State of Hopelessness

January 23, 2005
     I was down on the Gulf Coast of Florida last Thursday, flapping my gums about the issues of the day in civic design against a background of the most stupendous hopelessness. Until twenty years ago, Fort Meyers was a backwater on the northwest edge of the Everglades. Today it is an object lesson in how a society commits suicide by land development.

     The hyper-turbo phase of the cheap oil blow-out -- roughly 1985 to now -- has produced a final iteration of suburbia so gigantic in scale that the only visible entity is the space between things. The chain drug stores, and other tawdry objects, are set back so far from the immense highways that the buildings are not even visible, not to mention walkable from anywhere. The planning officials have evidently decided that it is beyond the competence of American architects and builders to produce buildings that are worth seeing, so now the "solution" is to just hide everything way off the road in the palmetto flats.

      Don't be deceived, though. This is not an aesthetic issue. This is about a society's ability to create a plausible future for itself, truly a life-and-death issue. Judging from what you see on the ground there, Florida has given up on the future. They expect the world to remain forever as it was in 1999, with oil at ten dollars a barrel and a "new economy" delivering caravans of newly-minted Nasdaq millionaires to the real estate offices, and the Ford Expeditions endlessly rolling off the dealer lots.

      When I'm in Florida, I see a living arrangement that is not going to survive even the first decade of the 21st century. I see a people so psychotically in thrall to easy motoring that they have zero chance of carrying on without it. I see an armature for daily life that will become dangerously useless, stranding and isolating hundreds of thousands of people who thought they were merely insulating themselves from trouble. That trouble will find them anyway, in the form of a growing class of desperate economic losers who will move through the suburban interstices in numbers that no law will be able to control.

     Florida had a chance in the early 1990s to begin reforming the way it built out its towns and cities, to prepare for the changing circumstances of the post-cheap-oil future. The founders and best practitioners in the New Urbanist movement started there. They laid out a comprehensive vision of how communities could get off of the sprawl track and build compact, walkable, beautiful places that had a chance to endure in a future that worked differently. The New Urbanists were able to do some great projects here and there -- Seaside, Winter Park, West Palm Beach, Mizner Park -- but by and large the officialdom of planning ignored them and just kept mindlessly issuing approvals for ever more six lane highways, gated housing pods, big box "power centers," and jive-plastic apartment complexes disconnected from anything. More than 99 percent of Florida's recent development came in that form.

     Now, it's too late. We're in the fourth quarter of the suburban sprawl fiesta bowl with less than two minutes left on the clock. Soon, there will be no development of any kind going on in Florida. The enabling mechanisms of cheap credit, cheap energy, and easy motoring will be things of the past. An impoverished American middle class will no longer be able to afford theme park vacations and the airlines that used to shuttle them down to Florida will be out-of-business. The new theme in 21st century America will be staying where you are and, unfortunately, a lot of places in America will not be worth staying in because of the choices their citizens made over the past two decades -- but people will be stuck in them anyway.

      Floridians thought they would live in a drive-in utopia forever. When that system fails, the younger generations will blame the old people who designed and administrated a world were you would hardly ever have to get out of your air-conditioned car to do anything.

      The baby boomer generation will feel the wrath of the young. Forget about reforming social security. The time will come when a younger generation says, "Look what you assholes did to our world -- now crawl off and die."

Comments

[Beth]

No, Mr. Kuntsler, I believe the next generation will leave the petulant egotistic cynicism you display behind. You do it so well. Only you could come up with this contruct:

"The time will come when a younger generation says, "Look what you assholes did to our world -- now crawl off and die."

[aj]

Jim, I dunno if you heard about it, but the first ever US conference on Peak Oil and sustainable living was held just this past November. (http://www.communitysolution.org/). Richard Heinberg and a lot of intentional-community, new-urbanist focused people met and discussed this. The word is out. Take hope.

The Community Solutions site has transcripts of all the speakers' presentations, plus their PowerPoint slides, if anyone is interested.

I take hope particularly in one of the presentations that was given, about how Cuba faced its own Peak Oil crisis after the fall of the Soviet Union and survived it -- in fact, is even better, in some ways, than before.

Pre-crash, they received $6 bn in subsidies from the USSR, as well as oil at below-market prices, enough for them to even resell to other countries and make a profit. They had "Green Revolution" industrial agriculture, focused on export crops, and while it wasn't a consumer paradise by any means, people drove cars pretty much everywhere.

