[Vision2020] Building and development planning

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

http://www.energybulletin.net/4856.html


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0871138883/104-8836728-5136763?v=glance


Excerpt below adapted from "The Long Emergency" by James Howard Kunstler    

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements 
for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament 
due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth 
century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace 
them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of 
the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest 
misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic 
destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our 
drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing 
development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and 
shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of 
those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and 
re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities 
we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and 
trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely 
local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying 
where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or 
a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap 
energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long 
Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of 
an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As 
industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, 
we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do 
it on a smaller scale. The American economy of the mid-twenty-first century 
may actually center on agriculture, not information, not high tech, not 
"services" like real estate sales or hawking cheeseburgers to tourists. Farming. This 
is no doubt a startling, radical idea, and it raises extremely difficult 
questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. The relentless 
subdividing of land in the late twentieth century has destroyed the contiguity 
and integrity of the rural landscape in most places. The process of 
readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational. Food production will 
necessarily be much more labor-intensive than it has been for decades. We can anticipate 
the re-formation of a native-born American farm-laboring class. It will be 
composed largely of the aforementioned economic losers who had to relinquish 
their grip on the American dream. These masses of disentitled people may enter 
into quasi-feudal social relations with those who own land in exchange for food 
and physical security. But their sense of grievance will remain fresh, and if 
mistreated they may simply seize that land.

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Vision2020 Post by Ted Moffett

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