The Infinite Suburbs are a joke

SUBHEAD: We must return to a landscape composed with the resource realities of the future.

By James Kunstler on  27 October 2017 for The American Conservative -
(http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/the-infinite-suburb-is-an-academic-joke/)


Image above: The Jetsons in their flying car. Note Elroy holds leash through the "glass dome" of the family vehicle that is attached the dog Astro's doggy dome. From original article.

The elite graduate schools of urban planning have yet another new vision of the future. Lately, they see a new-and-improved suburbia—based on self-driving electric cars, “drone deliveries at your doorstep,” and “teardrop-shaped one-way roads” (otherwise known as cul-de-sacs)—as the coming sure thing.

It sounds suspiciously like yesterday’s tomorrow, the George Jetson utopia that has been the stock-in-trade of half-baked futurism for decades.

It may be obvious that for some time now we have lived in a reality-optional culture, and it’s vividly on display in the cavalcade of techno-narcissism that passes for thinking these days in academia.

Exhibit A is an essay that appeared last month in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Suburb of the Future is Almost Here,” by Alan M. Berger of the MIT urban design faculty and author of the book Infinite Suburbia—on the face of it a perfectly inane notion.

The subtitle of his Times Magazine piece argued that “Millennials want a different kind of suburban development that is smart, efficient, and sustainable.”

Note the trio of clichés at the end, borrowed from the lexicon of the advertising industry.

“Smart” is a meaningless anodyne that replaces the worn out tropes “deluxe,” “super,” “limited edition,” and so on. It’s simply meant to tweak the reader’s status consciousness. Who wants to be dumb?

“Efficient” and “sustainable” are actually at odds. The combo ought to ring an alarm bell for anyone tasked with designing human habitats. Do you know what “efficient” gets you in terms of ecology?

Monocultures, such as GMO corn grown on sterile soil mediums jacked with petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and fast-depleting fossil aquifer water.

It’s a method that is very efficient for producing corn flakes and Cheez Doodles, but has poor prospects for continuing further into this century—as does conventional suburban sprawl, as we’ve known it.

Efficiency in ecological terms beats a path straight to entropy and death.

Real successful ecologies, on the other hand, are the opposite of efficient.

They are deeply redundant. They are rich in diverse species and functions, many of which overlap and duplicate, so that a problem with one failed part or one function doesn’t defeat the whole system. This redundancy is what makes them resilient and sustainable.

Swamps, prairies, and hardwood forests are rich and sustainable ecologies.

Monocultures, such as agri-biz style corn crops and “big box” retail monopolies are not sustainable and they’re certainly not even ecologies, just temporary artifacts of finance and engineering. What would America do if Walmart went out of business?

And don’t underestimate the possibility as geopolitical tension and conflict undermine global supply lines.

Suburbia of the American type is composed of monocultures: residential, commercial, industrial, connected by the circulatory system of cars. Suburbia is not a sustainable human ecology.

Among other weaknesses, it is fatally prone to Liebig’s “law of the minimum,” which states that the overall health of a system depends on the amount of the scarcest of the essential resources that is available to it. This ought to be self-evident to an urbanist, who must ipso facto be a kind of ecologist.

Yet techno-narcissists such as MIT’s Berger take it as axiomatic that innovation of-and-by itself can overcome all natural limits on a planet with finite resources. They assume the new-and-improved suburbs will continue to run on cars, only now they will be driverless and electric, and everything in their paradigm follows from that.

I don’t think so. Like it or not, the human race has not yet found a replacement for fossil fuels, especially oil, which has been the foundation of techno-industrial economies for a hundred years, and it is getting a little late in the game to imagine an orderly segue to some as-yet-undiscovered energy regime.

By the way, electricity is not an energy source. It is just a carrier of energy generated in power plants. We have produced large quantities of it at the grand scale using fossil fuels, hydropower, and nuclear fission (which is dependent on fossil fuels to operate).

And, by the way, all of our nuclear power plants are nearing the end of their design life, with no plans or prospects for them to be replaced by new ones.

We have maxed out on potential hydroelectric sites and the existing big ones are silting up, which will take them out of service inside of this century.

Electricity can also be produced by solar cells and wind turbines, but at nowhere near the scale necessary, on their own, for running contemporary American life.

The conceit that we can power suburbia, the interstate highway system, truck-based distribution networks, commercial aviation, the U.S. military, and Walt Disney World on anything besides fossil fuels is going to leave a lot of people very disappointed.

The truth is that we have been running all this stuff on an extravagant ramp-up of debt for at least a decade to compensate for the troubles that exist in the oil industry, oil being the primary and indispensable resource for our way of life.

These troubles are often lumped under the rubric peak oil, but the core of the trouble must be seen a little differently: namely, a steep decline in the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) across the oil industry. The phrase might seem abstruse on the face of it.

It means simply that it is becoming uneconomical to extract oil from the ground, even with the so-called miracle of “fracking” shale oil deposits. It doesn’t pay for itself, and the EROI is still headed further down.

In the 1930s, the oil industry could get 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil in energy they put into production. Drilling on the Texas prairie was like slipping a straw in a milkshake and the oil gushed out of the ground under its own pressure. Today, those old wells are far into depletion and we’re left with unconventional oil.

Horizontal drilling and fracking into shale is enormously more expensive to carry out, and offshore deepwater drilling that requires a $100 million floating oil platform is nothing like slipping a straw into a milkshake.

They have to go down a mile or more beneath the surface and then another mile into the undersea rock. It’s very expensive and dangerous. (Remember the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout of 2010?)

The aggregate ratio of oil-out-for-energy-in these days is 17 to 1, and for shale oil it’s more like 5 to 1. You cannot run industrial civilizations at those EROI ratios. Thirty to one is probably the minimum.

And you can’t run renewable alternative energy systems without an underlying support platform of fossil fuels. The implacable reality of this dynamic has yet to sink in at the graduate-school fantasy factories.

The world’s major oil companies are cannibalizing themselves to stay in business, with balance sheets cratering, and next-to-zero new oil fields being discovered. The shale oil producers haven’t made a net dime since the project got ramped up around 2005.

