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

[Dr.Doom]

Sorry, I'm late to this party....

"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."--JR

Yes, JR, I've been there too, and let me tell you the food and spirits are fantastic! People are OK too.

Somebody besides me please tell newbie(?) Sharon that everyone can't live the idyllic life of Tuscany, even all those Italians living there now.

[thal]

Johnny,

The flag on the moon used a pre-bent coat hanger (used previously from back alley abortions, disinfected, and wrapped in a plastic flag). Spiro Agnew knew the contractors. It's all on the Nixon tapes.

[thal]

Sorry AnonymousB, I reread my postal, and it made absolutely no sense to me. Apparently, it made some sense to you. Kind regards.

I've read two comments here today about looking forward. We're not looking forward, not even close, unless one thinks one can discern the road ahead through a quarter inch of ice mixed with carbon black on an unscraped windshield.

[Nudge]

AB, regarding the thread from last week, I thought you were fairly clear in your meaning. It is very much human nature (or at least the part we know as hubris) for anyone, no matter where that person falls on the bell curve, to assume that s/he knows it all and can always outsmart all the other bears in the forest.

One woman I know out here has the temerity (I'll be nice and not call it something else) to commute from New Hampshire to Rhode Island, solo, in an older Yukon Denali that gets 12mpg on a good day. Like the others of that stripe, she goes on to complain about fuel prices and to proclaim loudly how much she loves her truck. She says she couldn't stand the thought of commuting in anything smaller. Like the truck, the work place and the home were all voluntarily chosen, though, so I haven't got much sympathy for her. No one's forcing her to work there, live here, or drive that rolling monstrosity between both places. Right now she's spending more than half her take-home pay on gasoline.

I know others who do this type of thing. It really doesn't seem to matter where they are on the bell curve. One of my relatives (name withheld in case he reads here) has a “custom” McMansion in silly.con valley .. with an adjustable 8.5%~12.5% rate mortgage for $1.49m. The interest alone on it is more than twice my gross pay. The loan also has a clause that they can't refinance before 2012. Ouch. He and his wife have (or had) two leased BMWs in the driveway, the custom kitchen, tons o' snobbery, etc. They've been telling everyone for decades how smart they are. After all this prolonged buffoonery on their part, though, we've recently learned that they can't afford to finish the backyard, one of the leased cars had to be downgraded (oh, the horror!) and the kids had to be taken out of exclusive private school. Oh and the missus has like $300K in school debt from being in school until her early 40s, and having never really worked in her life before, she can't find a job in the current economy. (I'd like to feel bad for them, but the last time I tried, it resulted in a laughing fit that made my sides ache for days afterward. Tards. But they make such rich schadenfreude fodder!)

Just like my uber-pretentious relatives and the SUV people who are going broke, there's a big difference between being smart and knowing what the F you're doing.

[thal]

How much of modern American human existence is spent oscillating between boxes in drive-by-with little-peripheral-perspective mode? A bunch, I think. I'm going back to walking.

Nudge, you misspelled the car-name. It's the Denial.

I'm now wondering if Wilkes Barre might be a place to check out

[Nudge]

Lovely stuff, Jim, and a nice break from the financial meltdown scene. Besides, the MSM have shown up at the party, 10 months late of course, having just learned that something's amiss somehow in Ostrich Nation. They've got news crews crawling all over the broken edifice, like ants on a train wreck, seeking via video- and sound-bites to highlight the plot in terms simple enough for their ant audiences to understand. It's not working out too well for them, though, since a sizable portion of the audience played bit roles in the disaster, and many of them are like flatworms at the opera anyhow.

“ .. burdened with an outsize sense of its own wonderfulness .. “ Yup, that's the 'murika we have in the here and now.

