Rust and Sun

    My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.

____________________________________                                          

     Last week I sojourned in two parts of the country that might have been separate nations: Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, and Austin, Texas.

     Misfortune hit Wilkes Barre hard twice in recent history. The first time was one day in 1959 when coal miners working a vein under the Susquehanna River made an error in judgment and poked a hole up through the river bed, flooding miles of interconnected mineshafts under half the county. For days after that, workers threw in every kind of material at hand to close up the hole in the river bottom -- gravel, boulders, parts of old buildings, whole trucks -- but nothing availed until the mines drank up all the river water they could hold. That was the end of the anthracite industry in Wilkes Barre. More than 30,000 miners lost their paychecks forever.

     The second calamity was Hurricane Agnes in 1972, which strayed inland and lingered viciously in the folded hills of the Susquehanna watershed. This time the river flowed over its banks and drowned the city center. Something like 60 percent of the pre-WW2 architectural fabric went for a swim, a lot of it very grand stuff. Federal disaster aid completed the job. It paid to bulldoze the flood damaged buildings and replace them with the sort of awful concrete boxes (and lollipop street lamps) that expressed perfectly the bureaucratic loathing for the very idea of city life and almost guaranteed a failure to recover both economically and psychologically.

      The city remains in poor shape, with those bad newer buildings (now aging badly), and the "missing teeth" of more recent demolitions, and a sagging population base. But I liked the young professionals I met there who are working to revive this very damaged place. They were intelligent, and cheerful despite the difficulty of their task. They clearly loved their town. They were free to move elsewhere, had even been to college elsewhere, but had returned to their old city in the valley to make a stand. And they had worked tirelessly to actually get a few good new things built.

     A few days later, I flew off to Austin, Texas, to check in on the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism (the CNU) an organization of architects, town planners, and developers who have been working heroically for two decades to counter the death spiral of suburbia with a more sustainable vision of the human habitat. Each year the CNU moves its national meet-up to a different city so the members can see what's really going on around the country.

     For all of its reputation as a lively place, Austin's city center didn't add up to much. Of course, there was the famous Sixth Street strip of music joints, which in recent years has morphed into a perpetual party scene in the mold of Bourbon Street in New Orleans -- except in the case of Austin, the buildings themselves are little more than packing crates with bars and bandstands, while the side streets are adorned with rows of port-a-johns reeking in the impressive heat of the Texas spring.

     The rest of the city center is emblematic of all the blunders that poorly-trained municipal planners have imposed all over America -- overscaled office towers set back from the street behind meaningless landscaping fantasias, blocks of buildings that present blank walls to streets, and along one weird block, an extremely narrow sidewalk with new street trees planted right in the center, making it impossible for two people to walk together side-by-side. Here and there new condominium towers stood, with cafes on the ground floor, and a number of additional ones were under construction, which was well and good -- except they were gigantic towers. I'm not keen on towers. They deform the urban fabric and they will certainly lose functionality as we leave behind the fossil fuel age. There were plenty of vacant lots, too, between the state capitol dome and Lake Austin. The downtown streets were all six-laners, of course, many of them one-way, which prompted the motorists to drive as if they were on an expressway.

      The convention center itself was a thing built to such a pharoanic scale that Rameses the Great might have commissioned it for his villa in Easthampton. It was a quarter-mile walk from the front of the ballroom to the coffee set-up in the rear -- and this was one of the smaller ballrooms. The larger ones were occupied by some kind of intramural sports association convention full of people wearing sideways hats and weird, calf-length athletic shorts. The Sunbelt is all about sports, where the social aggression seething below the surface has been channeled.

     All this was hardly the fault of the New Urbanists, who came there mostly to look and learn, and continue the process of refining their agenda for the years ahead. More and more they are coming to recognize the discontinuities we face in the form of peak oil and climate change. On these points, the leadership may be even more radically active than the membership. The ideas from meetings they held in Austin about how to meet these problems will continue to radiate through the country. They are probably the only group of professionals in America that I know of -- including the professional environmentalists -- who have a coherent vision of how America might physically arrange daily life in the terrible aftermath of the fossil fuel fiasco. Their ideas have the power to galvanize our otherwise lame political debates of the season. Nobody else in America is really thinking about what we'll do when the cardboard signs appear on the convenience store pump racks saying "out of gas...."