After the crash, we heard a bit about how Cubans were suffering from malnutrition, even blindness. But now, a scant 14 years later, they are prospering in a local, community-focused, organic, free-market system. Everything is local. Everyone gardens. Farm workers make more than engineers! People are healthier in general: without petro-agriculture, pork farming is down; they are crash-breeding oxen to use as farm traction. The old, state-directed economy made way for local collective arrangements of every kind - from feminist communes to capitalist corporations. Most of the income goes into their universal medical coverage, which in turn is focused now on preventive care. People play a lot of sports to stay healthy.

People came up with their own ad hoc public transit systems, converting 18-wheelers into 300-person "camel" buses.

It's surely not an entirely rosy picture -- the long-term verdict on soil recovery is out -- but it is extremely hopeful that if they could survive that, and transition to local, agrarian economies in only 14 years, North America can too.

[Andy R]

aj,
Using Cuba as an example of sustainable economy isn't likely to win many converts here in the US.
Having said that, it may turn out that in dealing with a future crisis, our own society may come to resemble the emerging class of enterprising Cubans, but without the nanny-state conditioning 50 years of Communist rule has inculcated into the Cuban psyche (well - maybe some...)We might actually do better.

Of course, our detioriating infrastructure will be that much uglier, since unlike Cuba's, it was never pretty to begin with.

I see no redeeming value in farm workers making more than engineers - that sounds like a leftover vestige from the Marxist past.

It is interesting to note however, that as the Cuban government grows more feeble, the people have a de facto freedom that allows private enterprise to flourish, since they are not as tightly controlled by the state. Reinstitute private ownership of land in Cuba and you may see a class of yeoman farmers similar to our country in the late 18th and early 19th century. Wouldn't it be ironic if Cuba ended up more free than America - proof positive that a strong central government is no friend of liberty??

[kd]

Jim,

Stimulating entry as always.

I recently returned to Austin after many years. Horrified to discover it overun by crooked developers & high tech millionaires from Silicon Valley. Now the city like a bad dream. Traffic like Houston, real estate sky high, small towns nearby (like Round Rock) swallowed up by urban strawl.
There's a sad campaign to "Keep Austin Weird" going on. Austin hasn't been weird for a long time.

It broke my heart coming back here.

*

To Andy R: What's the redeeming value in engineers making more than farm workers?

[Lisa]

Jane Jacobs has a great screed on the pseudo-science of transport engineering in her latest book "Dark Age Ahead"...
Hopefully we're nearing the end of universities credentialing Asian kids to go back to their home countries and kill their formerly bike/ped friendly cities with bigger, wider roads, following in the US' short-sighted, oil-soaked tire tracks. I'd be happy to see organic farmers become the new "engineers" and be handsomely rewarded for their patient crafts in the future.

[aj]

Lisa, that's an excellent point. Industrial-scale engineering will likely give way to local craft / artisanship; however, biotech is probably going to replace it.

I don't think we'll be eating transgenic tomatoes, but we will be applying what we know to create newer and better hybrids to survive depleted soil conditions, or to create plants that are better at cleaning the soil around toxic waste sites (phytoremediation). We may get some sort of fuel from microbes, although likely only for onsite use, like biogas.

If the Internet is still going (and I expect it will be, as it will need to replace business travel completely) then I can see a lot of good things that can benefit localized economies, who will still need medicine, science, research.

For example, millions of people already donate their spare 'computer time' to online projects like Stanford's Folding@Home distributed protein-folding simulation, which helps find the origins of many diseases. We could put the same infrastructure to work to solve the agricultural, weather-mapping, crop-predictions, and biotech problems of the post-oil era.

[aj]

AndyR,

If you read the powerpoint presentation on Cuba at that site, one astonishing thing *is* that they decollectivized agriculture and basically re-established private farming. All sorts of things - from worker-owned companies to collectives to family chicken coops on rooftops. If there is land doing nothing in downtown Havana, you make an application to the city and quite probably you can get a license to farm it.

According to the report, most people in Havana own their own homes. Aside from their human rights record, which is shabby at best, I think reality sharply differs from the popular misconceptions-in-place-of-reporting you may have heard...As we Canadians can travel to Cuba no problem, I know many people who have been there and by all accounts it's hardly some sort of grim Soviet prison camp. Apart from the Gitmo bit....

I think after Castro dies that'll likely be it for Cuba As We Knew It; but I think there is still a strong resistance to foreign takeover. I think they'll want to pursue their own way, and it would be a real shame if a Certain Country were to pre-emptively invade because of, I dunno, not enough Wal-Marts, or weapons of mass cultivation or something...

