Dew on strawberries

Taken in our greenhouse yesterday morning.

The Long Emergency

Seven years ago, author James Howard Kunstler's book The Long Emergency predicted that a combination of peak oil, climate change and an economic crash would disrupt the fundamental systems that hold our society together. The book put the language of collapse into talk shows and mainstream news artices, and inspired pockets of activists, homesteaders, planners and preppers across the world.

Its key insight, perhaps, was in the adjective of its poetic title, the understanding that we will not face the apocalyptic flash of disaster films, but a gradual transformation punctuated by many small crises. The year before The Long Emergency, I had written my first magazine cover story about the issue, and I sought out Kunstler for an interview, delighted to find a kindred spirit.

He was at his grumpiest, and we would not agree in every way, but I appreciated his insights. Now that he is releasing the follow-up book, Too Much Magic, I thought it was a good time to re-post the interview. This originally appeared in Pulse magazine, February 2005.

************* 

 James Howard Kunstler is America’s version of an Old Testament prophet, a stinging social critic who warns of dark days ahead if we do not change the way we live.

The former journalist emerged as a trenchant observer of modern life with his 1994 book The Geography of Nowhere, which traces the past and future of suburban sprawl. He followed this up with 1998’s Home from Nowhere, which offered solutions to the problem of sprawl, and 2002’s The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, a broad look at what makes cities thrive or decay.

His latest book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, describes what may happen when the flood of cheap oil, which has sustained our society for a hundred years, begins to peter out—as experts predict it will in the coming decade.

The end of oil will mean more than the loss of gasoline, which would be devastating enough in a suburban society built entirely around the automobile. It will also mean the end to the plastics of which so many of our surroundings are made, and a shortage of the food we now grow with oil-based fertilizer. Articles about the end of oil are now trickling into the mainstream, but Kunstler, more than anyone, considers the geopolitical ripples that an oil shortage would create.

What happens if the last oil is owned by the brutal dictatorships of the Middle East? How will China, with 20 per cent of the world’s population and skyrocketing oil needs, react when others have the oil they need? How will rural America, with its recent resurgence of violent and apocalyptic beliefs, react to a crisis? Schools, corporations, cities—nothing, he believes, will stay the same in the Long Emergency to come.

KALLER: How did you come to focus on peak oil?

KUNSTLER: It was a natural outgrowth of my investigations into the fiasco of suburbia. Also, as a young newspaper reporter 30-odd years ago, I was very impressed by the effects of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. I was convinced it was a “preview of coming attractions,” and indeed it was—in the sense that the embargo occurred precisely because U.S. production had peaked and pricing power had shifted from America to OPEC.

These things were barely understood even by the experts back then, but they resolved over the decades, and by the mid-1990s it was pretty clear that we were approaching a similar global production peak, and that it would change everything. We are now heading into the event.

KALLER: Why has this issue been so universally ignored?

KUNSTLER: … The American public has been poorly prepared for this period I call The Long Emergency, when we will be compelled to change the way we live and do things.

The dirty secret of the U.S. economy for a couple of decades now is that it is mostly driven by the creation of suburban sprawl and all its accessories and furnishings—the subdivisions, the highway strips, the big box stores, the fried food shacks, et cetera. Subtract that, and the financial/real estate activity associated with it, and there isn’t a whole lot left in the economy besides open-heart surgery.

Our political and business leaders can’t come to grips with the unhappy reality of this. They can’t militate against the very car-dependency and oil addiction that our so-called economy depends on.

I’ll go further to state that I don’t even regard George W. Bush and other establishment figures as necessarily “evil,” but they have been very misguided, and the final result will be a pretty sobering period of hardship for the United States.

KALLER: You strongly criticize the American suburbs, which you say cannot continue once oil becomes precious. But I wonder if the suburbanites might not be in a good position—close enough to neighbours for mutual support, but with room to grow their own food.

KUNSTLER: Suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It is theoretically true that suburbanites might grow some vegetables on what are now their lawns, but they are not going to raise beef cattle or winter wheat on them. Anyway, the liabilities of suburbia are so extreme otherwise that I think it will fail as a human habitat. Its failure will entail the evaporation of trillions of dollars in hallucinated wealth, as well as a lot of social disorder and political mischief.

