Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns!
One a penny, two a penny
Hot cross buns!
If you have no daughters,
Give them to your sons
One a penny, two a penny,
Hot cross buns!
Welcome, readers and book lovers, to another "Books That Changed My Life" open forum on this Good Friday morning. Or, if Good Friday is not your thing, happy spring! Hope it's fine weather wherever you may be this April forenoon.
Today we have delicious hot cross buns for breakfast with delightful strong coffee that sparkles like dark wine in our coffee mugs. Help yourselves to sugar and half-and-half from that table over there. Then we shall stroll into the salon, sit down on the comfortable sofas and chairs, and proceed to discuss a book that nearly changed my life but didn't, in the end.
The Long Emergency (please click the link for a free download) is a disturbing book, but an important one.
James H. Kunstler lives in upstate New York, where he writes fiction and nonfiction. He maintains a blog here in which he discusses the latest news and his opinion on world events.
In Chapter 1 of The Long Emergency, “Sleepwalking into the Future,” Kunstler talks about what he believes will happen:
“What follows is a harsh view of the decades ahead and what will happen in the United States…. …It is my view, for instance, that in the decades to come the national government will prove to be so impotent and ineffective in managing the enormous vicissitudes we face that the United States may not survive as a nation in any meaningful sense but rather will devolve into a set of autonomous regions...
“I believe that we face a dire and unprecedented period of difficulty in the twenty-first century but that humankind will survive and continue further into the future—though not without taking some severe losses in the meantime, in population, in life expectancies, in standards of living, in the retention of knowledge and technology, and in decent behavior.”
The following chapter titles indicate the content of the book:
- Sleepwalking into the future
- Modernity and the Fossil Fuels Dilemma
- Geopolitics and the Global Oil Peak
- Beyond Oil: Why Alternative Fuels Won’t Rescue Us
- Nature Bites Back: Climate Change, Water Scarcity, Habitat Destruction
- Running on Fumes: The Hallucinated Economy
It is unnerving to watch some of the predictions the author made nine years ago as they begin to materialize. Vetwife’s diary last summer offers insight into the helplessness and confusion many of us feel already, with society seemingly perched on the brink of breaking down. Another dailykos diary, by CanisMaximus, warns of the necessity of relocating to a place that will still have water in 50 years.
By the time I finished reading The Long Emergency, Kunstler had persuaded me that the future is going to unfold exactly as he described. I even started Googling for an old-fashioned percolator-type coffee pot, the kind we used before everything became electric. Then I realized that coffee comes from South America and is brought to these shores by fossil-fueled ships. Even if I were able to find a percolator, there wouldn’t be real coffee to put into it.
So impressed was I by Kunstler’s arguments that I bought each of my sons a copy of the book and told them to read it. The elder son, an energy marketer, stated darkly that Kunstler’s doomsday scenario was nothing less than he’d expected, which was why he was laying in a supply of desiccated food. The younger one said he wished he’d read it in high school, because then he would have chosen to study civil engineering in college.
There were two factors that put me off believing completely in Kunstler’s scenario: (1) he seems to think that Bush & Co. did the right thing by invading Iraq, a country that hadn't done us any harm and had no connection at all to the events of September 11, 2001; and (2) the searing contempt with which Kunstler dismisses the red states and all who live in them. It's actually quite stomach-churning, the way he implies that the inhabitants of that region, whom he believes to be deliberately obtuse, will deserve the horrors that descend on them in the future. I therefore have grave reservations about recommending this book to fellow Kossacks.
Although I can't say the book changed my life, exactly--I'll probably have jossed it before things get really, really bad--it has made me extremely conscious of my fossil-fueled way of living. The journeys I make by car every day, delivering my granddaughter to day care, driving to shops and restaurants, casually turning on the electric light when I feel like it: all of these will come to an end one day. I think about the silliness of our business model, in which large numbers of people burn fossil fuel commuting to offices, and how almost nothing is "local" any more, except elementary schools. It's ridiculous.
What do YOU think? Do you believe, along with Kunstler, that we’re all doomed and that nothing can save us?
Or do you think he’s too pessimistic and there will be a shining new technology that’ll let us use electricity endlessly, with no climatic or economic repercussions? If his vision of our future life in this country should prove accurate, will you enjoy riding your bike or walking everywhere, keeping your teenagers out of school to help grow enough food to sustain life, and living without TV, the Internet, or even telephones?
Come, let us hear your opinion. The floor is yours!