The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER
Kunstler's conclusions -
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous.
In many American cities, such as Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis, that process is already well advanced. Others have further to fall. New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies. Their former agricultural hinterlands have long been paved over. They will be encysted in a surrounding fabric of necrotic suburbia that will only amplify and reinforce the cities' problems. Still, our cities occupy important sites. Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.
I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.
These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.
Wolcott’s conclusion rings a bell as well…
…The rebuff to Italy's Berlusconi (Bush's pal) in the regional elections this weekend. The sinking poll numbers for Tony Blair's Labour Party and the latest slide for Bush in the CNN/Gallup survey. The desperate, brazen attempt to block Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador from running for president of Mexico against Vincente Fox, which will almost certainly spark social upheaval and widespread demonstrations. The ratcheting up of rhetoric against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who's being lumped with Fidel Castro as the two tropical Saddams by Bush hardliners. And the looming oil crisis which threats to--well, go read this and prepare to shiver.
Our political system has failed us, our media have failed us, and neither have any inkling of the Wagnerian drama about to unfold.
For all that though, Wolcott is pushing a barrow which does not quite fit with the Kunstler message. His last sentence (my emphasis) does tie his and Kunstler’s messages together quite nicely. But the messages as I read them are quite separate.
Kunstler's summary of his book rattles its way through the single line track of the potential of a future oil crisis with obvious and particular emphasis on the impact on the US.
Wolcott on the other hand has attached Kunstler to the tail end of a political rant, a total afterthought and like a lizard's tail which when shed which lies around wriggling on the ground as a decoy whilst the lizard makes its escape. I do like Wolcott's last sentence, but I am confused as to whether the "Wagnerian drama" is the machinations of the American system politic and the international repercussions that he is predicting, or Kunstler's more serious analysis and summary he has tacked on.
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I am perhaps naïve enough to think that Kunstler might be a bit too far to the side of the doomsayers, ‘Nostradami’ and armageddonists. He seems to ignore the possibilities in “green fuels” such as ethanol and rape seed diesel oil. There is a wealth of possibilities in the dreaming of Buckminster Fuller… his “international hot air balloon” and the global distribution of energy are two instances.
However, it would not be good to get too cocky about how NZ might fare in the dire circumstances Kunstler predicts. Generally we might be better off than many, especially with the riches we have in renewable energy resources. Generally we are better off in the supply of food, though as in the predicted case of the US, distribution of those products could become more and more problematical.
There are (to me at least) very obvious threats that must be considered.
The first is strategic, in terms of defence from outside attack. Our remoteness is an advantage in this respect as is our isolation by sea. But that advantage is also a weakness. Have a “defence force”? Yeah, right! And in the light of Kunstlers prognostications pay for what, run it on what, and fight against whom? I suppose we could challenge them to a “sail-off” a la America’s Cup – that brings back memories of a Goon Show – Britons vs the Romans and a football challenge – or a rugby test series even.
The second is economic. We are small, about the same size as Philadelphia city in population. That also creates a weakness in the kind of future envisioned by Kunstler. It is not a case of oil, but of obtaining and being able to pay for such goods as metals especially iron and aluminium, high technology products such as advanced composites, and in some foodstuffs. In that latter category is wheat which we have some trouble growing efficiently in this country.
The third threat is one outside of Kunstler’s writing and that is climatic change. From my own observation (as an example) mountain pawpaw was grown around Mangonui (when I was living there 40 years back) only in extremely sheltered positions and it did not fruit. Now (this past ten or so years) it is grown in the open, and will fruit if well protected. That, I am told, indicates a change in temperatures and winter minimums especially of about +2C over that period. Obviously not long or persistent or scientific enough to even hint at a trend, but surely a harbinger of things to come. Where this becomes important is in areas such as wheat farming. If the worst predictions are realised, that there will be a +5C movement in long-term average global temperatures, our main wheat growing areas will become unviable, not just because of the increased temperatures, but as a result of the climatic changes that are predicted to accompany the increase.
At that level too, the change in sea levels (numbers between 3m and 50m have been seriously suggested) will impact NZ as hard as anywhere else. At 50m, considerable areas of prime agricultural land would be inundated.
On the scale of Kunstler’s report, NZ would have to face the disintegration of at least four of its major centres – Auckland and Wellington would be certainties, Whangarei in the north would largely disperse – the major industry there is the oil refinery – and Christchurch would be under pressure. Hamilton, Tauranga, Palmerston North, New Plymouth, and the other regional centres would probably disperse into their hinterlands as Kunstler suggests and would survive in that form.
Would NZ see armed conflict or racial insurrection? That is a possibility. The resources at stake would be land and fisheries.
I appreciate that the link is only an extract from a book. Kunstler comments on the formation of cottage industries and from that comes the possibility of resurrection of the guild structures of old. Does he cover reversion to barter economics and the loss of the current financial processes that underpin our civilisation? Not clear. Does he cover the breakdown of modern political structures? Not clear. What is the place of advanced technology in the society of the future? Not at all clear.
Certainly the world that he predicts is a very far cry from what we know. Certainly the long term – 100 years out and more – changes could see anything from a society of comparative ignorance being governed by fundamental religieux with a scholarly elite, or a return to feudalism of the Dark and Middle Ages on the one hand, to the kind of simple self-governing enlightened utopia dreamed of by the likes of the Libertarians.
Which is the more likely? I will never know. Neither, I suspect, will anyone else alive at present.
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