KALLER: I was surprised at how much of our food is grown with oil. How will that change affect us?

KUNSTLER: We’re eating oil. There’s no question that we’re going to have to grow more food locally with more human labor, and probably with working animals, too. But there are a lot of questions about how that will reorganize itself.

For instance, the subdivision practices of the past 50 years have been very destructive to the rural landscape—to our ability to reorganize land back into farms. Also, we can’t predict what the social relations will be between the greater number of people who will have to work in agriculture when oil and gas are scarcer and the people who own the land. In other times and places, this has been a recipe for unrest and even revolution.

 KALLER: Some people have dismissed the idea of an energy crunch, saying that we will come up with something like fusion. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to see what a fusion-powered chainsaw can do. If we could continue our lifestyle through some other means, do you think we should? What would be your ideal scenario?

KUNSTLER: We’re not going to continue our lifestyle by other means. Forget it. No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run the interstate highway system, Walt Disney World and Archer Daniels Midland. We’re going to have to downscale, rescale and resize all our activities, and live more locally, whether we like it or not.

We have acquired two very pernicious habits of thinking in recent decades. One I call the “Jiminy Cricket syndrome,” the idea that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. That’s what the Spielberg movies and Nike commercials tell us. Guess what: it’s a childish delusion.

The second mental obstruction we’ve taken on is the “Las Vegas-ization of the American Mind,” namely the idea that it’s possible to get something for nothing. This one-two combo of delusions defeats all honest and earnest efforts to really do something about the predicament we face.

KALLER: I know evangelicals who live in the countryside but don’t have an environmental perspective, and environmentalists with lots of theoretical knowledge but who live in city apartments. I can’t help but think of what they could do if they learned from each other. What groups do you think are best prepared for the Long Emergency, and what alliances could we see in the coming years?

KUNSTLER: Look, my friends are political “progressives” who drive their SUVs to the peace rallies. I think the entire U.S. public is poorly prepared. The Amish alone have a head start on where we are headed, but their way also includes a lot of religious baggage. Frankly, I think the answer is that the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers and we will be living in a very turbulent society.

KALLER: People I talk to often think in either/or terms, either commuting 40 miles from a McMansion or being Amish. But I’m sure a lot of people would like to ease into a different world as much as possible. What are some basic things we—mostly city-dwellers—need to start doing to prepare for the Long Emergency?

KUNSTLER: What we’re facing is a sharp discontinuity, not a smooth transition. That’s why I call this period the Long Emergency. People don’t necessarily get what they want or what they expect. In my opinion, the big cities are going to become very disorderly places—anyway many of America’s big cities are already in an advanced state of contraction—Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia … the list is very long.

New York and Chicago are overburdened with mega-structures and skyscrapers. They will probably not be usable in a scarce energy economy. These cities will contract and the process will be painful. Phoenix will dry up and blow away. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over. The action is going to shift to the smaller towns and cities, the places proximate to viable agriculture.

KALLER: Most of the people I know who are interested in the energy crunch are also against the government’s invasion of Iraq —but you seem to think that, in purely Machiavellian terms, Bush’s invasion was a smart move. What do you think we should do in the Middle East?

KUNSTLER: I didn’t say it was a smart move … I said it’s what we did. Yeah, all my friends were against the Iraq invasion and nothing has stopped them from commuting sixty miles a day or driving Ford Expeditions to the farmers’ market.

I view the Iraq invasion strictly for what it was: a clumsy attempt to stabilize the region of the world where two-thirds of the remaining oil is, and to incidentally modify and influence the behavior of Iraq’s two troublesome neighbors, Iran and Saudi Arabia. There’s a lady who lives near me with a sign in her yard that says “War is Not The Answer” and two SUVs parked in the driveway. What sanctimonious crap. I want to grab her by the collar and yell, “Guess what, war is the answer as long as you want to live this way. Get used to it.”

 KALLER: What are the biggest signs of hope you see right now?

