[Vision2020] Building and development planning

[Brent Bradberry]

A few days ago I posted a link to an article about one small community's 
approach to preparing for "the long emergency" which I thought might 
produce some response - (the town is Willits, California and the link 
may fallen through the cracks). Here is the link:
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/08.10.05/willits-0532.html

Brent Bradberry

Tbertruss at aol.com wrote:

>
> 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.
>
> ----------------------
>
> Vision2020 Post by Ted Moffett
>
>
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