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Remarks
by James Howard Kunstler
at the meeting of The Second
Vermont Republic
October 28, 2005
When we think about the destiny of our land,
there are a few questions we might ask:
What do we mean by 'our land?'
What has been holding it together?
Who are we?
And who will we become?
For about 210 years we have been a federal
democratic republic composed of more than a few states, eventually adding up
to fifty. At times, the citizen's identity has shifted from allegiance to a
particular state to the republic as a whole - as when Robert E. Lee, for
instance, famously declared that he was first a citizen of Virginia.
Lately the tendency has been for citizens to
think of themselves first as Americans, and secondarily as New Yorkers or
Virginians or Vermonters.
What has held us together - at least since
the convulsion of the Civil War - is a common culture and especially the
common enterprise of a great industrial economy.
For much of our history, including the first
half of the 20th century, we were a resourceful, adaptive, generous, brave,
forward-looking people who believed in earnest effort, who occupied a
beautiful landscape full of places worth caring about and worth defending.
Since then, lost in raptures of easy
motoring, fried food, incessant infotainment, and desperate moneygrubbing, we became a nation of overfed clowns who
believed that it was possible to get something for nothing, who ravaged the
landscape in an orgy of wanton carelessness, who believed they were entitled
to lives of everlasting comfort and convenience, no matter what, and expected
the rest of the world to pay for it. We even elected a vice-president who
declared that this American way of life was non-negotiable.
We now face the most serious challenge to
our collective identity, economy, culture, and security since the Civil War. The
end of the cheap fossil fuel era will change everything about how we live in
this country. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to
do things differently - whether we like it or not.
We are at or near the all-time maximum
global oil production peak. We do not have to run out of oil to find
ourselves in trouble. When world demand for oil exceeds the world's ability
to produce oil, all the complex systems we depend on will de-stabilize.
Everything from national chain retail, to
the Archer Daniel Midland Cheez Doodle and Pepsi
model of agriculture, to the arrangements for heating our homes and lighting
our cities will begin to wobble. Some of these things will fail us and begin
to change our lives.
At the same time, we will be tempted to join
a worldwide scramble for the world's remaining oil - most of which belongs to
countries whose people don't like us - and the nature of this contest may be
very violent.
Our suburbs will prove to be a huge
liability.
They represent the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the
world.
The project of suburbia
represent a set of tragic choices because it is a living arrangement
with no future. And that future is now here in the form of the peak oil
predicament.
Because they have no future, our suburbs
entail a powerful psychology of previous investment that will prevent us from
even thinking about reforming them or letting go of them. That's why
vice-president Cheney said the American way of life is non negotiable.
There will be a great battle to preserve the
supposed entitlements to suburbia and it will be an epochal act of futility,
a huge waste of effort and resources that might have been much better spent
in finding new ways to carry on an American civilization.
We might, for instance, have invested in restoring
our national railroad system, which we will need desperately, because no
other project we might undertake would have such a profoundly positive impact
on our oil consumption.
But instead we will try desperately to make
cars that get better mileage, so we can continue being car dependent and
continue building out and elaborating the infrastructure for a living
arrangement with no future - the subdivisions of the McHouses,
the strip malls, the big box pods, the deployments of hamburger shacks and
pizza huts.
In the service of defending suburbia, the
American public may turn to political maniacs, who will promise to make the
country just like it was in 1997, before we started having all these
problems.
In the course of this long emergency we
face, life and politics are apt to become profoundly local. Many of my
friends wring their hands over George W. Bush, whom they regard as the second
coming of Adolf Hitler and who think the Federal government will regulate
every inch of their lives. I tell them, in the long emergency the Federal
government will be impotent and ineffectual - just as they were after
Hurricane Katrina - and that the Federal government will be lucky if they can
answer the phones five years from now, let alone regulate anybody's life.
I tell them, life in America is
going to become profoundly and intensely local, and it will be the local
politicians you'll have to worry about.
American life will become intensely and
profoundly local because the complex systems that hold this nation together
are going to fail.
We will have to grow a lot more of our food
in the regions where we live. That won't be easy. A lot of our best ag land close to our towns and cities has been paved
over. A lot of knowledge has been lost.
We are going to have to reconstruct local
economies, local networks of interdependency - and that will not be easy
given the methodical destruction of economic infrastructure to our
communities by Walmart and the rest of the national
chain companies over the past forty years.
As these severe challenges arise, different
regions of the United
States will cope differently.
The sunbelt will probably suffer in equal
proportion to the degree that it benefited from the cheap oil fiesta of the
past several decades - because it squandered its wealth in building gigantic
suburban metroplexes that have no future. Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Charlotte.
The people in these places will be full of grievance and bewilderment, and
they may seek comfort in the romance of firearms in seeking to defend the indefensible
entitlements their failing suburbs.
The people in Phoenix
and Tucson
will have dreadful problems with water on top of their problems with oil and
the loss of cheap air conditioning. They may not be able to grow any food of
their own, locally.
In Las
Vegas, the excitement will be over. The capital of a
something for nothing culture will be left to the wind, the tarantulas and
the gila monsters.
California, the
most tragic part of our country -because it was once the most beautiful and
is now most lost - will have many of the previously mentioned problems and
the prospect of awful ethnic conflict.
I am describing a nation that may not hold
together far into the 20th century. I would like to be wrong about this, but
it hard to look at the big picture and come up with a different set of
conclusions.
All parts of the United States are going to
endure hardships in the decades ahead, but some regions or states may be
better prepared, or just luckier. I tend to me more optimistic about the
future in New England, The mid-Atlantic States, the upper Midwest, and the
Pacific Northwest (if it can escape the wrath emanating out of California.)
I include Vermont in this list, of course. This part
of the country enjoys some advantages: an armature of towns scaled to the
requirements of life in a lower energy world; a lot of good agricultural
land; a civic tradition of responsible local governance; a set of regional
collective character traits we associate with New England Yankees at their
best: rectitude, discipline, perseverance, and allegiance to the community.
I'm personally not an advocate of national
breakup or secession. I grew up with United States and I have been,
until recently, been pretty comfortable with the idea that we would stick
together no matter what.
But in the Long Emergency all bets are off
for politics, economics, and social cohesion. Turbulence will be the rule and
we will have to do our best to make sure that the just prevail over the
wicked, and that the weak are not trampled, and that the best that was in us
as a people can somehow be rescued from dumpster of memory.
Anyway, I'm a New Yorker, an upstater, and I don't relish the idea of patrolling the
waters of Lake Champlain in a solar electric gunboat to keep you Green Mountain
boys and girls from chopping down the Adirondacks
so you can bake all that granola you are reputed to subsist on.
However things turn out, I hope you'll let
me across the border from time to time to see how things are going.
Thanks very much for your attention and good
luck figuring all this out.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
My
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James
Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling
Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His
latest nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes
that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent
future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler
foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the
depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil,
military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans
will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more
from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork,
information about his other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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