 KUNSTLER: There’s some idea that if you don’t leave the public with “hope,” with the chance of a happy ending, that you have failed in your task as a journalist. This is also fallacious. And childish. This is not a Bruce Willis movie, this is America in the 20th century, stuck with the consequences of its behaviour.

People will either adapt or perish in the Long Emergency. We’ve already made a whole lot of bad choices, collectively, including our decision to build a drive-in, easy-motoring utopia. Let’s not continue to make bad choices, okay? Let’s not mount a stupid and futile campaign to prop up the fading “entitlements” of suburbia. Let’s prepare to downscale and live locally. Let’s rebuild the U.S. passenger railroad system—that’s something we already know how to do, and it is a symptom of our obdurate cluelessness and lack of seriousness that we refuse to do it.

 Life is tragic. History doesn’t care if we fail as a civilization. Others have gone before us. We have to take responsibility for what we are facing and quit expecting to be rescued by wishes, dreams, and miracles.

Corrected times for talks

Correction on the talk at Macalester Friday the 13th of July - it's at 6 pm. Here is the information again:

I've been writing less lately because I've been preparing a trip to the USA, my first one in three years, and posting will be light for the next several weeks during our trip.

I'll be visiting family in Missouri in early July, and have been invited to speak to Occupy St. Louis at 7 pm on July 4, at Legacy Books & Cafe, off Delmar & Union in the city.

Then The Girl and I journey to Minnesota to see old friends, and I will be giving a lecture at Macalester College two nights in a row -- Friday, July 13 at 6 pm, and Saturday, July 14 at 7 pm.

The lectures, held in the Weyerhauser Boardroom, will be on "O'Sterity: How the Irish thrived in desperate times." The talks will focus on the problems we face in the coming decades -- peak oil, climate change and economic collapse, all summed up as the "Long Emergency" -- and how we can deal with them using the skills and knowledge of traditional cultures.

Ireland, I point out, makes a good example: when my wife was growing up here in the 1970s, it was poorer than many Third-World countries, and not everyone had electricity or indoor plumbing. Yet statistics show people were better-educated, safer, healthier and happier -- at least from survey responses -- than Americans today. If we can piece apart why, I argue, we can help Americans and other modern people thrive during difficult times.

I've also been invited to speak on Andy Driscoll's "Truth to Tell" radio programme at 9 a.m. on July 16. The programme can be heard in the Twin Cities area.

If you're interested in homesteading, traditional culture, distributism, or any of the other subjects we talk about here, feel free to come, or let your friends know.

Travelling

Living on an island, the Irish have always been a nation of travellers, and during the boom some of my co-workers flew to Majorca and Cyprus as frequently and casually as their parents travelled to Dublin. Now that money has become lean again, however, many are finding travel far too expensive to do frequently. 

My family never had any money, and never took holidays, so I never travelled growing up. I took one plane ride with my grandmother when I was seven, to Cleveland, as far as I ever travelled in the USA, and that’s all – I’d never seen another country. In adulthood, however, I tried to rectify that, eventually moving to Ireland. I’ve still never seen the East or West coast of the USA, but I have no particular desire to. What I have found, however, are several ways to travel cheaply. 

One of them is the business trip -- my job paid for me to go to London three times in the last year, and each time I stayed on extra days to see the sights. My employer had to pay for a return ticket anyway so it made no difference to them, and each time I got to see London for several days, I ticked more items off my “bucket list.”

If your job doesn’t send you abroad, however, some airlines offer standby tickets, which allow you to take a flight as soon as a passenger misses their flight. If you don’t work full-time, you might try being hired as a courier, to accompany a package to a destination, and see if a company will pay for most of your plane service. 

When you want to stay in another country, hostels are usually the best place to sleep. Most of them are as comfortable and clean as any hotel, but a hotel room might cost you a few hundred euros a night, while a hostel can cost you ten to fifty. They differ from conventional hotels in that they often do not offer single rooms, with the private showers, televisions and maids that most hotel-goers have come to expect. Instead, most hostels require visitors to sleep in rooms with several other people, but this is not as difficult as it might sound; most hostel guests respect the privacy and sleeping habits of others and, as they are spending the day working or having fun, use their rooms only for sleeping. 