     Austin is exactly the kind of place in America that will get into trouble when that happens. It'll have to find something else to do with itself besides hosting drinking contests on Sixth Street every weekend night for visiting motorists. Much smaller Wilkes Barre, too, will struggle to find its way, but the one thing it surely isn't burdened with is an outsized sense of its own wonderfulness. How will these different regions of the nation find a common purpose as we slide into the long emergency? How will our political candidates find the language to articulate our predicament? They might start by listening to the New Urbanists.

Comments

[RJG]

re: Much smaller Wilkes Barre, too, will struggle to find its way, but the one thing it surely isn't burdened with is an outsized sense of its own wonderfulness.

This little line at the end says so much..
Very poignant this week Jim..
Thanks..

[Nicholas Paredes]

I used to go down to Austin for business at the turn of the century, as it quickly leveled all that had character in the center. Not far from the convention center is a rather small, but nice, downtown.

Western towns can be a bit strange in the width of the streets, with low lying buildings. But, given that most of them were not very large, I suppose that it didn’t matter. The layout simply mimicked the scrub on the other side of the buildings.

Austin, like many places, is simply in a feedback loop of money and ego. We all know the solution to that problem!

[PeakOilBoy]

I have found that Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon like to try and "outdo" one another since they are both considered bastions of leftism.

And even though both cities are Peak Oil active, they are still stuck in "Business As Usual" when it comes to politics.

Sure, they are going beyond just talking about making the switch to driving electric European phone-booth cars.

The time for denial of the need to do something about peak oil is over. Those of us in the Peak Oil Solutions market now get to begin peddling our wares and ways to fix this mess. Municipalities are now actively seeking solutions that help reduce carbon emissions and decrease our dependency on fossil fuels. While this is a step forward, the government resistance to those actual changes is enormous. Thus, we must to examine how to make sensible changes happen much faster at the local level.

Afraid of being told they aren't acting fast enough or working in an efficient enough way, local government officials immediately point to their accomplishments and begin to justify their present programs and structure.

Peter Lunsford, a longtime Peak Oil activist puts it this way:

"I have worked for more than six months to raise awareness among the municipal and County leadership in Washington County. The leadership here is conservative, some still honestly believing that humans are not contributing significantly to global warming, or that fuel cell technology will come to save us in ample time. What I have repeatedly heard has been that the existing plans they have in action (which don't include energy uncertainty by the way, and took years to develop in the first place) already are planned forward in the time-frames of years. No one in government really wants to stop that train. A good portion of these plans are actually rooted in law, bond issues, contractual obligations, bids, Federal Government alliances, business commitments, etc, and will require herculean efforts to change (including potential defaults on obligations,) which again the leadership doesn't want to mess with. It is a very serious conundrum."

It seems as non-government solutions for dealing with Peak Oil come to market, there are many, many bureaucrats that are going to feel threatened. These are public employees who's salaries are attached to the existing government system. When they see that the free market has done a better job than they have in creating solutions, they immediately cling to their psychology of previous investment and try to justify their existing government programs.

" But we have spent $250,000 on our existing system! "
" We have 32 departments to handle all those functions! "
" We don't want to be liable for any system outside of ours! "

I would suggest that cities across America create an incentive for getting people to convert their lawns to food gardens - instead of spending money on consultants who are stuck in yesterday's thinking - allocate some funds as a "Prize", 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place for the best "Edible Landscape".

At least it could get people thinking about where food comes from and get a ball rolling towards change faster than installing inner city choo choo tracks.

Editor, Lawns to Gardens

[Lost Horizon]

Unfortunately, America in general is very much 'burdened with an outsized sense of its own wonderfulness'

The general U.S. public's cluelessness is breathtaking. It can never seem to get beyond the 'We're Number One' propaganda drummed into it's collective skull 24/7 be the tarted up Media Whores of Corporatism.

