It
is natural, and human nature, to look after our immediate needs, and
not to plan ahead. Nature looks after the long-term: it genetically
instructs living creatures to slow down or speed up birth rates in each
community by having each creature's body chemistry highly sensitive to
environmental stress, so that they need not consciously
'plan' to have, or not have, more offspring, and so that they
instinctively gather food supplies, or hibernate, or migrate, when
signals in the environment 'tell' them to do so.
Humans, by
contrast, respond emotionally and/or rationally, to the point whatever
our instincts might once have told us is drowned in the noise of our
brain's conscious emotional and rational messages. We are governed by
our software -- our brains, not by our hardware, our genes. That
software has followed the only model it had available, and as such the
manifestations of that software -- our cultures and behaviours and
priorities -- change very slowly and are focused on the satisfaction of
our immediate needs. We are abysmal at long-term planning, at thinking
ahead. It is simply not in our nature.
As a result, after thirty
millennia of increasing urbanization and exploding population, we are
now within years, or at most decades, of running out of oil, water, and
other natural resources, and of so polluting the air, water and soil
with our thoughtless waste products that we are precipitating a period
of almost unimaginable, extreme climate and weather changes. And we
have, still, at this late date, no coordinated plan for dealing with
these crises. We will act, as we always have done, only when these
crises are upon us, when what is merely important (and hence never
done) becomes urgent.
Nowhere will our lack of preparedness be
more catastrophic than in our cities, where 60% of our 6.5 billion
humans live on 2% of the planet's surface area and consume 75% of what
humanity in total consumes. Even if that consumption were to stop
increasing today, it is still twice what our planet is capable of
sustainably producing, even with the best science money can buy. If
everyone on the planet were to consume what those in the world's
affluent countries consume per capita, which is what most of those in
the struggling nations of the world aspire to, that consumption would
be twelve times what our planet could sustainably produce. And even in
the affluent countries, that consumption is still increasing.
Virtually
all of the planet's net population growth is now occurring in the
sprawling urban areas, so that by the latter part of this century,
instead of four billion urban dwellers on 2% of the Earth's land area
with a combined consumption footprint of 27 billion acres, we will have
ten billion urban dwellers on 7% of the planet's land area with a
combined consumption footprint of 140 billion acres, ten times what our
planet can sustainably produce, even allowing generously for a shift to
renewable resources and reduced waste. It is conservatively estimated
that hydrocarbon availability by that time will be half what it is
today, so that hydrocarbons per urban dweller will be only one-fifth
what it is today.
Even at current rates of energy use, that
means that 80% of urban energy needs will be met by staggeringly
expensive, vulnerable nuclear plants. And nuclear energy, even if it is
somehow affordable (it would cost $50T just to build
the reactors needed to replace current fossil fuel consumption) cannot
replace transportation needs without a transportation infrastructure
refit investment that would dwarf even that cost. So any goods (food,
water, medicines) that rely on cheap transportation will become
massively more expensive, even if we can afford to continue the huge
agricultural subsidies in place now.
Life in cities for the huge
majority who cannot afford the basic amenities of life -- picture the
slums of Mumbai or Mexico, only three to four times larger, will be
almost unimaginable. And the affluent nations will be just as
dramatically affected -- with the US economy bankrupt, automobile and
even train travel prohibitively expensive, infrastructure crumbling,
and prices for food, water, heat and shelter ten times higher while
wages stagnate, the only areas that will suffer more than the vertical
cores of big cities of affluent nations will be their profligate suburbs, which some predict will be abandoned by their current property owners and will turn into squatter ghettos.
This is hard to imagine, for those of us who have never known a great depression
or scarcity. Not only will the future bring a shortage of clean water,
it will likely interrupt the availability of distribution systems that
depend on hydrocarbon energy (so we may have to get used to going and
retrieving water) and it will mean the end of use of irrigation, with
huge consequences for agriculture and life in drier areas like the
Western US. Most of us don't even remember the WW2 "victory gardens",
but we'll have to learn, as they did, how to grow and tend our own
crops -- which will make life especially difficult for those in
Northern climates. And those in more Southern areas will probably have
to learn to make do without air conditioning, so that the energy
available can be used for more essential purposes.
OK,
so this sound grim, and maybe you think I'm being an alarmist. While
many warnings of the danger of a depression were ignored during the
1920s, the last century also had its share of false alarms. As I've
said before, the coming crises are likely to start slowly and could
take decades before they start to seriously disrupt our economy. I
believe we're going to see what James Kunstler calls a "Long Emergency"
-- no sudden and short-lived blips like in the 1990s, but rather a
gradually building series of cascading crises that will eventually
overpower our civilization's ability to cope with them.
So what can cities do to avoid such a fate? If it is in our nature not to act until we feel the pain,
is there any point in trying to get any substantial changes made in our
society before that? Lots has been written about the need to consume
less, to commute less, to learn to become less dependent on things we
take for granted -- oil-based products and services, foods, water,
medicines, communications, electric light,
but who is going to read it until it starts to happen? When we read
about learning to plant urban gardens, buy crank-powered radios,
disinfect our own water, keep ourselves warm, stockpile
non-perishables, protect ourselves when infrastructure and
communication fails in the dark, we cringe with embarrassment at doing
such a thing -- that's the stuff that the neo-survivalist wingnuts do,
the people who don't get out enough and over-react to every alarm. We know
there will eventually be another influenza epidemic, but who is doing
anything about it to prepare and cope with it when it comes?
Our
neighbourhood was plunged last weekend into darkness as high winds and
blizzard conditions conspired to sever power lines and impede efforts
of electrical workers to repair them. For nine hours we sat, and slept
fitfully, in the dark, wondering how long the power would be off. Out
where we live, there are no gas lines, so most of us rely on
electricity for heat as well as light and power. The utter darkness is
unsettling, the sense of helplessness complete, and as the cold winds
howl outside and rattle your windows, you start to think about what you
will do if the inside temperature drops below 50 Fahrenheit, or 40, or
freezing, and what might happen if the water pipes freeze and rupture,
or if the snowfall is so severe that medical supplies and rescue
workers can't get through.
I can't help thinking that this is
what we're going to feel as the Long Emergency begins to unfold. First
annoyance, then unease, and then, as it becomes apparent that no one
was prepared for the crisis to be this bad, or to last this long, panic.
Our cities and their suburbs are inherently
rigid, lacking agility and resilience. But as it slowly begins to dawn
on us that we are going to need to find a radically different way to
live, I sense that it will be too late to make the cities resilient.
Just as now there is a massive exodus from the country to the cities,
all over the globe, in search of wealth and opportunity, the Long
Emergency will launch a massive exodus in the opposite direction, in
search of the simple necessities of life.
We had our wake-up
call with Katrina. New Orleans will never recover, and because we now
realize how vulnerable it is, we won't even try to put it back
together. Already the Bush administration is backing off
from promises to fund its recovery, evidently believing it's just
throwing good money after bad. We will likely do the same when we
witness that same lack of resiliency of all the world's cities to
economic collapse, the end of oil, and the impacts of climate change.
When we have left them behind, the skyscrapers will remain as monuments
to our civilization's denial of its own vulnerability, gravestones to a
way of living that could never be sustained. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
