Here’s A Plan
Jan 21st, 2008 at 8:53 pm by Susie
James Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency”, has some controversial recommendations and predictions:
Here’s what we better start doing.
Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations.
End the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the ethanol program.)
Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.
In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability. This essentially means making the individual building lot the basic increment of redevelopment, not multi-acre “projects.” Get rid of any parking requirements for property development. Institute “locational taxation” based on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories. Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating installations and solar, wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible on a small-scale network basis.
We’d better begin a public debate about whether it is feasible or desirable to construct any new nuclear power plants. If there are good reasons to go forward with nuclear, and a consensus about the risks and benefits, we need to establish it quickly. There may be no other way to keep the lights on in America after 2020.
We need to prepare for the end of the global economic relations that have characterized the final blow-off of the cheap energy era. The world is about to become wider again as nations get desperate over energy resources. This desperation is certain to generate conflict. We’ll have to make things in this country again, or we won’t have the most rudimentary household products.
We’d better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will have to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a “consumer” activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain “big box” operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business. We’ll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater reform of American medicine.
Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about illegal immigration. Stop lying to ourselves and stop using semantic ruses like calling illegal immigrants “undocumented.”
Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious “wealth” — and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with our circumstances — i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. We will soon hear the sound of banks crashing all over the place. Get out of their way, if you can.
Prepare psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance, and resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of resources in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to scapegoat and punish others. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that did not undergo a sociopolitical convulsion in the past hundred years. But despite what we tell ourselves about our specialness, we’re not immune to the forces that have driven other societies to extremes. The rise of the Nazis, the Soviet terror, the “cultural revolution,” the holocausts and genocides — these are all things that can happen to any people driven to desperation.
Sorry, Susie, but while there is a lot of good ideas in Kunstler’s plan; there are also a lot of booby traps.
1) End all highway subsidies and instead focus on rail-based transit??? Ahhh….no. First off, what are you going to do with all the autos and trucks that will have to be abandoned in order to fill up those trains and streetcars??? Secondly, there is a reason why autos are popular: they provide direct Point A to Point B service without the need for intervention. I’m not opposed to more balance in transportation with more public transportation (including more pollution-free bus and rail); but you’re not going to get rid of cars that easily merely by ending all road construction. If anything, we could use more infrastructure of all kinds (road, rail, and marine) as part of an overall public jobs program.
2) “Small is beautiful” might have worked in the 1880s when there wasn’t much in the way of technology; but it most definitely won’t fly in a age where supplies can be shipped world wide. Globalization is not the enemy here; maldistribution of income and resources is; and the solution is NOT to tear down regional and international supply lines and return to the herd mentality; it is make those supply lines more self-sustainable and stable and more energy efficient.
3) “Take a break from ‘legal immigration’ and enforcing the laws against “illegal immigration’??? Gee, Mr. Kunstler, having a racist moment lately??? As if poor Latino/Latina immigrants are solely responsible for the economic mess we are getting in, rather than the corporations who exploit the undocumented to no end??? How about those wealthy folk who really do profit the most from taking in “illegal immigrants”; perhaps taking away their right to exploit cheap labor might do a much better job than building an aparteid fence on our borders???
In short, reverting to right-wing populism and retreats to Luddism and the prehistoric times will do nothing to resolve the crises that we will be facing. Attacking the root of inequality and the power of corporate power, and relying on the skills of working people, will do so much better.
Anthony
Right now, Kunstler’s ideas mostly sound crazy. (I don’t know how crazy they’ll sound in the aftermath of post-Peak Oil society.) But I didn’t put them up to be taken literally, only to stimulate debate BECAUSE they’re so extreme. I think it’s time we had those discussions, instead of waiting for our “leaders” to hand them down from on high - after first checking with their various lobbyists, of course.
One thing with which I wholeheartedly concur - I’ve been predicting for more than twenty years that we would return to small, local schoolhouses. The cost of maintaining the physical plant is a major drain on local communities, and thanks to mandated physical features, they’re too difficult to efficiently heat and cool.
I like Kunstler, but like Anthony my first feeling was “so he wants us to move backward”?
I agree with the need to dramatically increase rail and streetcar/subway infrastructure. His advice to move back to cities because suburbs are unsustainable is also right on.
However, much of his comment (in this piece at least) reads like a recipe for the 1890s industrial age.
You want backward? Go read Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse”.
To count as “long-term sustainable”, the criterion that he uses is that the society has to last for 500+ years. (IIRC; it might be more). Oil is just the first and most obvious necessity that will run short.
The really depressing bit is that for humanity so far, just about the only way to get long-term sustainability is with a stone-age technology. I really don’t like this conclusion, but I think Diamond has got it right.
I think that’s a reason to get the hell OFF this planet, and see what the rest of the universe has to offer humanity.
Kunstler’s recipe isn’t so radical when you think of it as the first step in “managing” a long, slow decline.
I live in a tiny town. It’s 6 miles to the next town, where there are doctors and stores and such. I could conceivably bike in during the summer, but it’s 20 below out, and I don’t think I would survive the ride.
There’s a railroad track that has a train on it maybe twice a day. It could be used for transporting people in groups, to the heart of the next town down, the next town up. The line ends 50 miles north, at Lake Superior. What transport could be used there?
The end of oil is coming. We are heavily invested in cars now. What will happen to all those car parts when there is no more gas? I doubt they can be converted to electric - too heavy. So that’s no argument.
The idea is, that we have to think now. One of Ursula Le Guin’s books had a culture where everybody walked - and had computer access in their small huts.
Not to sound like a religious nut, because I’m not, but we’re at the end time, and everybody knows it. Not that the world will end, or that people will die out, but that all our structures will end, will change. So, what will come next?
I will get shot for this one.
The first reason people drive from town to town up here is employment.
The second reason is shopping.
The world’s largest Walmart is in Ashland, Wisconsin, at the end of that railroad line I was telling you about.
Walmart is heavily invested in keeping people coming to their stores.
Get Walmart to come up with efficient and pleasant mass transit to their stores, and let municipalities use them as hubs.
Call it “Plan k.”
About the only areas of Kunstler’s plan I agree with are the ideas of scale and spatial reorganization to take advantage of sustainability. However, stepping back to a previous technology is capitulation and will only result in further social bifurcation where those few who can afford it will maintain a relatively high level of technolgy and the rest will become the unwashed masses.
Wait a minute . . . isn’t that a description of the plot of ‘The Time Machiine?’ Or was it an episode of Star Trek? Jeez, life imitates art. Brought to you by a republican near you.