Their activities have been financed on junk lending made possible by arbitrages on the near-zero Fed fund rate, itself an historical abnormality.

The shale-oil drillers are producing all out to service their loans, and have thus driven down oil prices, negating their profit. Low oil prices are not the sign of a healthy industry but of a failing industrial economy, the latter currently expressing itself in a sinking middle class and the election of Donald Trump.

All the techno-grandiose wishful thinking in the world does not alter this reality. The intelligent conclusion from all this ought to be obvious: Restructuring the American living arrangement to something other than “infinite” suburban sprawl based on limitless car dependency.

As it happens, the New Urbanist movement recognized this dynamic beginning in the early 1990s and proposed a return to traditional walkable neighborhoods, towns, and cities as the remedy. It has been a fairly successful reform effort, with hundreds of municipal land-use codes rewritten to avert the inevitable suburban sprawl mandates of the old codes.

The movement also produced hundreds of new town projects all over the country to demonstrate that good urbanism was possible in new construction, as well as downtown makeovers in places earlier left for dead like Providence, Rhode Island, and Newburgh, New York.

When the elite graduate schools finally noticed the New Urbanism movement, it provoked extreme jealousy and hostility because they hadn’t thought of it themselves—it was a product of the property-development industry.

Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, in particular, had been lost for decades in raptures of Buck Rogers modernism, concerned solely with “cutting edge” aesthetics—that is, architectural fashion statements aimed at status seeking.

They affected to be offended by the retrograde front porches and picket fences of the New Urbanists, but they were unable to develop any coherent alternative vision of a plausible future urbanism—because there really wasn’t one.

Instead, around 2002 Harvard came up with a loopy program they called “Landscape Urbanism,” which was a half-baked revision of Ian McHarg’s old Design with Nature idea from the 1970s.

Design with Nature had spawned hundreds of PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) of single-family houses nestled in bosky, natural settings and sheathed in environmental-looking cedar, and scores of university housing “complexes” bermed into the terrain (with plenty of free parking).

Mostly, McHarg’s methodology was concerned with managing water runoff. It did not result in holistic towns, neighborhoods, or cities.

The projects of so-called Landscape Urbanism were not about buildings, and especially the relationship between buildings, other buildings, and the street. They viewed suburbia as a nirvana that simply required better storm-water drainage and the magic elixir of “edginess” to improve its long-term prospects.

Apparently MIT, down the street from Harvard, got jealous. They had snootily ignored the New Urbanism movement too, and done next to nothing on their own to rethink the next phase of the urban condition, besides the usual stale fantasies derived from the Radiant City playbook of Le Corbusier, the Swiss modernist who tried to destroy Paris in the 1920s with a skyscrapers-in-a-park scheme (which ended up being appropriated for the notorious American housing projects for the poor of the 1950s).

That’s where MIT’s Berger came in, having previously been at Harvard during the birth pangs of Landscape Urbanism. He brought over to MIT the P-Rex Lab (The Project for Reclamation Excellence) which put a “cutting edge” super high-tech veneer on what was still just environmental mitigation on previously used landscapes—pushing polluted soil around with front-end loaders.

Berger’s P-Rex lab showed absolutely no interest in the particulars of traditional urban design: street-and-block grids, street and building typologies, code-writing for standards and norms in construction, et cetera.

They showed no interest in the human habitat per se. Berger and his gang were simply promoting a fantasy they called the “global suburbia.”

Their fascination with the suburbs rested on three pillars: 

1) the fact that suburbia was already there;

2) the presumption that mass car use would continue to enable that settlement pattern; and

3 ) a religious faith in technological deliverance from the resource and capital limits that boded darkly for the continuation of suburban sprawl.

I will tell you without ceremony what the future actually holds for the inhabited terrain of North America.

The big cities will have to contract severely and the process will be fraught and disorderly.

The action will move to the small cities and small towns, especially the places that have a meaningful relationship with farming, food production, and the continent’s inland waterways. The suburbs have three destinies, none of them mutually exclusive: slums, salvage, and ruins.

The future has mandates of its own. If we want to remain civilized, we will be compelled to return to a landscape composed of relationships between town and country, at a scale that comports with the resource realities of the future.

These days the failure of American imagination, especially at the university level, is epic.

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Object Permanence

SUBHEAD: I brush a lock of hair from my face and catch the scent of the garden still on my fingertips.

By Jaclyn Moyer on 1 April 2017 for Orion Magazine -
(https://orionmagazine.org/article/object-permanence/)


Image above: Artist Ian Strange deconstructs buildings damaged in 2011 earthquake in suburbs of Christ's Church, New Zealand. This piece is titled "untitled house 3".  From (https://www.designboom.com/art/ian-strange-deconstructs-homes-in-christchurch-for-final-act-01-24-2014/gallery/image/ian-strange-final-act-designboom-11/).

After four years of farming vegetables in the foothills of Northern California, my partner, our nine-month-old daughter, and I left our farm for a salaried job and a rented house in Austin, Texas.

My first morning in the city I surveyed our backyard—a garage-sized rectangle thick with chickweed, an unruly patch of cactus, three leafless trees—then headed to the store to stock our empty kitchen. In the produce section, I floundered in choice.

Accustomed to constructing meals with vegetables from our farm, I circled pyramids of tomatoes, stacks of cauliflower. I lifted a bundle of kale, but the leaves were floppy and yellowed. I reached instead for broccoli, the stalk a shade closer to white than green, the flowers dry.

At the checkout line stood a rack of seeds. I slipped two packets into my cart: Georgia Collards and Ruby Red Chard.

That night, I hardly slept. Though my daughter had slept fine at the farm, in Austin she woke every few hours. Night after night, in the dark that wasn’t dark at all but aglow with the light of street lamps, I rocked her, rubbed her back, murmured lullabies.

Separation anxiety, I read, often caused sleep trouble in babies my daughter’s age as they developed “object permanence”—the understanding that things continue to exist even when they can’t be observed.

When my daughter woke to find herself alone, the theory explained, she was less content to fall back asleep because she now understood that something was missing; something she loved existed out in the world but she couldn’t see it, couldn’t touch it.

