No day is complete for me without bed-time reading. I like to keep my reading diverse: I’ll go on a fiction jag for awhile (I was introduced to TC Boyle a few years ago, for example, loved the first novel of his I read, and subsequently read all of his novels in short order), then switch to non-fiction/biography/history/whatever before returning to fiction for awhile, and so on.
This spring/summer I’ve enjoyed both the historical fiction (The Contract Surgeon and The Indian Agent) and non-fiction (Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch) of South Dakota author Dan O’Brien. The novels are set in the early reservation days of the Lakota culture of the Black Hills region; Buffalo for the Broken Heart chronicles O’Brien’s struggles to establish a bison ranch in the Black Hills 110 years or so after the buffalo (and the buffalo-dependent cultures of the Plains Indians) were nearly exterminated. Fascinating reads all.
Perhaps the most engaging and thought-provoking reads of the summer thus far, however, have been a pair of jeremiads by social critic James Howard Kunstler. 
Kunstler is probably best known as the author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993), and was featured prominently in the movie The End of Suburbia (2004).
The Kunstler books I read earlier this month both address peak oil and its possible effects. I’ve read numerous references to and excerpts from The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century since its publication in 2005, but didn’t read it until after I read this year’s Kunstler novel, World Made by Hand. The future envisioned by Kunstler in The Long Emergency is not pretty, and it’s not far off, either, in his view. Kunstler explores the consequences of a world oil production peak, coinciding with the effects of climate change, resurgent and new communicable diseases, water scarcity, global economic instability and warfare. He concludes that things ain’t gonna be pretty: in a nutshell, we have been having a global party fueled by cheap fossil fuels (oil especially) for roughly the past century, and the partyers are going to crash hard, soon.
I don’t embrace every element of his vision fully, but I think he raises critically important issues that are not being addressed realistically, even today as oil prices fluctuate between $130 and $140 per barrel. At the time his book was published (April 5, 2005), oil prices were at $57 per barrel. This seemed like an alarmingly high price at the time, as oil had fluctuated in the $10 to $25 per barrel range throughout the 1990s. Now, Goldman Sachs analysts predict that oil is likely to rise to between $150 and $200 per barrel soon and the top energy analyst at Germany’s largest bank says “Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy.” Kunstler seems eerily prescient in some ways, reading The Long Emergency three years down the road.
Kunstler’s novel World Made by Hand is set in a near future (2020 to 2030, roughly) in which multiple catastrophes have come to pass and the wheels have come off the global buggy. LA and Washington DC have been nuked by terrorists, throwing the US government and global trade into death spirals at the same time that global oil demand has exceeded supply to the extent that resource wars are triggered, pandemics have wiped out a significant percentage of the human population, and the industrial project is generally off the rails.
He creates an interesting world in which folks in a small community in upstate New York have reverted to a “world made by hand,” and are in the process of creating a workable way of life that can be sustained in a post-fossil-fuel, post-apocalyptic world. As with The Long Emergency, I certainly am not confident Kunstler is describing the world we will be living in soon, but I think he has important insights which mainstream American society would do well to ponder. I think it would be a healthy thing for Northfield’s civic leaders to think about and discuss the issues he raises. When our civic leaders are busy creating 530-acre industrial parks three miles out of town on a state highway, it is clear to me that these civic leaders are not contemplating the issues Kunstler raises in any serious manner. Northfield’s future may not be what our civic leaders seem to think it will be…
4 Comments
For over ten years I have been following discussion on yahoo reguarding survival techniques after the SHTF. Many thousands of people are honing their medical, herbal, weapons crafting, canning, firemaking and otherwise self reliant skills, and have been doing so for decades.
You are right to bring up the fact that decisionmakers are not putting any thing to the side for the future that any series of natural or manmade catastrophies might bring upon us. The highest up ones have the escape/survival thing taken care of by taxdollars, so they don’t have to worry
about anything but getting to the destination. The rest of us might have to scramble. I can only place my faith in God at this point in my life because I am dependent on the health system for my survival…but, I have lived a darn good life and if I need to roll over and make way for others, I am ready already. I hope others will develop skills important to mankind’s survival in case of disasters, and just to have a good skill like that brings with it a lot of
good personal power.
Bright,
I think you are right to say that “the rest of us might have to scramble.” That is as true of communities as it is of individuals/families. I think the hour is getting VERY late to deal with the long-developing issues that James Kunstler talks about. The longer we fiddle, the more likely that the scramble might be extremely difficult, and the transition to a more sustainable way of living more chaotic and painful than we like to discuss in polite company.
When Bruce conducted an energy audit of my home several months ago, we briefly discussed “current-state-of-affairs” issues; his thoughtfulness and breadth of vision was inspiring. So it is no surprise to me he is reading Kuntsler’s Long Emergency. That particular book is on my list of to-do’s. One of my oft-referred-to essays is Kuntsler’s The Agenda Restated. Short, precise, strident, motivating; exactly what I need when I feel like Alice in La-la-land.
Angel, Thanks for the comment. After seeing your remarks, I read Kunstler’s “The Agenda Restated” on his website. You’re right: it’s short, precise, strident and motivating. I especially liked his repeated exhortation to “get busy” and his conclusion: “Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.” Right on!