Lately I've wondered if that's not the type of force driving all the idiotic behavior seen on the roads these days. I mean the really stupid, insensate stuff, like tailgating at sub-carlength distances even above the speed limit in places where the cops are pretty strict, acting very aggressive with other drivers even though it brings everyone perilously close to accidents, and so on. Does each and every little prince or princess behind the wheel imagine him or herself to be a little Donald or Ivana Trump character? It certainly seems that way at times, judging from the overblown importance these people attach to the most mundane of trips across the local landscape.

[Nudge]

Thal, I'm having the same thought about Wilkes-Barre. Perhaps I should check it out on the way west? My god, it sounds as if some semblance of a clue is forming there, the sort of clue that's so sorely lacking everywhere else.

One of the many places where that clue is so lacking is Schenectady, NY, which is probably the next closest thing to a city from where JHK lives, the misled artists colony cum racetrack slash college dorm that is Saratoga Springs excepted. Schenectady has been a basket case since the 1960s. It's forever trying to reinvent itself as a good place to live, and it throws money at big projects like cleaning up Proctor's Theatre or bricking over the first block of Jay Street to turn it into a hip downtown area. Of course, Schenectady hasn't done squat to address the problems of atrociously bad urban planning, lack of manufacturing jobs, bad racial problems, and more. The main drag between Schenectady and Albany is probably one of the most disgusting examples of strip-mall sprawl you'll ever find on this planet.

Probably most of you who read WMBH are not too familiar with the area in which the story takes place. For all intents and purposes, the place where the fictional Union Grove is located is essentially the same as where the town of Schuylerville now sits. Given the location, I found it horribly odd that Saratoga was never mentioned, as it's barely 10 miles west on route 29. Maybe that was JHK's way of saying that the lack of post-Crash tourism killed off the Saratoga Springs economy (no rivers run through it) but then, Union Grove did nothing with the river either.

Thal, I can find some excuse to swing through W-B :)

[Anonymous Blowhard]

Thal, no worries. Writing is hit & miss with me when it's not technical (and even then). I assume I'm making as much sense as an SUV... um... pretty much anywhere, I guess.

I love the corrected spelling of the GMC monster. Were I perhaps a little younger & foolish, as opposed to older & foolish, it might be amusing to see what I could do to change those plastic nameplates to reflect their real names.

Not that I would recommend such activity, of course - "That would be wrong".

[Nudge]

Is there any move afoot to have something like “fair reporting” in the news? You can sort of do that sort of thing on YouTube by adding the appropriate counter-text breaks to an existing video.

Take for instance the last time the white house press secretary presented lame talking points about the “alarming” (LOL) news that China had increased its military budget. That would have been the appropriate time to pause the news to remind the audience that at $500Bn per year, the US spends more than the other 190 countries (including China) all added together. Pot, meet kettle.

[Nudge]

LOL, Yukon Denial. Very nice :)

[thal]

I once owned a beater Honda. On the back, the NDA had broken off. I was driving a HO.

Great car! Fill it up with gas and double the value of my ride.

[thal]

Nudge,

Yeah. Check the place out. I trust you.

AnonB,

Technical writing is very hard to do well. Ask anyone who's had to assemble parts pulled out of box labeled "Some Assembly Required. Made in Taiwan."

If it's software, all the more abstract.

[thal]

Doom,

Amongst all the tragedy out there, right up there is decanting of our industrial wits, skills, and inventiveness to the hinterlands by way of outsourcing at the behest of the finance boyz to save and derive, a buck. There's no doubt that we are a clever, though of late, distracted people. We could have prevented a large measure of this tragedy by giving a shit. It's sad really. We've lost our polity, and drowned our brethren.

[scott]

Sharon, while I like the idea of a tuscan sort of subsistence farming culture I am simultaneously reminded of Machiavelli's The Prince. Our government has become one with the Corporation and will not likely give up that power even in a worst case PO scenario. The name of the game is leverage, and the Corporations/Government has all the leverage, they own most of the farmland and control most of the infrastructure.

Our government and the Corporations insistence upon maintaining the current topdown wealth distribution system will destroy this country in a very short period of time.