Hostels also offer the chance to mingle with other guests in a way that hotels do not. Since most people in hostels use their rooms only for sleeping, and spend their time at the hostel sitting in common rooms, hostel guests have the opportunity to chat with others if they choose. Hostel guests also tend to be young and adventurous, often backpackers or other casual travellers, and come from all over the world. When I stay at a hostel, I soon have enjoyable conversations with people from Russia, Australia, Africa and many other parts of the world – all with stories to tell. 

You might think that seeing a foreign city would be expensive, and every city is different. In many cities, though, the most amazing sites are the statues, buildings, rivers, bridges and public parks, and those are almost always free. 

Many other great entertainments, however, are surprisingly inexpensive. Musical plays are in great demand right now, so their tickets run into the hundreds of euros, but amazing plays starring world-famous actors can have very cheap seats. I saw a play starring Keira Knightley and other well-known movie stars for about 30 euros, little more than a movie ticket with popcorn these days. 

Travelling around a strange city can often be part of the adventure, and while most cities charge more than they should for public transportation, most also offer the opportunity to pay one charge for a whole day or week. The London Underground, for example, charges the equivalent of 8.50 euros to ride all day, but that takes one anywhere in the city for half the price of a short taxi ride.  

Finally, eating in another city or country doesn’t have to be expensive either. We tend to pay more for food when we are hungry, intuitively enough, and take less time to enjoy the food. If you want to eat cheaply and enjoy your food as much as possible, therefore, buy cheap, healthy snacks at a grocery store. Snack on fennel or apples as you walk or ride from one attraction to the next, and keep yourself from getting too hungry and impulsively buying food, and you will truly be able to enjoy the restaurants you do visit. 

I was almost thirty years old before I got a passport, and while there's never much money to go around, I want to make sure I travel while it's as cheap as it is now. 

The neighbours

When The Girl was a toddler, she had an obsession with cows, and even before we built our house here, this was her favourite place to visit and wave to the cows in the distance.

When I mow the lawn, though, they are not so distant anymore, and the smell of mown grass makes them gather longingly and stare at our garden.

Don't even think about it, guys.

May in Ireland

Native-born Irish find the weather here annoying; it takes an immigrant to be truly maddened. March was a blessed reprieve from our Gothic winters, bringing enough sunlight and warmth that The Girl and I wore shorts one day. Then April brought us back to single-digit temperatures and near-constant rain. County Clare, thankfully, remained mostly dry for our camping trip, and we shielded ourselves from the sharp winds shooting over the waters of Lough Derg. 

It remains chilly here, plausibly January rather than May, and it might remain so all summer for all I know. We got a good start to the year, adding a farmer friend’s ripening manure to our garden beds when it was still winter, digging it in and letting it mix with the soil. Our garden beds are almost full now, seeded in cabbages and broccoli, radishes and lettuce, spinaches and kohlrabi, and our tomatoes and aubergines have a good start in our greenhouse. As I jogged along the canal this morning, The Girl riding her bicycle beside me, we passed neighbours turning the earth in their potato fields and farmers clearing the fields of brushwood.  

So little, though, has poked through the soil – they all seem to be waiting for a better opportunity, and despite our early start most plants have stalled. What few plants we have so far – spinaches and cabbages --have adoring fans in the slugs. Only slugs, for the acid soil of our bogland seems to prohibit snails, or I would be out every morning eagerly gathering snails for lunch. Our hedgehog, however, seems to help with the slugs, and when we get chickens we will get additional help. Our amourous pigeons have multiplied around our beds and are thoroughly enjoying our cabbages – we don’t have a gun, so I’m beginning to wonder whether any of the Victorian manuals I collect have instructions for building pigeon traps.

If the weather is discouraging our garden crops, though, they have not deterred the wild plants and grasses – I mowed our acre of land here today, and got so much compost that our massive bin overflowed. I have been enjoying nettles, dandelions and cowslips – the last two in salads, the first two sautéed or as tea, and all of them as wine. As I have drawn my parsnip wines – one with ginger, one with elderberries and one with beetroots – from the carboys and bottled them, the empty carboys have quickly been used for whatever weed is appearing around us. 

