The party was in Tom's Berkeley backyard. Tom's wife, whom I'll call Sharon, likes to garden and knows all about plants and flowers, and their garden was resplendent in the May sunshine.

I had brought chicken breast marinated in lemon and olive oil and parsley. For some reason, I had assumed that there was to be a grill. I asked where the grill was, and Tom and Sharon just looked at each other.

I ended up baking the marinated chicken in Tom and Sharon's gas oven, for a half hour at 350 degrees. It was delicious.

By the time my chicken was ready, more people had arrived, with spicy main courses of one ethnicity and another. Tom and Sharon's crowd is artsy. Even the men wear gauzy clothes. They always find interesting things to talk about--like art and religion and computers.

As I was listening to the conversations swirling around me, and savoring the May sunshine and the food, I kept worrying about how diabetics will keep their insulin, in the decades after oil runs out. Sitting on a hammock in dappled sunlight, sipping wine and plowing through my potato salad, I was visualizing some beleaguered Red Cross station that still had a power supply, providing the sole artificial cooling for miles and miles. I was thinking of the Red Cross station falling to the control of drug lords, looters, or some right-wing militia, and the diabetics not having access to their ice anymore. I was thinking of some diabetic's last, precious, hoarded ice, with the insulin vials sitting in it.

I have no direct first-hand experience with diabetes. I suppose I thought about diabetes, in a future time and place without oil, because diabetes is such a common affliction in modernity, and a high-maintenance chronic medical condition. You stay on top of diabetes with first-world resources that depend on reliable refrigeration. Which requires an electrical supply. Oh, which is generated almost exclusively by fossil fuel.

Yes, I have been reading James Kunstler's The Long Emergency, about global oil depletion and the grim decades he believes lie ahead. You keep hoping Kunstler will offer you some kind of hope for the future; he doesn't. His isn't a feel-good book. In what I would almost characterize as a spiteful tone, he pricks readers' little bubbles of delusion, stating that our whole Western standard of living is based on plentiful fossil fuel, or what he calls "the cheap oil fiesta" that has characterized recent history.

The fiesta is almost over. There's a lot of denial about that fact, political and otherwise, and Kunstler believes we are actually too far along in the transition to an oil-free world, to achieve it without unfathomable human casualties and without the utter demise of the first-world standard of living. Ha. High gasoline prices are only a start. Wasteful assholes.

I was thinking at the party about smart, contemporary people--successful professionals--finding themselves utterly at a loss when it comes to coping in a society without fossil fuel. No computers, no internet, no power grid; your MBA is not going to matter a damn. You any good at farming?

I was thinking poor inner-city populations would actually do a bit better in the time after the fuel runs out, especially their young, hardy members. Poor urbanites are used to scarcity, remember, and a certain, realistic despair we in the more affluent classes have banished at any cost.

You know what I was thinking about, going back for seconds on the potato salad? I was thinking about animals dying in the zoo, in a world after oil. I don't know if you recall the media accounts of the zoo in Sarajevo--once a thoroughly modern city--after the Balkan conflict started. People in the neighborhood were spiriting food to the bears and the zebra, so they wouldn't die. Eventually, the good Samaritans from the neighborhood became preoccupied with the conflict, or they got killed themselves, and the bears and the zebra starved.

I'd say, read the book, even though it's depressing, and even though it's not without flaws. It's really a shame Kunstler includes no bibliography, and the publishers were apparently too cheap to arrange an index.

I'd love to see a discussion in the blogosphere about the book, about its flaws, and about how people cope psychologically with its truths.
8:39:51 AM    comment []