Take a look what is happening in the trucking industry, don't you find it odd that independant contractors would be talking about a strike? Wasn't deregulation and the push for independant contractors about deleveraging labor unions? Now it is the independant contractors that are being deleveraged.

The big trucking companies can withstand the persistent price spikes by governing their trucks at lower speeds and cutting deals with the big fueling stations for discounts on fuel. Big companies can get as much as 20-30 cents per gallon discounts because they have thousands of trucks and they know those drivers will spend money in their stores and restaurants. It's leverage.

The trucking industry, in fact, the entire country, dare I say world is in a deleveraging process. The trucking industry is leveraged by the big companies that we haul for such as the Cargill's, WalMarts, you name it because of competition they can pass on higher energy prices to the trucking industry.

Once the trucking industry is weeded out in the deleveraging process of the strong absorbing the weak then inflation in energy will be passed on to the general economy.

[scott]

CREDIT BUBBLE BULLETIN
Liquidation is only solution to crisis
Commentary and weekly watch by Doug Noland

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD08Dj01.html

[zerotsm]

I live in the Wilkes-Barre area, and unfortunately for the most part, the place is as clueless and wasteful as the rest of the country. Circuit City built a store (or had built for them) only 11 years ago which has been abandoned to move into a bigger box store at a new mall even further away from the population that the store is supposed to serve. I remember when buildings were designed to be used for 50 years or more.

[scott]

"The Task Force goes on to argue that U.S. energy policy has been plagued by myths, such as the feasibility of achieving “energy independence” through increased drilling or anything else. For the next few decades, the challenge facing the United States is to become better equipped to manage its dependencies rather than pursue the chimera of independence."

Council on Foreign Relations Press

October 2006

http://www.cfr.org/publication/11683/national_security_consequences_of_us_oil_dependency.html?breadcrumb=%2Fpublication%2Fby_type%2Ftask_force_report

[EEofDC]

Speaking of Pennsylvania.... seems like there's no end to the depth of shortsightedness here in the UPL.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/business/08gas.html?hp

"Mr. Deiseroth has put new windows in his house, bought a new fishing boat and plans to build a new garage. His 89-year-old father and 90-year-old mother, who live nearby, just got a $20,000 monthly check.

His father has replaced the golf cart he drove around his farm with a Kubota utility vehicle, while his mother has bought a flat-screen television."

[scott]

"The Arctic Ocean is melting, and it is melting fast. This past summer, the area covered by sea ice shrank by more than one million square miles, reducing the Arctic icecap to only half the size it was 50 years ago. For the first time, the Northwest Passage -- a fabled sea route to Asia that European explorers sought in vain for centuries -- opened for shipping. Even if the international community manages to slow the pace of climate change immediately and dramatically, a certain amount of warming is irreversible. It is no longer a matter of if, but when, the Arctic Ocean will open to regular marine transportation and exploration of its lucrative natural-resource deposits"

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87206/scott-g-borgerson/arctic-meltdown.html

[scott]

"Washington must awaken to the broader economic and security implications of climate change. The melting Arctic is the proverbial canary in the coal mine of planetary health and a harbinger of how the warming planet will profoundly affect U.S. national security. Being green is no longer a slogan just for Greenpeace supporters and campus activists; foreign policy hawks must also view the environment as part of the national security calculus. Self-preservation in the face of massive climatic change requires an enlightened, humble, and strategic response. Both liberals and conservatives in the United States must move beyond the tired debate over causation and get on with the important work of mitigation and adaptation by managing the consequences of the great melt."

[Johnny Rico]

"I know, because I was raised by such factory workers, who labored at a former GE plant in Southern California (now located in Brazil)."

Yeah, I know, Doom, I saw on the CIA's World Factbook that semi-conductors was an industry in Costa Rica. I just have problem with people equating high math scores, a $13,900 per capita GDP, and no military with having better ideas than the US.

I also have respect for such factory workers, but from a slightly different angle. I lived for a few years as a kid in Mexico. My dad ran a plant for a certain American high-tech firm.