Last time a checked, the US was behind Costa Rico in math scores.

We're 26th, We're 26th.....

[Riddick]

"Nobody else in America is really thinking about what we'll do when the cardboard signs appear on the convenience store pump racks saying "out of gas...."

All I know is that I remember the last time we rationed gas in the 70's as I was a newly minted driver then. I recall the odd and even days based on your tag numbers. The long waits and the 10 gallon per vehicle limit. Tempers flared, people driving up in their guzzling chargers and coronets were dumbfounded.

Should be fun this time around when their is no light shining at the end of the tunnel.

[montysano]

"Unfortunately, America in general is very much 'burdened with an outsized sense of its own wonderfulness'"

Amen to that.

I occasionally call in to a local rightwing talk radio show and rain on their "USA! USA!" fest.

I got to get a new hobby. Yeah.........I know, but a guy's gotta have a hobby. Recently, during a discussion of Christianity, I asked how these fine Church People dealt with the 1 million dead Iraqi civiians (now verified by a third international study).

"USA! USA!"

[butchartist]

Glad to see that Mr. Kunstler has visited the city of Austin! Living just south of Austin, and observing the "cool" folks that live in that concrete mess has been very informing. They pride themselves in being "left" and "green" and the "blue dot" in the sea of red Texas. But they are all about keeping the cars moving. Being a artist, I worked up a whole series of Peak Oil collages. The reaction in Austin was amazing. They do not want to think about a world without oil or cars. The little towns that surround Austin still have their squares intact and most still depend on a local economy in some way. Farming was important in the past and will become important again in these towns. Yep, Texans are in for a big shock. I just hope that their belief in the "right to drive" does not turn ugly. But that is a mighty big wish for a culture that helped define the Age of Oil!
Yeeee Hawww!

[theroachman1]

"The downtown streets were all six-laners, of course, many of them one-way, which prompted the motorists to drive as if they were on an expressway."

That is almost how the whole country works in just one sentance. We can only see in front of us because we are moving to fast to see anything else.

[theroachman1]

Great post today as ususall

The funniest part is that many people think Austin as one of them "liberal cities" you would think that a city like that would be doing a better job of urban planning. But no they are stuck in the same mold as all other cities in this country. Cities like Austin seem to want to be the next Chicago, New York or San Fransisco

[progressive reactionary]

I'm curious about your faith in New Urbanism as a viable architectural and urban model. I understand that the CNU has retooled itself to project a veneer of sustainable, eco-conscious responsibility, but it's important to understand that this school of thought was founded as a fundamentally reactionary critique of the failed urban experiments of architectural modernism. Rooted in a sensibility of false nostalgia - longing for a bucolic past that never really existed in the first place - New Urbanism depends on obsolete planning practices and, frankly, obsolete moral practices. Don't get me wrong - there are aspects of New Urbanist dogma which are commendable and undeniably positive, such as walkable cities, the focus on local economies, and the movement's recent emphasis on sustainable living. But it's important not to ignore the movement's dark side, so to say: its quasi-fascist reliance on top-down codes and regulations, its preference for bland homogeneity over difference, and its insistence on a so-called "traditional" (but really kitsch-historical) form language as the only acceptable aesthetic.

I understand your attraction to New Urbanism as a means to address/mitigate the effects of Peak Oil. But I also think it's important to perhaps imagine some other, more positive, forward-thinking, and less regressive - indeed, progressive! - strategy to deal with the crisis at hand.

for some of my assorted doubts re: New Urbanism:
http://progressivereactionary.blogspot.com/search/label/new-urbanism

[Dave]

Dear JHK
Had the pleasure of hearing you speak at Kings College (my alma mater) and very much enjoyed it and was thrilled by the crowd you drew. Your talk had the timing of a Catskill Comic on a good night and the clarity of a damn good NYC High School Teacher. I can give no higher praise !
And you even signed my books of yours which was a real treat.
Wilkes- Barre is sort of a curiuos place once you get to know it well as I have being from the area. It gets sort of a hold on you after a while and those that leave sometimes return sheepishly to live or denounce the place a little overmuch making one suspect
that they are ambiguous about having left. Thanks for coming to my fair city and hope one day to see you again.

