much more complex phenomenon.
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, hoping to buy a house sometime in the next couple years and loving a more urban, localized life, but being in a place where suburbs sprawl out for an hour on either side of the city (Orlando). I haven't read any of Kunstler's books, so I may be taking this out of context, but one of his quotes motivated my thinking in response: "The problems of the cities are not going to be relieved unless the middle class and the wealthy return to live there."
Well, you know what? That is not the problem here. In my city at least, the middle class and the wealthy are returning to the downtown and the charming older neighborhoods with a five minute commute, and the prices there are going through the roof. Pretty soon lower-income neighborhoods are going to be gentrified and the people there pushed out of the city, farther and farther away until they bear the burden of that commute or lack of jobs. This lovely localized life, with the expensive organic groceries and the local businesses, that is yet another privilege of the wealthy.
In principle I sympathize with Kunstler and the idea that we should live closer together, be less dependent on oil. But then, if you're going to engage seriously with those ideas, you have to turn around and look at the alternatives and see what choices are really available to the average American consumer. The truth is, not much. If you want to afford a house, and you're working two jobs to support your family, you are going to look for the most affordable place in the best school system you can find.
So I agree with the general tone of this thread: it is easy to get emotionally swept up by ideas like his, to say, yes, we need to be greener, thriftier, and live in tighter physical community. But the implications of those ideas and their actual instantiation in a diverse and enormous country like America, a unique and vast place with many different urban and rural cultures, is far more complex than a simple set of emotional yearnings can grapple with. "How bad and boring" our lives are? I think there are many, many spiritual and physical reasons that a person can experience a bad and boring life, and I think that you cannot apply that generalization at all. There are many suburban housewives with a minivan and a soccer schedule who would say that they have deeply fulfilled, meaningful spiritual existences, and I think they would take issue with Kunstler's blanket dismissal.
But again, I haven't read him thoroughly, so all this might be taken rather out of context.
"It is true, Kunstler is a spirited writer. His jeremiads may inspire outrage among the white latte drinking yuppies, but they lack not only sound research, but also completely fail to address the problems facing the poor, the working class, and people of color."
I can only assume you haven't read The Long Emergency. Maybe you're referring to previous books of his. If you have read The Long Emergency and still think "the poor, the working class, and people of color" will have any problems more significant than those they would face during Kunstler's peak oil doomsday scenario, you're just not making sense.
You can argue that the scenario itself is implausible, but you have to actually give a reason or two for an argument like that, rather than to just toss out a reference to white yuppies.
Someone said: "In principle I sympathize with Kunstler and the idea that we should live closer together, be less dependent on oil. But then, if you're going to engage seriously with those ideas, you have to turn around and look at the alternatives and see what choices are really available to the average American consumer. The truth is, not much."
Being less dependent on oil is not just an idea that we can vaguely sympathize with. The fact is, we are going to have a major major problem (a "long emergency") if we DON'T drastically reduce our dependence on oil. Things will crumble to pieces all around us. We have to choose alternatives as a society, not just as individuals.
I have read Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" and I am recommending it to everyone I know.
I like the "Eyesore of the Month" feature on his webpage. Go to http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore.html and keep clicking "previous month" to see them all.
Yes, that was me. I also agree that we need to explore energy alternatives; in fact, a lot of my thinking about this was motivated by a major freakout a few months ago, reading some recent research and articles on the topic. Malthusian catastrophe seems so imminent when you read certain perspectives! Hopefully gas prices will go up again and stay up so there is even more economic incentive to develop true, renewable energy alternatives.
However, I do stand by my point as to relatively few alternatives being available in the present moment to the average American. By average American, I am thinking a lower-middle-class working family, with a couple of young children. They may not be average everywhere, but they are in my current location. For a family like this, how can they reduce their dependence on oil? Drive less, OK. What if houses in a location close to a good school or a job (maybe these people don't have a college education) are simply out of their price range? What are they going to prioritize? Also, they are being told that they should buy organic, eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. They live in Michigan, and for many months out of the year they do not have these things - except by trucks and planes that use vast amounts of oil to transport healthy foods to their table.
My point is simply that there are many competing tensions in our world right now, and energy is just one of them. It's a colossal tension, yes, but we can't reduce everything down to just, we need to use less oil. Simplifying, reducing, wasting less, giving more, being healthy stewards of our world and of each other, is complex and will vary from location to location.
Anyway - sorry - I probably sound ultra preachy - I am just wrestling through some of these things myself, as a single person, and feel that a lot of the rhetoric gets heavy sometimes and even heavier for families with more competing priorities, tensions, and constraints. Kunstler seems like he is pushing the rhetorical envelope to make a point, and that's great. We just need people to walk behind people like that, in local places, and help work out, practically, what a healthy life looks like in a globalized society.
I like his eyesores of the month! Thanks for pointing that out. His point that the idea of "unearned riches" is actually God in America is so spot on, in some ways. Riches earned and unearned.