[Vision2020] Building and development planning

[Donovan Arnold]

Ted,

Why such a negative outlook on the future? I look
forward to the future. I think technological and
medical breakthroughs will overall make things better
for most people in the world.

I do think that there is an an increasing divide
between the poor and rich and a shrieking middle
class, but this happens off and on throughout history.
However, let us face the fact that today's poor are
way better off than the middle class were just thirty
to forty years ago.

No doubt society has made some colossal mistakes
especially about the environment and will be
challenging to overcome in the next 100-200 years.
However, I have confidence in the human race. Most
people in the world are good hearted and we can
overcome these problems as we have in the past. I look
forward to the future with excitement at the
opportunities it will bring, not just for me, but
others as well.

Donovan J Arnold

--- 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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