[Anonymous Blowhard]

From last week, Thal's question:

>Whatever is your point?

Hubris I suppose. I admit, I was distracted when I wrote this & didn't get my point across - still not sure if I can. Anyhow, the point was Nudge's mentions were of folks who could, in theory, invoke some sympathy in that number crunching wasn't their forte. The gentleman I mentioned went on at length about how he was "smarter than the average bear" and while the average American would fail, his Superior Intellect would not let him get in trouble.

I don't like to see people suffer. But, when someone chuckles at the misfortune of others and how they'd never be that foolish, but then screams bloody murder when they reap their own troubles in a similar fashion, it's harder to engender anything other than schaudenfreude.

Apologies on being clear as mud there. More random ranting than anything else, I suppose.

[sharon]

My daughter gave me a copy of "Under the Tuscan Sun" for Christmas. The eye-opener is that it is clear that civilization can go on quite well without fossil fuels.

Sure, there are still cars in the Tuscan landscape, but they are not omniprescent. The picture that emerges in their absence is one of local communities, locally grown food, local cuisines. The result appears to be "health and beauty, life and art."

The author revels in fruits and vegetables grown to perfection and sold at that peak of ripeness and perfection, delights in local cuisines and wines.

We can do that!

The end of oil may well mean, not just food worth eating, but life worth living. I'm rooting for it.

[Johnny Rico]

"The eye-opener is that it is clear that civilization can go on quite well without fossil fuels."

Who would have thought a novel that served as the basis of a chick-flick starring Diane Lane and Sandra Oh could relieve all our misplaced fears about the post-apocalyptic nightmare.

"Sure, there are still cars in the Tuscan landscape, but they are not omniprescent. The picture that emerges in their absence is one of local communities, locally grown food, local cuisines."

Sounded too good to be true so I looked it up in Wikipedia and then found it on a map. It’s called Italy. It actually exists. That’s awesome.

[LaughingAsRomeWasBurningDown]

I so totally missed the post-apocalyptic setting of that movie.

[Johnny Rico]

My point. And I didn't even see the movie.

[SolubleFish]

"The downtown streets were all six-laners, of course, many of them one-way, which prompted the motorists to drive as if they were on an expressway."

JHK is smoking crack again (or just trying to liven up his blog).

So far, Texas has remained more or less immune to the housing and finance situation. But builders are starting to find it more and more difficult to find easy investment. There are a lot of new condos slated to be built in Austin still. Some investors are requiring at least half of those already be sold before providing any kind of investment (even in Austin's top market). It is my guess some of them won't be getting built while others may sink in the coming months or years. I'm waiting for the day that mommy and daddy cant send their frat or sorority kid off to UT and will force them to stay home for one or more years to attend community college (what a hit to the ego that would be). Things are always quieter in between school sessions. When the market effects spreads to Austin more fully I suspect that is how it will look for the long term. A lot of people looking for jobs, not being able to afford school (I once met a student at a hotel jacuzzi who was paying 3,000 a month - in 2000 dollars - or more to stay at the hotel until he got the place he was wanting to live in) or being foreclosed on will be making the exodus back out of Austin, once one of the fastest growing cities in the US.

I hope I will not have to grieve too much for someone I know who with their young family bought an 800k newly built home in a trendy location with an interest only loan.

Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are also still strong markets, probably in the top 10 or 20 in the US. Each being at least 2 to 3 times larger than Austin. I once wondered if the Megalopolis of DFW and its suburbs would reach all the way to Tyler or Oklahoma. But when it implodes that giant concrete slab will still be like the Titanic in the night. And the black swans will descend on it like devils upon Disneyland. The sheer amount of man-made lakes however could perhaps turn it into one big fishing economy.