[da]

Wow, KD. I just moved back to Austin as well and this after living in both Florida and the Midwest. Trust me we still have it better in Austin than in Florida, but I agree that it's turned out pretty awful if you just look back to what we had 20 years ago in Austin. Living in South Florida was a bizarre experience for me. I developed a twitch in my eye and some serious emotional problems. That place was beyond my imagination for sprawl, impossible for me to bike commute. It was so unliveable that I went to Green Bay WI and was very happy to have made the choice. That's saying something. Luck and family illness brought me back to Austin recently and I still have hope for the area. I live in the burbs currently but only because that's where I work. I get a lot of flak from Peak Oil minded people in town for living in the burbs(I just rent) but my 4 person family only owns 1 small car and I commute by bicycle to work everyday and its only a 15 minute ride. If my job was in downtown Austin I would readily live there but then I would have to buy one of those $230,000 2 bedroom houses that resemebles a firetrap. I think Jim's point is that we have simply misallocated our resources to such a point that its going to be near impossible to ever set it straight. Since I have been here renting in Austin I have looked all over the metro area and have yet to find a single New Urban type area, its just not done here and I consider Austin progressive for the most part. It's not that people would not live in those types of areas, its just the mindset of the developers and finance people "we'll just go with what works in the market". I have hope for the old Mueller airport area but most around here think the developers will scratch any hope we had. Meanwhile I'll hang here in my "executive apartment" that was put together entirely with a caulking gun(it covers of the mistakes ya know).

[Urbanist]

Jim-

I am afraid that there are not any New Urbanist projects in Winter Park--as you suggest.

Rather, Winter Park is a nineteenth century planned community from which New Urbanists gain inspiration.

Its success is in the fact that it was developed prior to the dominance of the automobile in the metropolitan landscape.

[Andy R]

kd/lisa,
nothing wrong with farmers making more than engineers if the market prices them that way.
question is - who's paying them and why?
"from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" has been tried - and found wanting...

[kd]

Ah, the sacred "market"...

[Andy R]

Yes kd, the "sacred" market. From aj's post, it seems like that evil force is at work in Cuba, with individual initiative providing for the needs of people who realize their government is not their mother- except that part about getting a "license to farm" a piece of property. A lease with a private owner, enforceable by common law would be my first choice...
The ad-hoc public transit is surely a small-scale initiative conceived by individuals who saw an opportunity to provide a needed service and I'm sure it is quite practical.
The more I think about it, the more it seems to be a vindication of early American ideals that were forever lost with the consolidation of power in the Federal government, particularly since the FDR administration. I'm with aj - I'd hate to see the same "Certain Country" that created a culture of dependency among their own disenfrachised going in and offering cheap trinkets to the natives in Cuba via Wal-Mart, etc.
Since they have no oil, perhaps Cuba stands a reasonable chance of being left alone.

We'll see...

[aj]

Cuba still has nickel, and it was of course always a "plantation." America doesn't like it when the field hands revolt :)

As far as I can tell it's pretty much completely decentralized. There is no Zentral Buro of Farming, just a division of their agriculture ministry that's doing a lot of research; the only licensing really is about public land.

I am ashamed to admit, this is not really a new story; i stumbled upon it. The alternative media started covering it around 1999-2000, around the 10th anniversary of the 1991 crash, when word got out that Cuba was devolving into anarchy...but it was one of the least-reported stories in the mainstream media -- it was a Project Censored award-winner.

Cuba was lucky in that its population is highly educated: they have about 11% of all the scientists in the region, and they'd already started research into organic agriculture in the 1980s.

Hugh Warwick wrote one of the best articles on this:
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/twr118h.htm

There, he mentions that there is a wide variety of organizations doing the farming -- old State-run enterprises gone entrepreneurial, with profit-sharing plans and production incentives; worker-run cooperatives; private gardens in people's homes; organization-run gardens meant for on-site consumption, such as factory cafeterias; intensive raised-bed city gardens run by a variety of outfits; individual farmers in the countryside; and the most common type, privately run, neighborhood-centric 'people's gardens.'

What they really have done is put into practice a way of making city land available for urban agriculture. If there's land doing nothing, people get together, have a meeting, put together proposals and vote on it...maybe it gets to the level of city council but I think they realized that central planning is what got them into the mess in the first place.

In a sense, our own market-driven industrial agribusiness, run not by local people but by distant bureaucracies, has come to resemble the bad old Soviet central-planning days of yore, hasn't it? Will Kansas become as bad as Kyshtym, someday?