I was going to crack a few jokes at the expense of others, but honestly, I really consider North Americans and South Americans to be Americans. Costa Rica might as well be Puerto Rico, might as well be Rhode Island.

They may be number one in math, but we've got Guantanamo Bay, we're number one in torture.

No offense, asoka, but it's true. It's not hard to have better ideas than the US. That's why we call ourselves the ClusterFuck Nation. Remember?

And the reason they can afford not to have a military is the same one every other country in the Western Hemisphere and all of Europe has. It's because they know Uncle Sam will take care of any problems (as well as cause them, but there's nothing they can do about that either). We're enablers.

I've got a good Black Swan quote on the topic, but not today.

Look at the recent "crisis" between Ecuador and Venezuela and Columbia. Remember what SecDef Gates said when asked about support for the Columbians? He said,"I think they can take care of themselves."

Know why? Because the Columbian military is bigger than both the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian contingents combined. All three together sport like 75,000 troops, 12 jeeps, and 4 helicopters. Oh, and some tanks left over from the filming of 'Kelly's Heroes.'

Yeah! Venezuela... the one with Hugo Chavez. Can you believe it? A regular Alexander the Great.

Remember Argentina in the Faulklands? So does Costa Rica. They realize there's no point. That's another great story for another day.

And you know what else, asoka? As much as I disagree with you sometimes, I have to admire and respect you, even if you only post on Mondays.

From my research, I believe that you have been posting here longer than anyone else. I could be wrong, but it sure looks that way.

So Happy Birthday, and I'll see you next week.

[Johnny Rico]

TOD Celebrates 10 Million Views!

Yaaaay!

OMFG. Westexas, ace, and Nate Hagens are in the first 10 responses. Doom, if you are one of the others, I swear I will drink a liter of bleach (the lemon-scented kind).

Where is Stuart Staniford?

What they won't say is that they have been trying desperately to raise their ratings, but can't figure out how to do it.

Normally there seemed to be a correlation between high oil and gaso prices and their hit-score. But this is not working anymore.

Staniford gives them a bump for the entire week when he posts, but he seems to have run out of bad writing, bad ideas, and bad research.

Drop by the blog. I need your input. I'm working on responses to past questions. Ask Bif and Yarra. I'm all reformed now. Ask Holmes.

[Johnny Rico]

http://shapeandcolour.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/brain-ulrich-copia/

I often wonder if dudes like this have any notion of peak oil or CFN or any of the things we discuss or if they come to these conclusions completely independently.

It's been so long, I can't even remember if I gave a fuck about overconsumption before I realized ...

[Wizard]

I find that the Global Research website has a lot of great articles. I was supprised to find this one there today authored by F. William Engdahl, who has some really good info on other subjects. Two things stated in the article are: " The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. " and " Cheney and his close Houston friend, Matt Simmons, propagated the myth of Peak Oil to lull populations into accepting the inevitability of $100 a barrel or even higher oil prices. ". The address for this article is: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8583
Of course I believe Mr Engdahl is wrong on both of these issues.

[Johnny Rico]

Wizard, when JHK makes me supreme-warlord-moderator of these pages as he continually promises, my first act shall be to ban you. Can't you see we are engaged in serious conversation here? Come back in the morning.

Hey Soluble,

I'm going to bed soon, but I was just thinking, I can't remember, but it makes sense. I think you're in San Francisco. You're always posting way late. If not forget it and let anybody else who lives in San Francisco carry the torch.

I mean, SMOTHER THE TORCH.

Put that shit out! Let those commie fucks in Beijing know the real deal.

Free Tibet! Human Rights in China Now!

No harm to the athletes just protest the shit out of the China and the Olympics.

Don't let your brothers and sisters in London and Paris outshine you.

San Fran and Seattle have the best protesters in the world. I wanna hear you tell me tales of tear gas tomorrow.

Fuck that shit up!

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!