[SolubleFish]

"I once met a student at a hotel jacuzzi who was paying 3,000 a month - in 2000 dollars"

Make that at least 5,000 in 2000 monopoly money dollars. It was at the Sheraton after all, not motel 6.

[upnatpishtim]

the snot locker effect (tm)
this essay requires a few para-dig-em shifts.
or in other words a paradyne shift.
recent information from the cassini probe sent to saturn indicates that one of the moons of that ringed planet,titan,
has 4 to 6 times as much hydrocarbon reserves as the entire are-th.
this primordial hydrocarbon is mostly methane. it exsists in lakes over 10 meters deep.
i agree that the are-th has this same primordial hydrocarbon. the russians are sed to have drilled deep into the crust of our planet, perhaps 8 miles to recover
this resource. this is not to discount the pre space age view of fossil fuel to be the geologic reprocessing of
biological remains. the are-th probably has both processes.
i wish to point out some discrepancies.
one is the fact that titan evolved around saturn, many times the distance of the are-th to the sun. second is the face that saturn is a gas bag mostly hydrogen and compounds such as methane.
the are-th has a moon. it has been exstensively studied.
it has even been visited by our speicies. no hydrocarbons there.
they say venus is are-th's twin. in diameter only.
to date hydrocarbons are not available in quantity.
and mars, maybe life arose there, and that means maybe fossil fuels. and primordial hydrocarbons?
guess work.
even with this added capacity of primordial hydrocarbons are-th is a finite place. it's diameter and volume and surface area are well known and precise
quantities. by human standards this may appear large.
i suspect that it is possible to consume a large fraction of these reserves. so much so that humans will alter the environment or exhaust the supply.
the by products of combustion are emitted into the atmosphere. our atmosphere has a large oxygen and nitrogen content. compare this to titan. it's atmosphere is mostly methane and ammonia. not a pleasant place indeed. venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide.both these places have extreme temperatures. titan being very cold and venus very hot.
are-th right in the middle or at least comfortable for humans.
it is true that a huge volcano or even a small one or a series of small ones can add multiples of any total combustion of all humans' activity. some say this is a good reason to ignore our own contributions to the alteration of the are-th's atmosphere.
any catastrophic event,such as a meteor impact can
render unlivable the are-th's biosphere. yet humans have
devestated the biosphere over and over again. witness the slaughter of the bison of the american west. there is talk of the cedars of lebenon, which no longer exsist today. lybia was the bread basket of the roman empire.
and the dessertification of that area is one of the main reasons rome fell. humans have decimated the various whale populations. dodo's are a recent example of humans causing extinction. and who is to say we wont cause our own extinction. is there a limit to human greed and folly?
technology has offered many benefits. and many dangers. our own profilgate breeding has caused
many problems. now certain nations are consuming as much as the usa. and emitting as much waste.
as their populations are larger they will soon overtake and surpass the usa in per capita production, consumption and waste. it is sed that there is a new continent in the middle of the pacific ocean made of plastic. it cant be walked on or colonized. actually it is a plastic soup. no one knows what this means.
i must note here about the almost total disappearance of pacific salmon, and the explosion of jelly fish ocean wide. yet nay sayers say humans have no foot print. and hence no responsibility.
the plastic soup is the transformation of are-th's hydrocarbon endowment from one form to another.
it is not 100% efficient. the transformation releases heat.
i propose that not only do we have a pollution problem and an energy problem, we have also a heat problem.
if we can make a pipe line of tanker space ships to titan and return it's hydrocarbons to are-th to consume we will reach a heat crisis. this is waste heat that is not reclaimed. it adds to the are-th's heat budget.
let us consider a run away atomic reaction. the core of
a reactor can get so hot as to sink into the crust of the planet. this almost happened twice. converting hydrocarbons into plastic may be more diffuse but it can add up to the same kilo calories over time. same thing with combustion. you get a chemical change of the fuel and waste heat.
if a fly lands on a steel beam it has to deflect it. perhaps
it is miniscule. but keep adding flies and eventually
the steel beam can be seen to deflect. and one can calculate exactly how many flies it will take to bend or break that beam. and humans are those flies on the are-th. we are making changes. we dont know what these
changes may be. just because we cant adequately quantify the changes doesnt mean they arent ocurring.
we can point to many things humans have done to disrupt life on are-th. there will come a time when all
fossil fuels and primordial hydrocarbons are for practical
purposes used up. then what?
and what of the population explosion that was made possible by using up all that fuel? and what of the tremendous waste products of a high tech civilization?
and what of all this war business? how does one factor in the abject waste of munitions production and the documented destruction of entire areas laid to waste and poisoned?
the usa has discharged one billion rounds of small arms ammunition in iraq alone. there is also the release of so called depleted uranium which is not depleted. uranium is a lead like compound. it is more toxic chemically than lead and is radioactive in spite of the label the defence industry has given it.
even "peaceful" use of the atom is fraught with danger. no one knows what to do with spent fuel from atomic fission.
i offer this bleak senario. we keep on going just as we do now. the oceans die. we run out of fossil fuel and primordial hydrocarbons. farm land becomes unproductive from over use. food becomes unavailable at any price. money becomes useless. expect riots and civil disobedience. mass murders. atomic warfare.
the end of human exsistance. this will happen soon.
some of the rich and powerful think they can escape by
securing vast tracks of land in continents far away from
the developed countries. they didnt count on the poisoning of the entire biosphere in the pursuit of thei
er power and riches. they may last slightly longer. but the disaster will find them also.
it wont be pretty.even as you read this the catastrophy is unfolding. there is nothing you can do. nothing. it is too late. enjoy life while you can. suffering will become universal.
it will take many years for the are-th to recover. all the wisdom and stupidity of this time will be forgotten. we have bombed ourselves back into the stone age. thus we frustrate einstien.
one last thing,very important....
no one gets out of here alive.