A friend suggested I place a piece of my clothing in the crib. “Sometimes the mother’s scent can be enough comfort,” she said. I unwound a shawl from my neck and spread it across my daughter’s mattress.

Our rented house was nice in ways I wasn’t used to: it had good insulation, double-paned windows, a dishwasher. No rats hid in the walls, no hornets under the eaves. There was also no woodstove. Instead of building a fire each morning, I turned on the heater with my iPhone.

Without produce to harvest or eggs to collect, without kindling to cut or rows of lavender to prune, I began to feel like just a guest in this life, wandering the grounds of some hotel. I felt severed from the world, as though I were wilting—I felt like the store-bought-broccoli version of myself.

A month passed and my seedlings began to outgrow their pots. I set my daughter on a quilt in the backyard and started to dig, forming long mounded beds. I dug all afternoon, cultivating as much of the yard as I could, not sure what I’d do when there was no space left to dig.

That evening, a siren neared and I waited for the sound to wake my daughter. The ambulance came within a block, but she didn’t stir. I tiptoed to her crib, leaned in to feel her breath on my cheek, and suddenly I wished she’d cry.

Brake lights poured through the curtains, and in the murky light I realized my fear wasn’t that city life would continue to grate, to feel foreign. I wasn’t afraid that my family and I would never feel comfortable in Austin but that—soon enough—we would.

It’s been two months now and my daughter, at last, sleeps all night. I wonder if her separation anxiety is abating. Perhaps she’s learning how to be apart from the things she loves, how to trust in their return.

In our backyard, my seedlings grow. I spend an afternoon weeding, working my fingers through each row until the soil settles deep into the creases of my palms.

That night in bed, I brush a lock of hair from my face and catch the scent of the garden still on my fingertips: tang of grass, musk of loam. I cup my face in my palm, press my nose into the skin, and fall asleep.

• Jaclyn Moyer’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Salon, High Country News, and other journals. She lives in the foothills of Northern California with her partner and two-year-old daughter

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Battle of the Behemoths

SUBHEAD: And the transition will get underway with a speed that will make your head spin.

By James Kunstler on 11 August 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/battle-of-the-behemoths/)


Image above: The ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ development process has begun for a 2020 release. From (http://bloody-disgusting.com/movie/3427859/godzilla-vs-kong-development-process-begun-first-details/).

As the empire deliquesces into a fetid slurry of economic failure, we stand ankle deep in the rising swamp waters witnessing the futile battle of the giants, Walmart and Amazon.

Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning, wrote this week that “[t]he Amazon-Walmart rivalry will determine the future of retail.”

Well, it seems that way, perhaps, and I understand why a lot of people would imagine it, but I would draw some different conclusions. What we’re seeing is more like the battle between Godzilla and King Kong, two freaks of nature produced by a toxic culture, fixing to finish each other off.

The condition that will flavor events going forward is scale. Everything organized at the giant scale is going to fail. We have made all the systems of daily life too large and they will not function in the long emergency (and the fourth turning), an age characterized by universal contraction.

This is true of corporations, institutions, schools, hospitals, farms, governments, virtually all organized enterprise. Retail is currently just the most visible example at the moment, since it is a commercial battleground that doesn’t enjoy public subsidies.

The organisms on that field are exquisitely sensitive to economic reality, and the salient reality these days is the impoverishment of their customers, the former middle class.

This has been a sensational year for retail failure so far with a record number of brick-and-mortar store closings. But it is hardly due solely to Internet shopping. The nation was vastly over-stored by big chain operations.

Their replication was based on a suicidal business model that demanded constant expansion, and was nourished by a regime of ultra-low interest rates promulgated by the Federal Reserve (and its cheerleaders in the academic econ departments).

The goal of the business model was to enrich the executives and shareholders as rapidly as possible, not to build sustainable enterprise.

As the companies march off the cliff of bankruptcy, these individuals will be left with enormous fortunes — and the American landscape will be left with empty, flat-roofed, throwaway buildings unsuited to adaptive re-use. Eventually, the empty Walmarts will be among them.

Just about everybody yakking in the public arena assumes that commerce will just migrate to the web. Think again. What you’re seeing now is a very short term aberration, the terminal expression of the cheap oil economy that is fumbling to a close.

Apart from Amazon’s failure so far to ever show a corporate profit, Internet shopping requires every purchase to make a journey in a truck to the customer.

In theory, it might not seem all that different from the Monkey Ward model of a hundred years ago. But things have changed in this land.

We made the unfortunate decision to suburbanize the nation, and now we’re stuck with the results: a living arrangement that can’t be serviced or maintained going forward, a living arrangement with no future.

This includes the home delivery of every product under sun to every farflung housing subdivision from Rancho Cucamonga to Hackensack.

Of course, the Big Box model, like Walmart, has also recruited every householder in his or her SUV into the company’s distribution network, and that’s going to become a big problem, too, as the beleaguered middle-class finds itself incrementally foreclosed from Happy Motoring and sinking into conditions of overt peonage.

The actual destination of retail in America is to be severely downscaled and reorganized locally.

Main Street will be the new mall, and it will be a whole lot less glitzy than the failed gallerias of yore, but it will represent a range of activities that will put a lot of people back to work at the community level. It will necessarily entail the rebuilding of local and regional wholesale networks and means of distribution that don’t require trucking.

If you think we’re just going to switch the trucking industry over to electric vehicles or engines that run on bio-fuels, hydrogen, compressed air, or natural gas, you will be disappointed. Ain’t going to happen.

We’re going to have to come up with something else, starting with the basic idea of the walkable community. This implies that we’re going to have to revive the existing towns and small cities that fit that description.

And it also implies that a great deal of American suburbia will have to be abandoned. The capital will not be there to reform it.

In any case, commerce later on in this century is not going to be anything like the Blue Light Special orgy of recent decades. And the transition will get underway with a speed that will make your head spin.

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The Big Contraction

SUBHEAD: An interview with James Howard Kunstler on the nature of our unraveling future.

