This month's freak snowstorm in New England provides me with a nice analogy for the challenges facing the United States in regards to energy, infrastructure, and how to climb out of the present depression.
The other day my better half and I walked through the Middlesex Fells near Boston. The recent freak snowstorm felled many branches and whole trees all over the woods because the heavy, wet snow fell on branches that had yet to shed any of their leaves. Trails are blocked, and brooks are so clogged with branches that there are marshes and ponds forming all over, despite there not being that much rain since then. So swollen, in fact, that it almost looks like beavers are colonizing the area. (They aren’t. The Fells are far too infested with dogs, and even worse, those dogs bring their humans along. Beavers are far too snobby to settle in among such disreputable company.) The fallen trees created many new clearings, exposing beautiful moss beds to the afternoon sun, a bright green contrasting with the dull brown and grey of the New England fall.
The night of the storm, we stayed up late, startling at the noise made as branch after branch fell around us, wondering whose house was going to be damaged. None of our neighbors were hit, but a falling tree did block the road in front of our house, and another threatened our electricity. But as the maples and oaks suffered all this damage, our bradford pear tree happily let its branches sag down through the storm, and spring right back up as the snow melted and slid off in the morning. It was a demonstration of the founding myth of the Ishinriu school of Jiu Jitsu, whose founder was inspired by seeing willow branches yield to the snow falling on them, and bend to let it slide off, while maples groaned and cracked under the load.
Some days beforehand, I had another example of Jiu Jitsu thinking. I live in a suburb of Boston, and commute on a bus that runs on the freeway. Unfortunately, the MBTA is under a budget crunch, and buses are not being upgraded, so riding the bus nowadays brings the risk that it will conk out. For normal buses, that’s acceptable. For my line, the MBTA will cancel bus runs if the bus gives any indication that it might conk out on I-93. With a bus frequency of every 30 minutes, that means a risk of running late to work. One morning, my regular bus run was canceled because the driver was trapped on the Tobin bridge
where a distraught man was about to jump. But, he phoned his supervisor, who canceled the run, and typed the cancellation into his computer, which meant my iPhone informed me. I saw this right on time, hopped on a bus in the opposite direction, and arrived at a commuter rail stop just as the train was pulling in. The iPhone MBTA app tracked both vehicles based on GPS, which is how I knew I could catch that train, and arrive at work 5 minutes late instead of 45 minutes late.
That made it a perfect 21st Century kind of day. We don’t have jetpacks. We don’t have flying cars. In fact, fewer of us can afford cars at all. We don’t have sleek monorails taking all around. In fact, we’re on creaky buses that are falling apart. But since information travels faster and more cheaply than matter, we have all sorts of ways to adapt.
The same analogy can apply to how we should respond to the serious hardships imposed by this freak storm I started with, which has added to the infrastructure destruction in the neighboring state of Vermont in the wake of Hurricane Irene. Here is an article on the extent of road repair needed there and in other states, out of a FEMA budget item that is already exhausted. The states cannot find the money to rebuild the roads, and as for Washington, the less said, the better. So, if I were the enlightened despot of Vermont, I would respond with a little bit of Jiu Jitsu.
http://www.stateline.org/...
Tropical Storm Irene Vermont flooding road damage
Photo by Chip Allen/Getty Images
Damaged roads from flooding along Route 107 Southbound are seen on August 30, 2011 in downtown Bethel, Vermont. Vermont is one of several states waiting for federal money to rebuild its roads and bridges after this year's record-setting number of disasters.
It has been three months since Tropical Storm Irene washed out roads all across Vermont, but in the town of Roxbury, it is still difficult to get around. Two bridges on the main road through the town of 700 are still out, and are not expected to be repaired until the middle of December. In the meantime, drivers must use back roads to get to the nearby town of Randolph, a mild inconvenience now that could become a major issue as winter settles in. Shawn Neun, chairman of the Roxbury select board, says snow would make using back roads “more hazardous, and it would just make it (take) longer.”
2 years ago I got to visit the Austrian province of Tyrol. The terrain is of course a lot more mountainous, the climate is similar to Vermont when it isn’t winter, but their way of life is very different in some ways. Tyrol suffers immensely from flash floods, more so nowadays thanks to global warming. So they keep pavement to a bare minimum. Most of the roads I traveled on were 2-way, 1-lane, with very narrow shoulders of gravel on each side. When you meet oncoming traffic, you both have to pull halfway aside, slow down, pass, and then move on. And that is the norm. 2 lane roads are the major highways. And 4 lanes? That is the region’s autobahn. And, these narrow roads are of the highest quality.
Compare to the United States. We build our roads long, because we have to. But we also build them wide, because we’re Americans. And since we “have” to build them wide, we build them thin, to save money. And so they wear out in no time. Which is how we got to have such a terrible road system in 2011. What’s worse, since we “have” to run our lives using automobiles, we “have” to have oceans of parking, and we “have” to have enough lanes to make sure we can get around quickly and at high speed. This is the kind of rigid thinking that is now causing immense suffering and hardship all over the country. More flexible thinking is what we need.
If we can’t afford to maintain long and wide highways everywhere, then we shouldn’t. Railways are cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, and cheaper to run vehicles on. They are also less prone to being snowed in, they add less risk of flooding , and they suffer less in the face of flooding. They also are quicker to repair. Even if Vermont had the money to repair all of their washouts, road repair is also a matter of logistics, and it would still take long.
Similarly, there is the ongoing regression into hardship going on in northern Michigan right now. To travel there, or to ship anything there, you need to get to the southern edge of Lake Michigan and turn left (or to the western tip of Lake Erie and turn right). The shape of the land there means you have to drive a long while to get there if you wish to get there at all. That is making it expensive to live there, to truck goods to there, and it also makes goods expensive to truck out of there, which is why industry in Northern Michigan is so anemic now. If you can’t afford to rely on a road system, then you shouldn’t. See above as far as rail goes, and, it just goes to show that Michigan needs to revive commercial Great Lakes shipping.
The same applies to many of the other challenges the nation is facing. If we can’t afford to get enough fuel to tootle around the way we used to, then it is time to Jiu Jitsu our way out of this, and change how we live so we don’t need to. If we can’t have electricity on demand, then we have to learn to use electricity in line with available supply, hence my diary entry on the Smart Grid. There are simple ways to side-step a lot of the trouble coming our way, if we only get around ideological and political obstacles that are presenting it.
Best of luck to all you Kossacks who already are fighting the good fight towards sustainable reforms along these lines. I wrote this so you might have more rhetoric in your quiver. Jiu jitsu does sound better than “euroweenie,” or (heaven forbid!) “green.” I hope it might start more discussion.
I also hope to find for tomorrow some examples of our military coming up with similar thinking about domestic national security (in the good sense, not keep-the-hippies-kettled sense) and disaster preparedness.