Orion > Curmudgeon in the Wild

Maul of America
by James Howard Kunstler

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he September 11th attacks had one outstanding paradoxical effect on our national psychology: they put the kibosh on any criticism of the "American Way of Life." I was in Texas just two weeks after that event, in the wasteland of off-ramps, megaplexes, chain stores, pawnshops, and fried meat establishments that runs between Fort Worth and Dallas. I had gone there at the invitation of a civic booster group to give my talk on traditional town planning to the chamber of commerce, which had all been arranged long before the attacks.

Now, my regular rap contains a goodly amount of criticism of the status quo. I've been known to say things like "the highway strip is a spiritually degrading environment," and "there isn't enough Prozac in the world to counteract the anxiety and depression generated by the average suburban high school." Boy, did they not want to hear that now. I could hear grumbling over the chipotle chicken even as I warmed up.

But something had gotten into me that day. Maybe it was the chain hotel I spent the night in, isolated in its free parking orbit from everything else in the universe. So I throttled up to rant-speed: "We're about to send soldiers to Afghanistan," I told them. "If one of them steps on a land mine over there, what will he remember, in his last moment, about the place he calls home? Will it be the curb-cut in front of Chuck E Cheese's? Will he pine for the stacking lanes at the traffic light in front of the mall?"

The grumbling got louder.

"We've got twenty-thousand places like this in America that are not worth caring about. How long is it going to be before all these places add up to a nation that is not worth defending?"

"Boo. . ."

"We're gonna have to come up with some reasons to care about this civilization beyond discount shopping and hamburgers."

"Siddown."

"And when the era of cheap gas and cheap air conditioning is over, you folks down here in the Sunbelt are liable to dry up and blow away."

"X$#@&%!"

Harsh, admittedly. But it was a harsh time, with every indication of growing worse indefinitely into the future. Now, six months into the "War on Terrorism" our denial level concerning how we live -- and the peril this places us in -- remains sky-high. This is especially true concerning oil, the commodity underlying all of our current living arrangements and economic relations (not to mention our international policies, such as they are). Except on this subject, denial devolves into delusion.

Readers of Orion are no doubt familiar with the boilerplate figures on oil: The United States possesses less than five percent of the remaining global oil reserve, while we burn about twenty-five percent of the oil produced in the world. More than half of our oil is imported, almost a quarter of it from the Persian Gulf. According to research recently done by Harper's magazine, we import $19 billion worth of crude oil from the region each year, and spend another $55 billion of taxpayer money annually "safeguarding oil supplies" there. Over seventy percent of the remaining world oil reserve lies under the soil of the Islamic nations of Asia, from the red sea to Indonesia. Blah blah blah.

Does any of this seem like a problem? Not if you follow the issue in the American Media. Recently, The New York Times has become a cheerleader for the completely crazy idea that the Russians and former Soviet Republics in the Caspian Sea region are going to rescue us from our addiction to the oil produced by the Saudis and other Persian Gulf states. Hello. . . ? Is it a good thing for America to be addicted to the resources of any nation -- in particular nations with whom we were locked in a life-or-death geopolitical struggle for the last half a century? And apparently, no one finds it worthwhile to note that Russian oil production passed its peak of total reserves in 1986. Just a technical detail.

The part about the former Soviet Republics is really hilarious. These states -- Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan -- occupy some of the most contested real estate in the world, much of it topographically inaccessible by ordinary means. They are populated largely by Muslims of innumerable tribes and clans with conflicting agendas. And many of them -- surprise to few -- don't like America too much either. Their governments are corrupt, despotic, and unpopular with their own people.

Between these nations and the west lie our old friends Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Oil from the Caspian basin would have to pass through these countries in pipelines. If there is a kind of infrastructure in the entire world more easily susceptible to sabotage, I don't know what it is. A drunken hunter nearly took out the Alaska pipeline single-handedly last summer with one bullet. Imagine what a determined band of Pashtun, Chechen, or Uzbek radicals could accomplish with thirty pounds of C-4 plastic explosive.