[baileyalexander]

Good post, per usual.

JK, you constantly ponder how your fellow citizens will address their past, their present, their current state of emergency…

Who knows, some whine or wax on about the immaturity or the trivialization of the current mindset in America, but that happens all over...I simply think it’s a Lack of Perspective.

Where's the depth, the analysis, the ability to compare and contrast...it’s non existent. There's no beyond, beyond what little they see in front of them.

Lack of perspective...who knows how x factors will play out...there's a myriad of ways to live, to make a perception, but there's something odd about how we screwed up so quickly....I always thing of the late 50's/early 60's as the cultural and intellectual zenith...but that lasted for about a minute.

Look at the dialogue, how people interact on blogs, what they project….change is imminent, but this is disconcerting...if only we had to deal w/more borders...who knows...just lack of perspective...

[SolubleFish]

Here is another spin on it.

Life after the collapse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa7yf9XtcJM

[asoka]

"Last time a checked, the US was behind Costa Rico in math scores."

Costa Rica has been ahead of the USA in ideas for a long time. In 1949 Costa Rica had the good sense to completely abolish its military and use the money to develop infrastructure, health, education, etc. so it's no surprise Costa Rica is ahead of the USA.

[Johnny Rico]

"the are-th has a moon. it has been exstensively studied.
it has even been visited by our speicies."

It's not true. The moon landing was staged. In the video the flag is flapping around. There's no wind on the moon. Stop smokin the dust, chief.

[Johnny Rico]

"so it's no surprise Costa Rica is ahead of the USA."

Yeah. I heard Microsoft and Google are moving their headquarters there soon because it's such an innovative environment ... and, um, the math scores are good.

[Dr.Doom]

JR, San Jose, Costa Rica is already home for a big Intel chip plant. Seems Intel gets a nice combination of well-educated people willing to work long hours for relative-to-the-US, low pay. Kinda like post-WWII US factory workers, except for the well-educated part. I know, because I was raised by such factory workers, who labored at a former GE plant in Southern California (now located in Brazil).