what kunstler said

A few days ago, when Jim Kunstler was in town, I had the opportunity to hear him speak twice; once at the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Architecture, and once at a local indie bookstore. What follows is a really rough mash-up of the notes I jotted down during both events, as he spoke about the coming of “The Long Emergency” and interacted with urban planning students, ancient hippies and us Henny Penny-types in the audience. If you’ve followed any of my Kunstler-related links in the past, much of this probably isn’t new to you, but I think you might find a few new things of interest.

• He starts both events by saying that we’re looking for “new ways to run the same old shit.” The only problem with that, he then says, is that we’ll never find them, because they don’t exist. No combination of alternative fuels, in his opinion, can replace oil. What we need are new solutions, and not just on the fuel side of the equation. We need to live differently.

• We think that suburbia is OK because our friends and neighbors want it. It’s not though. And, “it’s coming off the menu” regardless of whether we want it or not. Suburban living isn’t going to be an option for much longer. (A lot of stuff, it’s Kunstler’s belief, is going to be “coming off the menu” soon – like tuna.)

• Dick Cheney may say, “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” but it is. And, if we don’t negotiate it for ourselves, reality is going to step in and do our negotiating for us. Reality, he warns, is coming, and we cannot escape it.

• The suburban infrastructure has no future. We justify its existence with a “psychology of previous investment,” which maintains that because we’ve experienced it our entire lives, it has to remain, but that’s not the case. It was an aberration, a costly misallocation of resources.

• We have childlike, magical thinking when it comes to alternative energy. We need to look at the problem as adults. (The infantilism of the American people seems to be a strong thread running through his worldview.) We can’t just assume that since we put a man on the moon, we can produce enough energy to replace oil.

• People say, “What about biomass?” Those people don’t consider the fact that the space we’d need to grow soybeans for fuel will, in the near future, need to be used for the production of food. When we stop using petroleum-based chemicals to boost crop yield, he argues, our productivity per acre is going to drop considerably and we’re going to need all of our land for food to sustain the American population.

• In addition to childlike thinking, we also suffer from “the worship of unearned riches.” It’s the largest religion in the country, according to Kunstler, and its holy place is Las Vegas. We have this belief that we can get something for nothing, but that’s not the way it works.

• “Technology does not equal energy.” Yes, we have brilliant scientists, but technology itself won’t keep WalMart, Disney and the U.S. highway system moving at the same pace that they are now. They require massive amounts of energy… Kunstler claims to have pointed this out to the execs at Google, where he had recently been asked to speak. They responded to his talk, according to Kunstler, by saying, “But, Dude, we’ve got technology.” He says they didn’t get the difference between technology and energy. (His opinion, it’s pretty clear, is that they aren’t approaching the situation as responsible adults. At both events, he made it a point to tell this story and to focus on the fact that the Google offices had snack stations and gaming areas, and that the people he met with, the leaders of Google, were wearing baggy jeans “so that their ass cracks were showing,” and sideways baseball caps. They were, at least in his opinion, infantile.)

• There will be alternative energy, but it ultimately won’t be on a large scale. He predicts that there may be some large-scale tests done, but that solar, wind and hydro will ultimately reside at a neighborhood or home level.

• The worst municipal investment your city can make is a parking structure. If you ask people what they want, they’ll say more parking, but in five to ten years that won’t be the case.

• The most significant thing we could do right now is to make a significant investment in rebuilding America’s railroad infrastructure, which has been left to rot during these years of oil gluttony. Rail is not only more efficient than highway transport, but a large-scale project like this, in his opinion, would both put people to work, and give us the morale boost we’re going to need to get through the next few difficult decades. Kunstler believes it’s something that’s attainable, and it’s the first thing we should focus on. But, as he says, no one is talking about it.

• If we’re to survive, we’re also going to have to reclaim our waterfronts, which, over the years have given way to parks and condos. Harbors should be used for shipping, as they were intended, not for condos.

• We will be farming more and shopping less in the future. Recreational (or did he say “competitive”) shopping will be a distant memory.

• Land, farmable land, may be the only source of wealth in the future. Paper wealth will likely fade away and disappear.

• We’ll need to reevaluate our relationship with rural land. Its only value isn’t in housing development, as we’ve come to believe. It’s in agriculture.

• Quotable Kunstler: “History doesn’t care if you pound your country down a rat hole.” History is unforgiving, and, when things start to go bad, no one’s going to step in and stop it from happening.

• American cities will contract severely, while getting more dense at their cores, and along waterfront areas.

• People will leave cities and head toward agricultural areas. “This will not be an orderly process.”

• In 20 years, there will be no more zoning and land use codes. No one will be able to afford to build to code, and our municipalities won’t have the wherewithal to enforce codes, even if they wanted to.

• We have to come to terms with the fact that everyone cannot live an urban life in a rural setting.

• Detroit will be an important place, given its location between Great Lakes. Put simply, every place that was once important for reasons of commerce will be important once again.

• Electric power will not be dependable. It may be off a few hours a day, or there may be intermittent lapses in service. It will not be 24/7 though. This will, in his opinion, make apartments over 7 stories tall impractical (as elevators won’t be dependable) and telecommuting unlikely.

• Our culture of eating Cheese Doodles, downloading porn and watching NASCAR has not prepared us for being adults, and making the decisions that need to be made right now.