Interview by Erico Tavares on 30 March 2017 for LinkedIn -
(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-contraction-interview-james-howard-kunstler-erico-matias-tavares)


Image above: Family "camping out" of their 1958 Chevy Brookwood station wagon. Back when the car was new they were not "homeless", they were just "roughing it". From (http://www.ultraswank.net/advertising/classic-hand-drawn-car-ads-from-the-us/).

E Tavares: Thank you for being with us today. You have been writing about worsening societal issues, what you call “entropy in action”, for many years. Broadly speaking, why do you think the US is in so much trouble?

JH Kunstler: We’ve been sowing the seeds for our predicament since the end of World War II. You might even call this process “The Victory Disease.” In practical terms it represents sets of poor decisions with accelerating bad consequences.

For instance, the collective decision to suburbanize the nation. This was not a conspiracy. It was consistent with my new theory of history, which is Things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time.

In 1952 we had plenty of oil and the ability to make a lot of cars, which were fun, fun, fun! And we turned our war production expertise into the mass production of single family houses built on cheap land outside the cities. But the result now is that we’re stuck in a living arrangement with no future, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Another bad choice was to offshore most of our industry. Seemed like a good idea at the time; now you have a citizenry broadly impoverished, immiserated, and politically inflamed.

Of course, one must also consider the possibility that industrial society was a historic interlude with a beginning, middle, and end, and that we are closer to the end of the story than the middle.

It was, after all, a pure product of the fossil fuel bonanza, which is also coming to an end (with no plausible replacement in view.) I don’t view all this as the end of the world, or of civilization, per se, but we’re certainly in for a big re-set of the terms for remaining civilized.

I’ve tried to outline where this is all going in my four-book series of the “World Made By Hand” novels, set in the near future. If we’re lucky, we can fall back to sets of less complex social and economic arrangements, but it’s unclear whether we will land back in something like the mid-nineteenth century, or go full-bore medieval, or worse. One thing we can be sure of: the situation we face is one of comprehensive discontinuity — a lot of things just stop, beginning with financial arrangements and long-distance supply lines of resources and finished goods.

Then it depends whether we can respond by reorganizing life locally in this nation at a finer scale — if it even remains a unified nation. Anyway, implicit in this kind of discontinuity is the possibility for disorder. We don’t know how that will go, and how we come through it depends on the degree of disorder.

ET: Fair points, but one remarkable feature of Western civilization has been its resilience. In less than a decade the US has been able not only to reverse the historical decline in domestic crude oil production but also come up with natural gas as an expansive new source of energy. It now exports both of these commodities. Ditto for food production, where it can afford the luxury of using 40% of its corn production as car fuel. Doesn’t all this contradict what you had postulated in “The Long Emergency” back in 2005?

JHK: We flatter ourselves a bit to harp on our “resilience.” More realistically, history is an emergent process and societies are emergent phenomena which necessarily respond to the circumstances that reality presents. Sh*t happens and sh*t unhappens and then re-happens differently. The oil situation is grossly misunderstood by the public, including you, as implicit in the question you have just put to me.

We are not exporting any meaningful quantities of oil or natural gas. In fact we’re still importing nearly 8 million barrels of oil a day.

The shale oil “miracle” has largely been a manifestation of low interest lending into an industry that can’t pay back its loans, even as it produces like mad at a loss. You can look at it as a simple equation: oil over $75 a barrel crushes economies and oil under $75 a barrel crushes oil companies. To date, American oil companies have not made a red cent off the shale oil “miracle.”

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it kept a lot of people busy for a while, but it was essentially a stunt that is not paying for itself and it has a short horizon. The public only sees lower gasoline prices at the pump; they have no idea how low prices are wrecking the oil industry. The result of all this will be an incrementally smaller global oil industry and fewer customers for its products — without anything to replace it.

The crux of the matter is the falling Energy Return on Investment (EROI). In the 1950s you got 100 barrels of Texas crude for every equivalent barrel of energy you sunk into the project. That’s 100 to 1. Shale oil gives you about 5 to 1.

Tar sands are a little worse. The worldwide average EROI these days is 17 to 1 (including Arabian oil, deep water, etc.). We can’t run all the systems of our “advanced” society at those ratios, and that is why we have been running up the debt so dramatically — borrowing from the future to cover the cost of living as we do.

And that is exactly why we are heading into financial clusterfuck as it becomes increasingly evident that the debt will never be paid back. This will wreck the banking system, and that will force everything else to change, including the dynamic of how we produce and distribute food. So, no, none of what I am saying here contradicts my 2005 book, “The Long Emergency”, though it has played out with some strange twists in the story.


Image above: A 1958 Chevy Brookwood station wagon as it appears today. With that big cargo bay and isolated location it could easily be used by homeless persons roughing it. From (http://usedfromusa.com/chevrolet-ads/145244-1958-chevrolet-brookwood-station-wagon.html).

ET: Another theme you talked about in that book is that in order to cope with looming energy and food crises Americans would have to eventually live in smaller-scale, localized and semi-agrarian communities. All part of a process you call the Big Contraction. 

However, a McKinsey Global Institute research paper from 2012 predicts quite the opposite for most of the world in the coming years, as depicted in the graph above. Indeed, growing urbanization has been one of the major trends so far in the 21st century. What do they see here that you don’t?

JHK: McKinsey’s prescience may be on a level with what the CIA failed to see in the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union. Everybody and his mother is predicting that our cities will only get bigger and bigger. I will impudently state that they are all mistaken.

Our cities have attained a scale which cannot be sustained, given the capital and resource scarcities we face immediately ahead. This is what they don’t see: the fragility of the fossil fuel supply system (and everything that depends on it) and its relation to money and capital formation.

McKinsey and its compadres are dumb extrapolationists — they look at what’s been going on and they say we’ll only get more of it in a bigger package. These people are the “intellectual-yet-idiots” that Nassim Nicholas Taleb identifies so shrewdly.

For one thing, the successful places in the years ahead will be those places with a meaningful relationship to food production. I believe the action in US will shift to the now-derelict small towns and small cities, especially places around the extensive inland waterway system and the Great Lakes.

