[Dialogue] Corn in Mexico

[George Holcombe]

This author is one of the folks who worked on End of Suburbia and is  
worth the read.

The agenda restated
by James Howard Kunstler

       Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for  
being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I  
find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a  
long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to  
take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long  
Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly  
demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive  
dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

      Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip,  
and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's  
necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so  
much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses  
to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will  
succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are  
tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful,  
or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars  
by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars  
running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially  
unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political  
"progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme.

Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on  
fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the  
heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring  
system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make  
things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond  
the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the  
common activities of daily life.
We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill  
model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As  
oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming  
organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our  
ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the  
center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done  
more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more  
human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming --  
e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be  
done much more locally.

This situation presents excellent business and vocational  
opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their  
Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems  
in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and  
skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from  
the dumpster of history. Get busy.
We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in  
our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some  
degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami....) will  
support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to  
return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages,  
towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our  
small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to  
contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of  
suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough  
problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary  
value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications.

The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of  
regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap- 
together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This  
whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable  
to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill- 
sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools  
of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching  
Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes  
about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes  
and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be  
replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.
We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of  
Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to  
it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up  
car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail  
is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved  
in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's  
make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than  
fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power  
plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few  
source-points as possible.

We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much  
more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our  
harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including  
the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like  
Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their  
waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the  
piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy  
accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to  
restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's  
for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used  
the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of- 
scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and  
the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive,  
scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels"  
of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the  
interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian  
slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for  
Middle East and African oil.

The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain  
stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will  
have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This  
will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who  
make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned  
"middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will  
replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally  
dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be  
cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are  
completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in  
the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't  
want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here  
in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.
We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going  
to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices  
of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light- 
special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life  
in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and  
things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live  
the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of  
manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of  
fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're  
going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means.  
Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't  
know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the  
younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.
The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for  
a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to  
have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're  
going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to  
need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and  
singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is  
not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so  
well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized  
secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will  
not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in  
these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they  
will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we  
probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with  
smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right  
away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education  
will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling  
efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family.

God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities,  
both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of  
higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed  
from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a  
coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case,  
will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing  
for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line- 
of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots  
to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of  
America.
We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of  
intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will  
not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to  
return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called  
"doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big  
universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st  
century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be  
fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we  
don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or  
the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical  
science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.
Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually  
all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You  
can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely  
to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations  
to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical  
and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you  
are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you.  
An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted  
by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local  
institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized.  
Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and  
federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for  
local heroes.
       So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things  
out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am  
not providing you with anything to think about or devote your  
personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit  
wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the  
future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you  
are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new  
circumstances.

George Holcombe
14900 Yellowleaf Tr.
Austin, TX 78728
Home: 512/252-2756
Mobile 512/294-5952
geowanda at earthlink.net



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