James Kunstler: The American Suburban Project Is Over
Sep 11th, 2008 | By James Howard Kunstler | Category: Politics & Economics“What we developed over the past decade in America was not an ‘information economy’ or a ‘consumer economy’ but a suburban-sprawl-building economy, meaning an economy dedicated to building a living arrangement with no future, ” says James Kunstler, author of Clusterfuck Nation. Americans have one big problem: We can’t face up to the reality that the way live is no longer sustainable thanks to peak oil.This from The Daily Reckoning:
The climax of the sprawl building economy occurred in absolute lockstep with the climax of peak oil. You can date it virtually to the month - May, 2005. After that, the future asserted itself and all the financial expectations bound up with sprawl-building went up in a vapor - including the value of mortgages on suburban houses. Everything that followed has been an attempt to cover up this basic reality: that the way we live in America can’t continue.
The reason our energy debate is so hollow and idiotic is because we can’t face this basic reality.
The fantasy-du-jour among both political parties is that we can become “energy independent.” By this they mean we can keep on living the way we do by means other than oil. This is just not true. We have to make profound changes in everything we do from the way we inhabit the landscape to the way we produce our food. Lately, the only change we’ve shown any interest in is changing what our cars run on. But that is not going to rescue us, not even a little. Our inability to talk about anything else except the cars will drag us down into poverty and turmoil.
The housing market is not coming back. Ever. In the form that we knew it. The suburban project is over. That version of the American Dream is over. We’ll be a lot better off if we put aside dreaming altogether for a while and start focusing on reality instead – that part of the day when we’re awake and capable of actually doing things. We’ve got a lot to face and a lot to do.
The government takeover of Fannie and Freddie is just another papering-over of our fundamental problem - that until we embark on new ways of being a nation, of living differently and working differently on different things, the other nations of the world will not have confidence in us, or the paper we issue, and we will not really have confidence in ourselves.
Source: Last Ditch
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