The giant metroplexes, so-called, will contract, probably in a messy way that includes great losses of notional real estate value and battles between various ethnic groups as to who gets to inhabit the districts with remaining value (e.g. close to the waterfront).

This contraction has already occurred in many cities of the heartland — Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, etc. In contrast, booming New York, Boston, San Francisco and Dallas are purely products of the financialization of economy, and disorder in the banking system will hit them very hard. The suburbs around these places are next to go. Their destiny is either slums, salvage, or ruins.

ET: One aspect that we find fascinatingly provocative in your work is your description of modern urban landscapes, and how instead of being welcoming social spaces they now cause anxiety, even repulsion. What have modern architects missed in relation to their predecessors? Is that in any way related to the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which profoundly impacted much of the Western world?

JHK: The architects are a dysfunctional sub-culture in themselves. Suffice it to say they are hand-maidens of the corporate racketeers and victims of a particularly virulent form of techno-narcissism that infects our culture of wishful thinking and solipsism.

But the condition of the landscape is a product of much more than architects. The suburban project comes to us courtesy of banking, the automobile and trucking interests, national chain retail, municipal planning officials (who know nothing of urban design), traffic engineers, and many other ultra-specialists who populate this matrix of racketeering.

They have produced an everyday environment that is positively punishing to human neurology. It makes people sad, lonely, confused, angry, anxious, and despondent. They didn’t do it on purpose. It was just the blowback from their methods, customs, and practices. The zoning ordinances crafted and refined over a hundred years now mandate a suburban sprawl outcome in most American places.

Look, life is tragic. As I began to say in this interview, societies can make some pretty poor choices. Our choice to live in a drive-in utopia was a terrible blunder and now we’re stuck with the consequences. Notice that the outcome on the European landscape is still rather different. They will have plenty of problems in The Long Emergency, but at least they did not destroy their old city centres, and when the time for contraction comes, as it will, they have something of great value to contract back into.

ET: You talk about a “population overshoot” relating to demographic explosions in Africa and the Middle East that you claim cannot be sustained by the existing resources of those regions. Why do you say that?

JHK: Much of this region is desert wasteland. The populations of the “nations” in it (many boundaries drawn arbitrarily by the victors of World War One) have exploded numerically. The region can’t feed nor water itself, nor employ its exploded population. It is purely a product of fossil fuel pseudo-prosperity. It went this way for less than a century and then it will be over.

For the moment these populations (especially the young men) are exploding in political violence. Categorically, “normal” life will not continue as it has. We’re already seeing the gross disintegration of whole societies. It will accelerate.


• James Howard Kunstler's thinking gained prominence after the publication of his book The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development “because [he] believe[s] a lot of people share [his] feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.” This was followed by The Long Emergency (2005) and most recently Too Much Magic (2012), both non-fictional books. Starting with World Made by Hand in 2008, he has written a series of science fiction novels about such a culture in the future.
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You Are Not In Control

SUBHEAD: The Technosphere controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons.

By Dmitry Orlov on 14 February 2017 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2017/02/you-are-not-in-control.html)


Image above: Detail of illustration of man controlled by technology by Igor Morski. From (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/543317142516835055/).

My recent book tour was very valuable, among other things, in gauging audience response to the various topics related to the technosphere and its control over us. Specifically, what seems to be generally missing is an understanding that the technosphere doesn’t just control technology; it controls our minds as well.

The technosphere doesn’t just prevent us from choosing technologies that we think may be appropriate and rejecting the ones that aren’t. It controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons. It also controls our values, aligning them with its own. And it controls our bodies, causing us to treat ourselves as if we were mechanisms rather than symbiotic communities of living cells (human and otherwise).

None of this invalidates the approach I proposed for shrinking the technosphere which is based on a harm/benefit analysis and allows us to ratchet down our technology choices by always picking technologies with the least harm and the greatest benefit.

But this approach only works if the analysis is informed by our own tastes, not the tastes imposed on us by the technosphere, by our values, not the technosphere’s values, and by our rejection of a mechanistic conception of our selves.

These choices are implicit in the 32 criteria used in harm/benefit analysis, favoring local over global, group interests over individual interests, artisanal over industrial and so on. But I think it would be helpful to make these choices explicit, by working through an example of each of the three types of control listed above. This week I'll tackle the first of these.

A good example of how the technosphere controls our tastes is the personal automobile. Many people regard it as a symbol of freedom and see their car as an extension of their personalities.

The freedom to be car-free is not generally regarded as important, while the freedoms bestowed by car ownership are rather questionable. It is the freedom to make car payments, pay for repairs, insurance, parking, towing and gasoline. It is the freedom to pay tolls, traffic tickets, title fees and excise taxes.

• It is the freedom to spend countless hours stuck in traffic jams and to suffer injuries in car accidents.
  
• It is the freedom to bring up neurologically damaged children by subjecting them to unsafe carbon monoxide levels (you are encouraged to have a CO detector in your house, but not in your car—because it would be going off all the time).
  
• It is the freedom to suffer indignities when pulled over by police, especially if you’ve been drinking. In terms of a harm/benefit analysis, private car ownership makes no sense at all.
  
• It is often argued that a car is a necessity, although the facts tell a different story. Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. The population of the planet is over 7 billion. Therefore, there are at least 5.8 billion people alive in the world who don’t own a car. 

How can something be considered a necessity if 82% of us don’t seem to need it? In fact, owning a car becomes necessary only in a certain specific set of circumstances.

Here are some of the key ingredients: a landscape that is impassable except by motor vehicle, single-use zoning that segregates land by residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial uses, a lifestyle that requires a daily commute, and a deficit of public transportation.

In turn, widespread private car ownership is what enables these key ingredients: without it, situations in which private car ownership becomes a necessity simply would not arise.

Now, moving people about the landscape is not a productive activity: it is a waste of time and energy.

If you can live, send your children to school, shop and work all without leaving the confines of a small neighborhood, you are bound to be more efficient than someone who has to drive between these four locations on a daily basis. But the technosphere is rational to a fault and is all about achieving efficiencies. And so, an obvious question to ask is,

What is it about the car-dependent living arrangement, and the landscape it enables, that the technosphere finds to be efficient? The surprising answer is that the technosphere strives to optimize the burning of gasoline; everything else is just a byproduct of this optimization.


