The End of Suburbia?
After the Oil Is Gone: This is why I feel the hard times are coming, and can't shake the feeling.
It's not next week, or next month, or next year. But it will be within our lifetimes, and well within our children's lifetimes. Our grandchildren's lives will be radically different.
And you know what? It's okay. I'm okay with it.
The main thing is, how do we get ready? What do we do? Some of us are already in a good place for this. Most of us aren't. My big concern is how to prepare my children--what to teach them. Gardening and small animal husbandry seem to be a good start, and that's why we have six chicks in our upstairs bathtub awaiting more feathers and the raising of their chicken coop.
User login
Navigation
Recent blog posts
- The Newbie
- The Year of Breaking Things
- Beware angry dairy farmers
- In praise of computers for kids
- Chemistry Fun with Pennies
- A month’s worth of probiotics for the price of a cabbage!
- Gluten Free Sourdough Bread as an Intuitive Art
- caring for fleece
- A niece! I has one!
- Yearbook Yourself, or, excellent time waster
Who's online
There are currently 0 users and 25 guests online.
Interesting
Makes me glad we have our 10 acres, our own spring, and a woodstove.
My kids know how to grow and preserve food, hunt and fish, raise animals for food, sew, do woodworking and basic construction and mechanics, and walk/bike places. We have spent days at a time without power or safe passage on the roads (We have icestorms in the winter and floods in the summer)and have done OK. The kids even know how to ride horses, which could come in handy.
Thinking about it I guess my little town would do pretty well. We have a 26 mile walking/biking trail linking 4 communities already, we have thousands of acres of agricultural and wooded land, and a pretty strong sense of community. People are quite handy too, by necessity, as the nearest city is 60 miles away.
It will be interesting to see if any of this does come to pass. Hmm...
ditto
Couldn't read the article, not a Salon sub. Don't wanna be.
But...
Living on a farm/ranch helps. We have a garden, which could be much bigger if needed. We have windmills for water (both drinking and watering needs). So long as the wind blows. LOL! Don't think here in E. New Mexico their will be a shortage of wind any time soon. Of course, we raise our own beef, so no problems there, and we can add hogs, goats, other 4 legged things, too. I could raise hens and eggs if I REALLY wanted/had to. We've got horses if we need them for transportation if it comes to that.
and of course we are teaching our children how to live this way, too.
See, not so bad being a hick! LOL!
day pass
I only get day passes to Salon so I don't have to subscribe. I don't have the money to pay for subscriptions to magazines.
The idea of being forced to garden sounds pretty horrific to me though. There is very little that I hate more.
actually....
There is, of course, something much more horrific which for some reason was not even mentioned in the Salon interview. I have been up at night thinking about this ever since Lynn posted it. The truth is, those of us who are dependent on modern medicine to prevent our slow and agonizing premature deaths probably ought to make humane suicide plans ahead of time, in order to prepare for the time when modern medicine ends.
electricity
I'm thinking of lack of electricity to run factories produce medicines, run oxygen tanks for those who need them, etc. And yes, we already have a health care crisis in this country, but there are other countries without one. People who live in those countries will experience a dramatic drop in health care if the medicines and equipment they need are no longer manufactured.
I actually agree with Deffeyes (the geologist from Princeton) who thinks that what probably will happen is that we will turn to dirtier-burning fuels as a next resort. Just based on the past-- before oil was able to be used as it is now, people used more coal and such, so after it is no longer available for use, I expect they will turn back to coal and other dirtier fuels before any other technologies are available.
I don't worry about things like these
First of all, because of my eschatology...yeah, the world's gonna end. I already know that! LOL! I trust God no matter what happens. My hope isn't in oil reserves, it's in him.
Second, because predictions like these have been made ever and anon. Remember all those 70's sci fi films depicting the horrors of over-population? Ehrlich's *Population Bomb*? Big zero. It's all been thoroughly debunked.