[aj]

sorry- typo -- that, counter to expectations, Cuba had NOT devolved into anarchy :)

[erik]

To me, it's more interesting to note the renaissance occurring in South Florida (which, in Florida parlance, means SouthEAST Florida). Unlike SWFL, South Florida has a much narrower strip of buildable land between the Atlantic and the Everglades. Communities like Miami and Ft Lauderdale reached buildout several years ago and, as a result, new development has leapfrogged back to the older, eastern portions of Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

In Miami, you have the revitalization of the Design District and continuing densification of Brickell Avenue. In Ft Lauderdale, a huge number of residential towers and townhouses are being constructed downtown and sleepy bungalow neighborhoods like Wilton Manors and their adjacent 40's and 50's style commercial strips are actually turning into pleasant, walkable little communities.

Florida will never be Manhattan, but it's doing some pretty amazing things in reinventing what a suburban city can look like.

[Saurav]

"The baby boomer generation will feel the wrath of the young. Forget about reforming social security. The time will come when a younger generation says, 'Look what you assholes did to our world -- now crawl off and die.'"

I like to think we're more decent than that. I think I'll bitch about baby boomers now and then pay more taxes and bitch later too. But "crawl off and die" isn't part of my political vocabulary, particularly with regard to old people (which boomers will be by then).

Then again, they might drive me to outsource myself to India before it's ever time to confront the combined idiocy of simultaneous unnecessary war and trillion dollar tax cuts.

[carlostheobscure]

"...crawl off and die..." very well might be the emblematic phrase of future political discourse if this civilization crashes and burns due to a confluence of economic and ecological factors. After that kind of discontinuity, those that inherit the toxic mess-if they're in position to offer a criticism at all-would likely look on the millions of "American consumers" as little better than Nazi rank and file, with the corporatist elite and their apologists currently running the show as the American epoch's equivalent of Goebbels, etc.
Then again, I'm often surprised at people's lack of vindicativeness when it comes to really large crimes. For instance, it strikes me as remarkable that not a single dispossessed worker/retiree from Enron, Worlcom, etc. has gone postal on "Kenny boy" Lay or some other example of corporate swine? In the aftermath of the destruction of the economic and environmental commons due to our profligate ways, the following generations might simply face their fate in stunned silence, unable to assign blame due to the overwhelming banality of the untold and countless material choices that led the fat cats that preceded them to the edge--and into--the abyss.

[Andy R]

carlostheobscure,
I think that widespread prosperity (or the material goods that lend to that illusion) is why you don't see the expected reaction to the Enron/Worldcom situations here in the US of A.
People are pretty docile when they can get everything they need without killing something - and everything they want when the world offers them a plastic card with a magnetic strip.
I'm still thinking of the Cuban example - given a similar circumstance, would the US follow the Cuban evolution to decentralization or go the route that Kunstler has postulated - drawn towards the "corn-pone nazi" populist politician who will return us to the "golden-age" of drive-in utopias?
Our national psyche (what's left of it after 70 years of intrusion by the welfare-state) could lead us towards an improved model of what Cuba has rediscovered out of necessity. Or we could have the tantrum that Kunstler has predicted because of the misguided sense of entitlement that permeated public life in America during the 20th century.

Whatever happens, whenever it happens - it will be "interesting times" for sure...

[orionoir]

i think of the consensus view on freud -- his genius was in his questions, not his answers -- when i read jim's near-term apocalyptic predictions. it's become common wisdom that america's socioeconomic follies simply cannot go on this way much longer, the center will not hold and the bottom will fall out, perhaps the process is already underway. yet corporate profits remain at an all-time high and most people see at least 4% growth going forward. dollar bears continue to make the case for a worldwide currency implosion and yet still, despite a twelve or thirteen digit tab for a "war of choice," there just hasn't been any fire to this fire.

the status quo is often more resilient than we give it credit for.

you don't have to go back too many years to find people seeing the end of the world in oil at $25 bbl let alone today's $50. my guess is it can double and double again before the middle class feels compelled to change its behavior. as it stands now, the recreational use of gasoline is a marker of suburban/rural mental poverty -- it's not your banker's kids who are wreaking havoc on their snowmobiles, it's that family on tobacco road who plows your driveway and sharpens your chainsaws.

the sickest puppy of all when it comes to american asset classes is this staggering real estate bull of ours. in my former incarnation as an infotech whore i didn't blink at roundtrip commutes of five and six hours, the long drive was not the biggest factor in an equation that since has moved to bangalore. two or three hundred grand buys a beautiful house midway between boston and fairfield county, gasoline would have to go to a million bucks a gallon before i'd feel compelled to buy into the boston burbs.

a national real estate collapse reminiscent of the 80s oil patch would wash away a lot of surprisingly soluble wealth, but it would also free up space for generations who are presently priced out of near-urban housing. as for me, well i believe in beauty etc, but as everyone else, i've got my price... if those $half million mcmansions on the new cul de sac go on half-price sale, heck, happiness is four and a half bathrooms, i can live with a repulsive exterior.