It turns out that the fact that so many people are forced to own a car has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with petroleum chemistry.

About half of what can be usefully extracted from a barrel of crude oil is in the form of gasoline. It is possible to boost the fraction of other, more useful products, such as kerosene, diesel fuel, jet fuel and heating oil, but not by much and at a cost of reduced net energy.

But gasoline is not very useful at all. It is volatile (quite a lot of it evaporates, especially in the summer); it is chemically unstable and doesn’t keep for long; it is toxic and carcinogenic. It has a rather low flash point, limiting the compression ratio that can be achieved by gasoline-fueled engines, making them thermodynamically less efficient. It is useless for large engines, and is basically a small-engine fuel.

Gasoline-powered engines don’t last very long because gasoline-air mixture is detonated (using an electric spark) rather than burned, and the shock waves from the detonations cause components to wear out quickly. They have few industrial uses; all of the serious transportation infrastructure, including locomotives, ships, jet aircraft, tractor-trailers, construction equipment and electrical generators run on petroleum distillates such as kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and bunker fuel.

If it weren’t for widespread private car ownership, gasoline would have to be flared off at refineries, at a loss. In turn, the cost of petroleum distillates—which are all of the industrial fuels—would double, and this would curtail the technosphere’s global expansion by making long-distance freight much more expensive. The technosphere’s goal, then, is to make us pay for the gasoline by forcing us to drive. To this end, the landscape is structured in a way that makes driving necessary.

The fact that to get from a Motel 8 on one side of the road to the McDonalds on the other requires you to drive two miles, navigate a cloverleaf, and drive two miles back is not a bug; it's a feature.

When James Kunstler calls suburban sprawl “the greatest misallocation of resources in human history” he is only partly right. It is also the greatest optimization in exploiting every part of the crude oil barrel in the history of the technosphere.

The proliferation of small gasoline-burning engines in the form of cars enables another optimization, forcing us to pay for another generally useless fraction of the crude oil barrel: road tar. Lots of cars require lots of paved roadways and parking lots.

Thus, the technosphere wins twice, first by making us pay for the privilege of disposing of what is essentially toxic waste at our own risk and expense, then by making us pay for spreading another form of toxic waste all over the ground.

 Suburban sprawl is not a failure of urban planning; it is a success story in enslaving humans and making them toil on behalf of the technosphere while causing great damage to themselves and to the environment. Needless to say, you have absolutely no control over any of this.

You. Are. Not. In. Control.

You can vote, you can protest, you can lobby, donate to environmentalist groups, attend conferences on urban planning… and you would just be wasting your time, because you can't change petroleum chemistry.

That the need to make people buy gasoline trumps all other considerations becomes obvious if we observe how the technosphere reacts whenever gasoline demand falters.

When rampant wealth inequality started making owning a car unaffordable for more and more people, the solution was to introduce larger cars for those who could still afford one: minivans for the mommies, pickup trucks for the daddies, and for everyone the now common SUV.

And now that gasoline demand is dropping again because of falling labor participation rate and an increase in the number of people who telecommute, the solution will no doubt be driverless cars which will cruise around aimlessly burning gasoline.

Mommies may think that a minivan will keep their kiddies safer than a compact would (not true unless they have 8-9 kids).

Daddies may think that the pickup truck is a sign of manliness (true if you are some sort of gofer/roustabout; pickup trucks are driven by picker-uppers, a subspecies of gofer/roustabout).

But all they are doing is obeying “The Third Law of the Technosphere,” if you will: “For every improvement in the efficiency of gasoline-fired engines, there must be an equal and opposite improvement in inefficiency.”

So, perhaps you should just relax and go with the flow.

After all, being a slave in the service of the technosphere is not immediately life-threatening… unless you crash into a tree or get run over by a drunk. But there is another problem: this arrangement isn’t going to last. The net energy that can be extracted out of a barrel of oil is quickly shrinking.

In less then a decade the energy surplus required to maintain a car-centric lifestyle will no longer exist.

If private car ownership and daily driving are required of you in order to survive, then you won’t survive. There goes at least 18% of the world’s population, which will find itself stranded in the middle of an impassable landscape. Oops!

Given that you are not in control, and given that the car-centric lifestyle is an evolutionary dead end for your subspecies, what can you do?

The answer is obvious: you can plan your escape, then join the other 82% of the world’s population, which is able to live car-free. Some of them even manage to live entirely outside of the reach of the technosphere. Let their example be your inspiration.

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New Gravel Roads

SUBHEAD: In a generation Kauaians may be driving around the island on gravel roads.

By AP Staff on 16 August 2016 in the Star Advertiser -
(http://www.staradvertiser.com/breaking-news/one-citys-answer-to-pothole-complaints-new-dirt-roads/)


Image above: Lowell Frederes stands along 113th Street in Omaha, Nebraska on August 10th. The city had ground-up the asphalt surface of the street saying it was beyond repair and replaced it with a gravel road. From original article.

[IB Publisher's Note: Asphalt roads are basically fossil fuel laid deep on gravel. Concrete roads are even more energy intensive to lay down. Although there has been major projects to improve roadways on Kauai in the last decade, remember roads are temporary. It will be unlikely we will be able to afford maintenance on the roadways we use today. We have grown accustomed to dense traffic with a mix heavy trucks and tractor trailers. Kauai will have to accommodate the future -  like it or not. How we live our "suburban" lives, commuting, relying on Big-Box stores and front door deliveries from FedeEx will simply go away. Our disintegrating roads will likely support 4x4 trucks, all-terrain vehicles, off road bikes, horse drawn wagons for some time. But the  low-riding  sedans, coupes, crossovers, and hatchbacks that fill our high tech roads today will be a thing of the past.]

For miles and miles Omaha stretches on, one tidy, suburban-style neighborhood after another filled with modern low-slung houses set on spacious lawns with towering oaks and elms.