Nettles are at the perfect size this month – before this they are too small, and after this they get stringy – and fat hen, jack-by-the-hedge and Good King Henry should be appearing soon. Hawthorn leaves remain somewhat edible, although they are getting tougher and less tasty every day as they get ready to bloom. Lime trees, also called lindens, are just beginning to leaf, and as their leaves come in they can be eaten like lettuce. 

May’s sun and warmth offers a good opportunity for green manure crops like comfrey – its deep roots bring nutrients from deep in the soil, and its soft tissues decompose quickly in the compost. We like to take the comfrey that grow wild down the road and cut them, and bring them in wheelbarrows to our compost bin; in six months or so they will give us several wheelbarrows full of rich compost that we can add to our soil for free. 

It’s raining again now, as it does for days at a time here. Yet that’s the price we pay for such lush country, and once in a while, when the sun comes out, it looks like the postcards.  

Photo: The forest in Tuamgraney, County Clare.

Glacial till

You'll find stones like this everywhere, ripped out of mountains by the ice sheets that covered this land, transported back and forth as they moved, and then deposited when they melted. Sometimes they are obviously very different than the stone around them -- granite in limestone country, for example. These are in Tuamgraney, County Clare.

Urban wildlife

In the shadow of London’s National Gallery and the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields lies Trafalgar Square, with bronze lions the size of our car. Now, moreover, they can be seen as intended; until a few years ago they were famously covered in pigeon poop. 

My college in Missouri had this problem when I went to school there; we students loved feeding the pigeons, but they had a tendency to exert the prerogative of flying animals. The college responded, as I recall, by setting out poisoned feed, killing not only the pigeons but, presumably, every other animal that ate the feed, and every animal that ate those animals. I don’t know what kind of poison they used, but I hope it was something that breaks down quickly in the soil once all those animals died. 

Londoners had a wiser solution, one that cut down on the pigeons and kept the remaining ones fit: hawks. When I passed by an excited crowd were gathered around a Mr. and Mrs. Hawk, who seemed to regard the human herd with nonchalance.

Away on business

 If anyone needs me, I'll be here for a few days.

Photo: Taken from across the River Thames.

Cards

I’ve been teaching The Girl card games, and was reminded how fundamental and commonplace cards were in our culture until the last few decades. For generations everyone played cards; men left the house to play poker with their mates, women played bridge with their neighbours, and workmen, sailors or train passengers played cards to pass the idle hours. 

A 1940 survey of residents in 24 American cities found that cards were Americans’ favourite pastime; 87 per cent of homes had a deck of cards, more than had radios or telephones. In his book Bowling Alone, sociologist Robert Putnam notes that trends in card playing followed other signs of social involvement – steady growth in the first three decades of the century, a slump during the Great Depression, and then explosive growth in the years after World War II. 

Perhaps the most amazing statistic: a 1961 survey found that one of every five adults was part of a regular bridge foursome. Just bridge, regularly.

My grandparents grew up playing cards around the kitchen table, with siblings in the evening and with cousins at family gatherings. The friendly competition smoothed the rough edges of family gatherings. I still see this in the pubs here, where locals gather in the pub in the evenings to play 42, but even here they are elderly; the young men are staring at the television. 

Today card games have become a rare and curious event; I know few games, and have trouble finding anyone who plays cards to teach me more. The decline has been even more precipitous because most games require multiple players, so once the number of able and willing players in an area declines past a certain critical mass, the game becomes effectively extinct. 

Still, I want to pass on what I know to The Girl, in the same way I want to pass on rhymes and folk songs, because they were popular for a reason, and we might return to a culture where people find them useful.  

Let’s say more of us lose our jobs, or see more power outages, or have less ability to drive around, or have to move in together. Let’s say more of us are cooped up together, with people we don’t know well, and need to pass the time. It will be a situation earlier generations would have taken in stride with a pocket deck.

Photo: Poker Game, courtesy of Wikicommons.