Or if not now, soon. Sooner than we like to think.
The basic problem is, since WWII, we Americans have built the most automobile-dependent society in the world. Every suburban housing pod, strip mall and office park is built around the assumption that the people who live and work and shop there will own their own cars, and have access to an unlimited supply of cheap fuel, forever. As a result, other alternatives are squeezed out. Going anywhere on foot is inconceivable. Mass transit wouldn’t be economical: No matter how many rail lines you run out to the 'burbs, you can’t build enough so that everybody lives within walking distance of a rail stop. The pattern is too dispersed and low-density. Most people would have to drive to the nearest rail stop – and once you’re in your car, why get out?
It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and in some ways it seems like a good idea still. But it’s become so much a part of the air we breathe that anything different – e.g., building high-density, mixed-use, pedestrian-scale neighborhoods – has become inconceivable. We’re like people who keep an elephant in the bedroom and for some reason never talk about the smell or the wastes or the creaking floorboards.
Kane Holtz Kay, in her book *Asphalt Nation[?I] did a good job of describing all the problems auto-dependency causes – the obvious ones, such as air pollution, but a great many other problems as well, which would remain even if somebody developed a technology for running cars on some non-polluting, renewable fuel, such as (in theory) hydrogen. Some of these – e.g., the social isolation and placelessness of the suburbs – are not things that everybody would agree at first are problems; some would say they’re just choices, and valid ones. But the total picture is rather overwhelming.
An even better source is James Howard Kunstler, and his website, www.kunstler.com, and his three books, the Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and The City In Mind. Here is an excerpt from the last, published in 2001 – the chapter on Atlanta, pp. 60, 73-75:
A current popular belief in America is that “alternative fuels” could replace gasoline in the vehicles we use and that the system could merrily roll along without petroleum as if nothing had happened. This a dangerous delusion. The truth is that no known “alternative technology,” including hydrogen, fuel cell, electricity, nuclear, or alcohol from biomass, can take the place of gasoline in the way we have organized our lives, especially where cars and trucks are concerned. None of the touted alternative fuels is as versatile as gasoline, or can be produced for anything close to the cheap price of gas we’ve been accustomed to, or can be stored or transported as easily. The electric car is not going to save Atlanta.
I started this chapter by asking the question, does Edge City have a future? My answer is a plain NO. In Atlanta they are constructing a giant misbegotten organism that will almost certainly not be able to function far into the future. Suburbia, more than being a set of things, might be described more accurately as a set of behaviors. They were behaviors made possible only under the extremely abnormal conditions of late-twentieth-century life in the U.S.A.: unprecedented political and economic stability, extraordinary immunity to the consequences of bad decisions (really, the ability to mortgage the present against the future), and cheap oil, cheap oil, cheap oil. All these things are apt to change in the years directly ahead.
In the public debates about suburbia, the idea is almost always put forward that suburbia exists because Americans like it and want it. That may have been so. But if so, it may have been a poor choice. What’s more, that people like a way of living, or are accustomed to certain behavior, does not mean that circumstances will necessarily allow them to continue that way of living. Junkies like their heroin, too, but after a while their veins collapse, their immune systems switch off, and their organs begin to shut down. I’m convinced that circumstances in the twenty-first century will compel us to live very differently.
The next economy will be the Repo economy when, for example, amazing numbers of “Ditech 25 percent dream loans” will be labeled NONPERFORMING and seedy-looking men armed with repossession notices show up in the circular driveways of the defaulted-upon chipboard-and-vinyl McMansions in places like Cherokee County, Georgia, to change the locks on the putative collateral. I see this unwinding of credit and presumed wealth evolving into a tremendous political fight over the table scraps of the cheap-oil economy and the dubious material artifacts it produced, pitting neighbor against neighbor, group against group, and region against region.
I believe the world is entering a long era of chronic instability in oil markets that no amount of wishing or pretending will hold back. By the time this book is publised – a year from now – I shall be surprised if we are not experiencing the initial effects. The two oil-producing regions that allowed America to postpone this reckoning for twenty-five years, the Alaskan North Slope fields, and the North Sea fields (belonging to Britain and Norway), are scheduled to pass their production peaks this year, and after that, most of the oil in the world will be controlled by people who don’t like us, or contained in regions to chaotic to engage in the complex business of oil extraction. The Middle East regions containing the greatest reserves will be the last to peak, but long before they do, the oil markets will destabilize. In the current American mood of narcotized inattention, the point can’t be emphasized enough that it is not necessary for oil reserves to run out before world oil markets are severely destabilized. And when that occurs, industrial economies will be painfully compromised.
We Americans cherish a set of delusions to minimize or deflect the seriousness of this. As already touched on, we believe that we can run a drive-in civilization on some fuel other than petroleum. The actual prospects for this are dim, but we base our belief (a wish, really) on the spectacular cavalcade of technological achievements that occurred in the previous century, one astonishing novelty after another: airplanes, movies, radio, TV, antibiotics, Teflon, computers, automobiles themselves. (The lingering “victory disease” from our great triumph in World War Two still stokes our delusions of invincibility.) Alternative energy sources such as natural gas, biomass, coal, nuclear power, solar power, fuel cells, and so forth, will fall far short of compensating for disrupted oil markets. It will be a hard lesson. The world’s fleet of eleven thousand jet airplanes will not run on coal or plutonium. Massive disruptions to transportation and business will occur. The “global economy” as touted in recent years – meaning the long-range transport of enormous quantities of cheap goods virtually everywhere – will join mercantile imperialism in the history books. Food production, which depends heavily on oil-based fertilizers, will be affected by oil market disturbances. The Caesar salad that travels twenty-five hundred miles from California to somebody’s table in Atlanta will become an object of nostalgia. Farming will have to become much more labor-intensive, will have to be practiced on a far smaller scale, and done much closer to market. Half a million other products, from medicine, asphalt, paint and detergent to plastic trash bags, are also derived from oil. As the oil markets destabilize, shortages and fluctuating prices in oil will hinder industry from even addressing the problem from converting societies to other forms of energy.
That’s why we need “smart growth.”