It’s a model of comfortable mid-American living, with one unusual exception: thanks to a quirk in how Omaha developed, about 300 miles of streets in these nice neighborhoods are pitted with potholes almost big enough to swallow an SUV.

The bad roads have been both an anomaly and a source of complaints for years.

But recently, they’ve become the center of a mini-crisis after local officials began dispatching crews to tear up the asphalt in the neighborhoods and turn the streets back into dirt roads, much like what existed in the city’s frontier days.

The sudden appearance of miles of dirt road in the midst of urban Omaha has prompted angry protests by residents and showcased a conflict over the public services homeowners should expect when a modern city outgrows some of its old real estate agreements.

“No letter, no notice. We just came home on a Tuesday, and our street was ground up,” said Joe Skradski, a dentist who lives on 113th Street, where a dozen $400,000-and-up houses now line a dirt path. “Since then, it’s been nothing short of a nightmare.”

Nearly every U.S. city faces a backlog of needed roadwork as streets built decades ago wear out, but the situation is especially vexing in Omaha, a sprawling city of 435,000 people with 4,800 miles of road and not enough tax revenue to maintain them.

Decades ago, a number of developers sought permission to lay down asphalt roads rather than longer-lasting concrete in several sections in the middle of town, and to skip installing curbs and gutters preferred by the city.

The city agreed, with the understanding that homeowners be responsible for occasional repaving. Some substandard roads also were in areas once outside the city but that were later annexed.

For years, the arrangement held up. But as the roads began to age and crumble, and as new residents replaced the original homeowners, resentment intensified about a city government that maintained some neighborhoods while ignoring others.

Said neighbor Bill Manhart, “It’s like living in the country, but in the middle of the city…There’s so much dust and mud on the street, what’s the point?”

A series of meeting between city officials and residents of the affected neighborhoods, which include about 10,000 houses, hasn’t resolved the problem.

“This is insanity,” declared City Council member Chris Jerram at one heated council session earlier this year.

Austin Rowser, Omaha streets superintendent, said the city’s position is “a matter of fairness. Some property owners paid for better streets and a minority didn’t.” He added that the city simply can’t afford the roughly $300 million bill to fix all the substandard streets.

That doesn’t fly with residents who say that dirt roads or crumbling pavement are unworthy of a well-off community with a growing population, a tiny unemployment rate and four Fortune 500 companies.

“Well, gee whiz, if I’m going to be on a gravel street, I don’t think they should increase my taxes,” said resident Terry Hexum, referring to a recent tax assessment hike that would generate revenue for the entire city. He helped organize a protest meeting attended by 200 people about the street dispute.

Officials have suggested that neighbors create a district to finance repaving, or the more expensive option of rebuilding the streets to city standards, which the city would then maintain.

But when no agreement was reached, city officials dispatched its bulldozers, saying dirt roads were better than deteriorating asphalt. It was not the solution residents were hoping for.

Signs went up denouncing Mayor Jean Stothert and other city officials, and one businessman filed a lawsuit that sought to force the city to repave the road in front of his $1.8 million home.

“So, they say it’s not their road,” said Manhart. “My question is: When did it become theirs to take, and when did it become ours to fix?”

Last month, Stothert announced the city would stop the dirt road conversions, would try to set aside more money for repairs and offered to pay half the cost of repaving three stretches of roads that had prompted some of the heated complaints. It was enough to get businessman Bruce Simon to drop his lawsuit, but no one has come up with a funding plan that would fix all the rough road.

According to urban planners, the dispute is a case study in how short-term deals that cities make about seemingly minor issues can backfire when the cities and circumstances change.

Dan Piatkowski, an assistant professor of regional planning at the University of Nebraska, said the dispute is also forcing residents to think about what they get from government. This is especially useful, he said, in a conservative state like Nebraska that is skeptical of government spending.

Many conservatives believe “smaller government is better, but we still want our roads to function,” he said.

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Beacon in th Sand

SUBHEAD: We must not pretend we'e something other than responsible agents, capable of destroying everthing around us.

By Tyler Sage on 24 September 2015 for The Dark Mountain -
(http://dark-mountain.net/blog/a-beacon-in-the-sand/)


Image above: Cropped image of painting by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (1816 – 1868) titled "Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way (Westward Ho!)". Click to enlarge. From (https://americangallery.wordpress.com/category/leutze-emanuel-gottlieb/).

We might begin with the image of American history as a great tidal wave of progress. A wave launched with the appearance of the colonists; a wave rolling with greater and greater momentum westward across the continent. It brushed aside everything that resisted it. It used covered wagons and steamships, homesteads and railroads, guns and axes; it used laws and politics, noble speeches and the rhetoric of free enterprise; it used corporate charters and city charters and civic pride. It remade everything it touched.

This is a rather unreconstructed metaphor – we are, for example, bypassing the question of what this wave might look like to a Native American standing in its way – but it is at the same time a useful one. It captures something of the old notion of Manifest Destiny, and a bit of the American view of its own history as one of an inevitable, necessary advancement. It captures something of the feeling of propulsion that can seem at times to occupy the heart of the so-called American experiment. But it is also useful because of the questions it raises.

If our history is to be seen, metaphorically, as a wave of progress sweeping across the continent, what happens when that wave collides with the western wall of the Pacific Ocean? That is, what happens when the wave runs out of land?

At least two possibilities suggest themselves. It might be the case, first, that the wave of progress (we might call it ‘progress’) cannot be stopped. We can imagine it reaching the boundary of the Pacific and simply continuing to accelerate, if not geographically, then into other realms.

If we keep pushing on the image, we come to the image that the West Coast, and California in particular, often project: they are the furthest point of advancement, the tip of the still-moving spear, the prow of the boat. This seems to be the self-imagining of Silicon Valley, which would like to see itself as riding at the edge of an accelerating frontier, a force (or the force) for progress and goodness in the world.

It is also the imagining forwarded by the rhetoric of Hollywood, with its proclaimed position as the country’s ‘dream factory’, the place that points the way towards what the rest of us can only imagine ourselves being. Under these readings, our westward progress is still continuing. We advance, restlessly and unceasingly, towards some better place.

