[Fresh Ink] Kunstler: Too stupid to survive

[Richard Menec]

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/06/too-stupid-to-survive.html

Comment on current events by the author of The Long Emergency (2005)

www.kunstler.com                     June 15 2009

Too stupid to survive

by James Howard Kunstler

Coming home from the annual meet-up of the New Urbanists, I was already 
agitated from the shenanigans of United Airlines - two-hour delay, blown 
connection - when I waded into this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine 
for further evidence that our ruling elites are too stupid to survive (and 
perhaps the US with them).  Exhibit A was the magazine's lead article about 
California's proposed high-speed rail project by Jon Gertner.

The article began with a description of California's current rail service 
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. A commission of nine-year-olds in a 
place like Germany could run a better system, of course. It's never on 
schedule. The equipment breaks down incessantly. A substantial leg of the 
trip requires a transfer to a bus (along with everybody's luggage) with no 
working toilet.  You get the picture: Kazakhstan without the basic 
competence.

The proposed solution to this is the most expensive public works program in 
the history of the world, at a time when both the state of California and 
the US federal government are effectively bankrupt.  By the way, I wouldn't 
argue that California shouldn't have high-speed rail.  It might have been 
nice if, say, in the late 20th century, some far-seeing governor had noticed 
what was going on in France, Germany, and Spain but, alas ...  It would have 
been nice, too, if the doltish George W Bush, when addressing extreme 
airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train 
service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart. The idea never 
entered his walnut brain.

The sad truth is it's too late now.  But the additional sad truth, at this 
point, is that Californians (and US public in general) would benefit 
tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, 
when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely 
on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that !). The tracks 
are still there, waiting to be fixed.  In our current condition of psychotic 
techno-grandiosity, this is all too hopelessly quaint, not cutting edge 
enough, pathetically un-"hot". The fact that it is not even considered by 
the editors of The New York Times, not to mention the governor of 
California, the President of the United States, and all the agency heads and 
departmental chiefs and think tank gurus and university engineering 
professors, is something that will have historians of the future rolling 
their eyes.  But for the moment all it shows is that we are collectively too 
stupid to survive as an advanced society.

Ironically (if you go for gallows irony) a sidebar in the same issue of The 
NY Times Sunday Magazine featured the latest architect's wet dream of an 
airport-of-the-future (page 35). Note to the editors and architects: 
commercial aviation is toast (we just don't know it yet). We're back in the 
$70-plus a barrel-of-oil aviation death-zone for airlines.

Also ironically proving that America is not alone in techno-triumphalist 
mental illness was another big article in the same magazine featuring French 
President Nicolas Sarkozy's neo-Modernist fantasies for vast new 
construction projects in Paris.  Note to Sarko: the developed world's 
metroplexes are headed for shocking contraction, not further expansion. I 
know this is counter-intuitive, but a little applied prayerful research will 
bear it out.  And, by the way, the last thing any city on earth needs is 
more skyscrapers - that is, buildings that have no chance of ever being 
renovated when they reach the senility stage of their design-life.  For 
really mind-blowing statements, this one from that article is a standout: 
"Paris's current problems as a city can be traced to the very thing that 
makes it most delightful - its beauty".  Right. So, the solution will be to 
make it more like Houston.

Actually, I doubt the French people consider these schemes anymore plausible 
than ur-Modernist Le Corbusier's 1924 proposal to bulldoze half of the Right 
Bank and replace it with dozens of identical skyscrapers. The French people 
laughed at Corbu, and put their vertical slums outside the city center, but 
notice that we Americans actually did it, replacing our old human-scaled 
center cities with priapic arrays of glass-and-steel tubes surrounded by 
parking lagoons. Anyway, nobody in the OECD world will have the energy to 
carry out anything like this again, not even France with its nuke plants.

Which brings me back to the New Urbanist annual meet-up last week in Denver. 
Given the gathering conditions of what I variously call The Long Emergency 
or the economic clusterfuck, they have had to shift their focus starkly. For 
years, their stock-in-trade was the greenfield New Town or Traditional 
Neighborhood Development (TND), a severe reform of conventional suburban 
development.  That sort of reform work was only possible when (1) the 
continued expansion of suburbia seemed utterly inevitable, requiring heroic 
mitigation and (2) when they could team up with the production home-builders 
to get their TND projects built.  To the group's credit, they realize that 
these conditions are no more. Suburbia is now cratering, both as a 
repository of wealth in real estate and as a practical matter of everyday 
existence.  They get that the energy crisis and all its implications are 
real and that our response to it had better be deft.  They understand that 
the capital resources we thought we had for Big Projects are flying into a 
black hole at the speed of light. Mostly they see that he time for "cutting 
edge" fashionista techno-triumphalist grandiosity is over.

To put it bluntly, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is perhaps the 
only surviving collective intelligence left in the United States that is 
producing ideas consistent with the reality.  They recognize that our 
survival depends on down-scaling and re-localization. They recognize the 
crisis we will soon face in food production, and the desperate need to 
reactivate the relationship between the way we inhabit the landscape and the 
way we feed ourselves. They recognize that the solution to the liquid fuels 
crisis is not cars that can run by other means but on walkable towns and 
cities connected by public transit.

This is exactly what you will not find in the pages of The New York Times or 
the political corridors of power.  Oh, by the way, the Obama administration 
contacted one of the leading lights of the New Urbanism in the weeks after 
the inauguration.  He never heard back from the White House.  I guess 
they're not interested.

Postscript (Added 2:45 pm Monday):

Some commentors here have got the mistaken idea that I am against "urban 
density" or cities per se.  This is a very dumb mis-reading of what I have 
said many times.  I am strongly in favor of the urban human habitat at all 
levels, from village to city, and indeed I am in favor of "tight" urban 
design at the fine grain.  I just don't believe that our giant "metroplex" 
cities will continue to exist in their current form.  They are not scaled to 
future energy realities. They may well re-densify at their old centers and 
waterfronts even while they contract in population and total area of 
governance.  Now, why is this so hard to understand???

_____

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