Becky, take the hormones into consideration too. I lay awake nights during pregnancy struck by all the inhumanity and cruelty in the world, going on at *that very minute.*
I could get into growing my own stuff, though.
Not to mention the fact
that he's a bigot:
"I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion."
it's not Kunstler
I thought he was making wild extrapolations myself. And it's definitely not from pregnancy. This is something I've been concerned about since I was a teenager, it just never came up on this particular forum.
Re: ditto
You don't hafta be; you can get a day pass for free by watching an ad, just so you can read individual articles like this.
Hicks are apparently the wave of the future!
what I'm expecting
It depends on what you mean by "modern medicine." I'm not as dystopic as Kunstler (though I share his loathing of suburbia--you're not a bad person if you live there, but as a society it was a really stupid planning decision for us to have made).
But I do agree with him that the major fallout of passing the oil peak is going to be transportation. And THAT is going to be the real kink in American society. It won't be that medicine won't be available; it'll be, can you get to it, or can it get to you? And will you be able to purchase it?
We already have a health care crisis in this country, so for many of us there won't be much difference. They can't get health care now, so what'll be so different? "Barefoot doctoring"--health care provided by friends and family who've studied up--is going to become more important regardless how the peak oil situation goes, unless we get national health care. And I don't think that's going to happen. I'm already providing that kind of minor care for family and friends, with the big proviso that I Am Not A Doctor. I'm just an obnoxious know-it-all who's done a lot of research and study, some of which has really paid off for me personally.
I agree with Kunstler that life is going to be a lot more local. A LOT more local. And peak oil notwithstanding, we're heading into a period of real economic trouble that's just beginning. Again, not the end of the world, but a definite contraction of our accustomed way of life.
Lynn Siprelle, Editor
Even in the old days, not eve
Even in the old days, not everyone had a garden. There will still be produce/farmers markets for folks like you. Do you think everyone in NYC in the 1800's had a garden? But I suppose it will be a matter of having the money to buy the goods. Something to barter, perhaps?
last night
I had a conversation with a good friend who is an engineer with the Bonneville Power Administration. She thought Kunstler was mostly full of it, though she shares my apprehension for the economy and for transportation. We will have electricity; for instance, here in the PNW we have the BPA, which is almost 100% hydroelectric. There's the Tennessee Valley Authority, also hydro. BC has hydro. Lotsa places have hydro and geothermal. The lights will be on, sorta.
What we won't have is CHEAP power. Which means no more Walmart-style stores, which depend entirely on cheap transportation. (awww.) No more cheap foreign imports, including food--no more Chilean grapes and strawberries in the dead of winter, which just ain't right anyway. And no more year-round citrus and other fresh foods from the southern parts of the US, at least not without paying a premium; ask your grandparents about oranges in their Christmas stockings. We got them when I was a girl, in fact, and I could NOT understand why until I was a grownup and understood about food transportation. Now the girls get chocolate oranges in their stockings, but by the time their children have children, they may be back to the real ones as a winter treat as precious as chocolate.
Like I said, things will get intensely local; under any energy scenario, that's going to happen. This really has been a "cheap oil fiesta." And we're going to have to work much harder at illness prevention to avoid the need for things like oxygen tanks. That's what barefoot doctoring is for.
Lynn Siprelle, Editor
I wasn't that thrilled about that paragraph either
What I know about Southerners is that they stick together. I don't get the "rugged individualist" vibe from them that Kunstler is attributing to them.
Lynn Siprelle, Editor
The funny thing about it is,
The funny thing about it is, there are people still living in the southeast who don't have electricity *yet*! LOL! Folks around here are probably more equipped for an "oil-running-out" scenario than anywhere else. At least we know how to hunt and fish! LOL!
Anyway, it all seems like wishful thinking on his part, to me. There are so many unforeseen circumstances that could pre-empt his predictions, even if they were founded on fact...human inventiveness being just one of them.
Post new comment