I think it not extreme to suggest that China might be a future contestant for these resources. A glance at a map shows that this region is much closer to China than to the US, and China, with limited oil resources of its own and a population more than four times that of the US, is industrializing at a tremendous rate. Do you suppose we aim to fight a long-distance land war against China in these regions for the control of its oil? I don't think so.

The truth is, we are nearly up against the wall where oil is concerned. As I write, the big cheese of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has proposed a one-month oil export boycott by Islamic nations against the US. He joins Sadaam Hussein, who has just implemented a punitive 30-day boycott, just as SUV-driving season is upon us and demand is up. Many people I know believe that the Islamic oil producers would never give up the revenues they enjoy from our insatiable appetite. Are they crazy? Suicide bombers happily give their lives up for the chance to injure Americans and Israelis; do you suppose that members of that culture would not give up some revenue, too? Iraq alone stands to lose almost $2 billion in oil export revenue over the next month. Voluntarily.

We do not want to even begin thinking about modifying our American Way of Life in a manner that would reduce our addiction to oil. Perhaps we subconsciously apprehend another truth about the current situation: that the US economy has come to be based on suburban turbo-development. Stuck in this scary cul-de-sac, we have trouble even imagining a different kind of economy. So, this is what we end up defending. The result of this foolish intransigence is liable to be tremendous political friction at home when the squeeze of chronic oil market disruptions comes, and a fight over the table scraps of 20th century suburban development, as its value and utility evaporate.

The task facing America -- which nobody in politics or the media wants to talk about -- is the necessary downscaling of all our activities. The Big Box discount retailing economy cannot survive a world of non-cheap oil, or even of disturbed markets.

I was in Syracuse, New York, yesterday on one of those "Future of the City" panels. The city officials there are hell-bent to support a proposed super-giant-mega mall project to be called "Desti-NY." Get it? It would be an extension of the already humongous existing Carousel Mall, and is designed to be an eastern rival to Minnesota's intergalactic-sized Mall of America. The overly-hopeful idea is that recreational shoppers will come from as far away as Worcester, Massachusetts to buy the same kind of Nike Sneakers they can get at their own mall -- thus bringing jobs jobs jobs to Syracuse. Meanwhile, Syracuse has four other malls that were put to death when Carousel Mall arose out of the toxic muck on the shore of Oneida Lake. Not surprisingly, the proposed Desti-NY project has got something on the order of $30 million in federal grants and subsidies attached to it.

I didn't hesitate to opine that the proposal sounded flat-out insane. Incidentally, even if the Desti-NY were issued its permits tomorrow, it would be years until the giant mall opened, that is, after the world had passed global peak oil production. This mall would be a pitiful, ridiculous obsolete mega-folly before it opened. The panelists who boosted it were not stupid people. They're just going along with the American Dream -- sleepwalking version.

We have to reorganize commerce in this country on a more local and multi-layered basis. Industrial-strength agriculture based on oil "inputs," and featuring the 3000-mile caesar salad, will not survive. We are going to have to grow more food closer to the places where we live. Giant central schools serviced by yellow bus fleets will soon be history. A cars-and-trucks-only transportation system is going to leave Americans stranded in the near future, and I wouldn't be bullish on commuting forty miles a day.

Alternative fuels are not going solve these problems, at least not in a way that would allow us to carry on our current program. I wish my fellow ex-hippies and environmentalist friends would give a little less of their time to projects like hybrid vehicles and concentrate instead on the walkable community side of the equation. That is where the big payoff in conservation lies for this nation. It would accomplish three things. It would put the development money where it belongs, in civic environments, including existing towns and cities. It would give us a chance to develop economic systems and relations that had a reasonably sustainable future. And it would provide places worth caring about as an alternative to the demoralizing fiasco of places like the suburban wasteland between Fort Worth and Dallas.

James Howard Kunstler harangues OrionOnline readers regularly. He is the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere. His new book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, has just been made available by Free Press.

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