[aj]

Orionoir, that will surely happen. What will also happen is that the burbs will cease to be 'cartoons of country living' in Jim's words: they will become little farmlets out of necessity.

Pets or meat, indeed.

[scotty]

Interesting discussion, glad I found this page... It's truly amazing how many people are simply ignorant about modern day energy concerns. Most people think we'll have access to cheap oil for another 50-100 years. "The price increases of recent times are simply anomolies." Most people don't realize that China, India, along with other developing nations need oil too and were not the only nation that is oil thirsty. With whom does the blame fall for the sprawl of the US? My parents generation? Maybe.. I can remember shopping downtown, and my mom would say "I remember years ago, this was the only place you needed to go. Less than a mile walk away and you had access to everything you needed, it's a shame what happened to this place, now its a ghost town" I remember laughing it off like a smart assed kid, "sure ma, who cares about crappy downtown, can we go the mall now"

I can't believe that these issues hardly ever reach the mainstream media. It's as if the problem doesn't exist. Ask 100 people about what peak oil means for the future, and 95/100 will stare at you blankly.

Maybe I'll buy a 50 acres up in remote Northern Vermont and learn to farm my own food and to shoot a shotgun.. Or maybe I'll stick around the Boston area..... and just learn to shoot the shotgun.

[aj]

It's funny and sad that the core truth of Peak Oil is being used to defend tinkering with Social Security..."If we don't do something now it'll all be gone in 40 years!"

[SB]

On the point of a "crawl off and die" I feel that Mr Kunstler is right on the money. With the many storms on the horizon as it stands ie "consummer debt, National debt, SSI, baby boomers comming of age and collecting soon, personal debts, housing bubble...you throw in a possible 100+ USD bbl by the end of this decade and it sure can be a reciept for disaster! American life also has evloved into a individualist suburbia sprawl mindset. The homes of Ameica may be pretty buts its settings are ugly. It has really turned into a nation not really worth defending "by the way I served 10 yrs in the army and was in the Iraq Freedom call up" I am 29 yrs old and the US as I reflected on in the last few yrs has really nothing worth defending..only thing good is the dollar let it collapse and America is a really screwed nation. I wish I lived in the USA "I now relocated with my family to Europe" I wish the USA had walkable commutes, non shallow people, kind of the America of the 1940's...Its gone Ive lost hope in the USA. Now do I blame thew older people "boomer" yes and no. They just did what everyone else was doing at the time and greed played the role. But I think when the dollar collapses, peak oil is here in full swing and debts bankrupt Americas...boomers are going to also have it difficult.
As for FL and its future. I with Jim think if I lived there now I would get out while I can still get a good dollar out of my home. That place will be very disfunctional in the next 10 yrs or less. In 1924 FL had 4 million residents "really pre-oil" it was a backwater. Was not "the place to live" at that time. Take cheap oil away from FL and its current 20+ million population are going to be "getting out of Dodge City!
Great post Jim! Clusterfuck update has been a must read weekly since I found it 6 months ago!

[orionoir]

of all things about which to worry, food scarcity seems quite irrational to me... there's a zillion layers of metaphoric fat we could trim from our national distribution system before we'd get down to muscle and bone. it would truly sad, of course, to lose the cheese doodles, buf if it were to come down to it, we all could learn to love rickshaw-delivered tofu.

somehow i don't see northern vermont as a terrific destination for someone concerned about the waning days of the age of petroleum. forget about having fun shooting your gun, people are so poor up there they can't afford to miss. or heat their homes. or buy cheese doodles (nearly every damn thing is trucked in from somewhere else.)

florida mb unspeakably ugly, but life in the ruins of orlando will still be a whole lot more pleasant than what's left of chilly new england. i guess that's my argument with jim's pessimism: he moves from sharp-eyed aesthetic observation to conclusions of economic doom & gloom without a whole lot of intervening math. for all we know the move away from car-centric communities will be gradual, creative, and downright character-building.

[Brian Miller]

Re: the last poster. That's always one of Jim's themes that I laugh at: the death of Sunbelt. The unlivable desert areas, maybe (Phoenix and Las Vegas can rot in hell, for all I care)...But: I can live without air conditioning. Uncomfortably, but with no real problem. I go days without turning the heat on in Northern California winters.

How will Saratoga Springs survive, though? With the multiple millions of people living there, Jim and his fellow northeasterners/upstate New Yorkers will run out of fireplace fuel pretty quickly once the heating oil runs out :)