• Our lives will be profoundly local. There will be a reemergence and renewed appreciation for local public life and public space.

• If we have fascism in this country, it will be at the local level. It will not be at the federal level. You saw how the federal government responded to Katrina. It ws pathetic and ineffective. What he fears, however, is that at a local level people will long to be led. They’ll welcome powerful leaders who are ready to tell them what to do.

• During a discussion on the possibility of a gas tax, and whether or not one could be used to nudge people in the direction they’ll have to be moving anyway, he mentioned an idea that a friend of his, an oil man in Texas, had. He suggested that we look into replacing FICA (Social Security) taxes with a gas tax. (When I have the time I want to explore this more. On the surface it sounds like a great idea. People would welcome the repeal of the Social Security taxes, and the gas tax (which would go toward funding Social Security) would just apply to those who chose to drive. Sure, there would be problems that would need to be worked out, but this is the kind of bold, innovative approach that is probably called for.)

• There will be an “orgy of default” in suburban homes in the next 5 – 10 years, as people realize they can’t afford to commute from them, heat them, etc.

• He didn’t mention Ozymandias, but that’s what came to mind when he talked of the vacant suburban developments built 30+ miles outside of city centers.

• Local commerce was killed by big box retail. There existed in every town an intricate web of connections between merchants that will need to be rebuilt from the bottom up as big retail begins to falter and downtown regions begin once again to attract foot traffic.

• Electricity will be a problem too. Not just oil is peaking, but also natural gas. We’ve expended most of our North American supply, and we lack the infrastructure to ship large amounts from other countries. We will be relying primarily on coal.

• Thomas Friedman was wrong in his book “The World is Flat.” Globalization isn’t going to be with us forever. We won’t have Chinese and Indian manufacturing. The world will begin to look bigger again. Meanwhile, we’re tearing our factories down. We aren’t just childlike, we’re childlike and shortsighted.

• As for the Chinese, Kunstler wonders if we’ll step in to stop them when they begin marching into the former Soviet republics in search of petroleum. Will we, he asks, be willing to fly our much smaller army 12,000 mile (burning all that fuel), when they just have to march and roll their tanks over the border? He suspects that we probably won’t.

• He talks quite often of those he refers to as “the formerly middle class.” He suspects they will be angry and bewildered at their loss of entitlements. He says, “We are a nation of complacent, sleepwalking clowns engaged in delusional thinking.”

• Phoenix will, “dry up and blow away.” No one will live there without AC… He cautions graduating students, “Don’t move to Phoenix.” Instead, move somewhere that was viable before the oil boom, and forge a role for yourself in a cohesive community.

• The Democrats need to drop the “nonsense about gender identification” and focus on what really matters, like rail. Otherwise, the party may die.

• When asked for examples of other nations who have navigated such enormous shifts successfully, Kunstler mentioned the recent “soft landing” in Cuba, in the wake of having Russia cut their financial assistance. They had to adapt overnight, and they did it. They got oxen to replace tractors, they privatized farmland and they got everyone fed. (The people are only getting something like 2/3 of the calories they once did, but they’re getting fed.)

• An odd hip-hop tangent…. Hip-hop is not entertainment. It’s about a warrior culture seeping up in the black underclass. It’s destructive. (I must have skipped this part of his book, “The Long Emergency,” but I understand that he goes into this subject in some depth.)

• Europe may fare better than the US during the long emergency. They didn’t destroy local agriculture, mass transit or their local infrastructure. However, global warming might hit them harder?

• I don’t think I caught it all, but he briefly mentioned Jared Diamond in relation to genocide. I believe he said that Diamond had been wrong when suggesting that the genocide in Rwanda wasn’t tribal in nature. (Do I have that right?) He said that there will surely be more genocide in the future.

• After asking a women in the audience if she was a hippy (she was), Kunstler admits somewhat reluctantly that he was once one too. He said, however, that this woman’s romantic, utopian notion of a post-collapse world that was more tribal in nature, will not happen. The Hippy dream is just that.

• Along the same lines of what he was saying concerning the rail system, Kunstler was arguing that we should reactivate local hydro stations that had been taken off-line by the power companies in the 1960’s. And, in a related comment, he mentioned that we would need more mechanical engineers, people who could be able to work on such small facilities. (We will also have to start building nuclear facilities.)

• There are political parties talking about these issues. The British National Party is gaining popularity. Their pro-agriculture, pro-rail, pro-environment, anti-suburbia agenda is resonating with people. Too bad, he says, that they’re fascists… Their chairman, Nick Griffin, has made several trips to the U.S. hoping to start an allied organization, but it’s not taking hold so far.

• Oh yeah, and, in case it wasn’t obvious for everything else, life expectancy will be going down.

OK, that’s all I have. As I said at the beginning, I’m sure I’ve got some things wrong. If you were at either of the events and feel as though I misstated any of Kunstler’s views, or left anything significant out, just let me know and I will make the appropriate changes.

I don’t have the time to go much further now, but the three main take-aways for me were; 1) the necessity of a national rail system, 2) the idea that we might be able to pass a gas tax if it was presented as a replacement for an existing tax, and 3) that, since I have no skills that will be valued during the long emergency, I’d better learn how to grow my own food. More on each of these points will follow in the coming weeks.