But there is another possibility. It might also be the case that the progress cannot go on forever. It may be that we should understand American civilisation as becoming increasingly enervated and deracinated as it spreads across the continent, thinner and less substantial, like a wave moving up a beach. Under this view, as it advances, our culture loses strength and decency.

Our downfall is inevitable, and you can see that if you look westwards; California is the land of fad and fantasy. There is little more out there than a construction of cultureless suburbs, plastic and unrefined, deadening.

This is the old view of the New York stage industry towards Hollywood; it’s the contemporary view sometimes exhibited by the East Coast establishment towards Silicon Valley: they are frivolous, substanceless dreamers with no grasp on either reality or propriety. All flash, no substance.

Under this imagining, American civilisation has become increasingly self-corrupted as it has pushed towards the Pacific; the West Coast is not a beacon but a symbol of dissolution. The motion is not towards intensified life, but towards senescence. In the indelible image of the poet James Wright, ‘At the bottom of the cliff / America is over and done with / America, / Plunged into the dark furrows / of the sea again.’

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We might continue with a fact: California is running out of water. This is not a metaphor. The details are fairly straightforward. Precipitation has been extremely low for four years. We might also note an example of the difficulty the state has had in approaching this problem: in January of 2014, Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency, and requested that citizens of the state reduce their water consumption.

He set a goal of a 20% reduction in water usage. In July of that year, the governor was back with another announcement: the first summer water usage statistics had appeared, and despite the declared state of emergency, people were actually using more water than they had the previous year. Since then, despite rationing to farmland and rapidly-intensifying restrictions by municipalities, things have not improved. T

here is only so much slack in the system. People use water; they need water. And people need to eat. California produces 71% of spinach consumed in America, and 69% of carrots, 90% of the broccoli, 97% of the plums, 95% of the garlic. And more. It is the breadbasket of American agriculture.

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We might offer an observation. It involves Starbucks, a west-coast company (it began in Seattle), and one that heralded the cultural boom of the boutique excellence of the everyday product with which we are now surrounded, from craft coffee and beer to farm-to-table food and excellent television shows. Last year, at Starbucks in California and across the country, coffee cups appeared bearing paper sleeves emblazoned with motivational sayings from Oprah Winfrey. T

he program, affiliated with the company Teavana (a subsidiary of Starbucks) was familiar in its outlines. It combined notions of corporate philanthropy – a portion of profits was donated to one of Oprah’s own charitable foundations – with self-help jargon; the underlying motive was, of course, to increase sales for Starbucks and fame and profit for Oprah. In terms of the dynamics we expect from our corporations, there was little unusual in this.

But if we pause for a moment, and step outside of our own familiarity, it’s possible to see how absolutely strange this is. We were drinking from cups of coffee bearing self-help slogans. What on earth for? What, if we step back from our position of familiarity, does this mean?

One obvious place to start is by examining the intention of this campaign: what was the effect it wanted to create? How exactly did it intend to increase sales? We might first note that these slogans made us, or tried to make us, feel better about ourselves. As Slavoj Zizek is fond of pointing out, programs like this one allow us to consume without guilt.

When we patronized Starbucks last year, those coffee sleeves assured us that we were no longer simply buying a product from a large, faceless corporate entity that did not much acknowledge our existence. Instead, we were buying a product that both gave to charity and reinforced our notion that, through the purchase, we were actually increasing the degree of our self-actualisation. The product was, in some sense, engaging with us on a level that was separate from its existence as a simple commodity.

But what, exactly, was the content of this engagement? One of the messages from Oprah on the cardboard sleeves read: ‘Be more splendid. Be more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.’ Splendid is descended from the Latin splendidus, meaning bright, or shining, or gorgeous. Extraordinary is also from a Latin word, meaning outside of the common order. So what Oprah and Starbucks were urging is that we be bright, shining, glorious stars of our own, outside the realm of the ordinary, that last world here presumably meaning ‘everybody else’. So far, so good.

This message, like the program itself, is so familiar to American culture as to serve as an entirely unremarkable background, or perhaps foundational element, of it. Each of us can shine. Each of us can be perfectly individuated from the mass.

The second half of Oprah’s exhortation showed us how: ‘Use every moment to fill yourself up.’ Here again we have the familiar element of ‘using every moment’. Life is precious; waste none of it. And how? By ‘filling yourself up.’ It’s this last phrase that contains the pure distillation of the message, as though each of the preceding ideas has suddenly and sharply come into focus.

There is, of course, the not-so-subtle pushing of the product through the reference of ‘filling’ (as in another cup of coffee.) Beyond this, however, resides the deeper image: we will become splendid and extraordinary by filling ourselves. We are to take every moment and use it to draw the world into us, to consume it; this moving of everything into our being will be the feat that actualises us.

This logic was pushed to its final conclusion by another slogan on a sleeve. ‘You are not here to shrink down to less, but to blossom into more of who you really are.’ That is to say, the exhortations of the first message are not exhortations to change ourselves. Rather, they are indications of our real, if hitherto unknown, potential. They are about our true purpose.

You are not here to change, you are here ‘to blossom into more of who you really are.’ You already contain the seeds of greatness. To be ‘more splendid’ and ‘more extraordinary’, you need to fill yourself up. But this will not alter you, or make you into someone else. It will, instead, release your true self. It will reveal your deepest actuality. Do not change, and do not let people tell you to change; instead, fill yourself up until your true inner perfection begins to emerge.

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We might consider the Peoples Church of Fresno. This is an entirely ordinary evangelical church, of the kind that can be found across the nation; however, for our purposes it is worth remembering that the history of American evangelism is intimately connected, for worse and for better, with the history of American westward expansion and American exceptionalism.

The eradication of the Native Americans had religious as well as social and economic roots – one has only to remember the famous Presbyterian minister Benjamin Palmer’s 1901 sermon, in which he argued that ‘when the Indians had, for countless centuries, neglected the soil, had no worship to offer the true God, with scarcely any serious occupation but murderous inter-tribal wars … the Indian [was] swept from the earth, and a great Christian nation, over seventy-five million strong, [rose] up.’

At the same time, however, much of the movement to abolish slavery in this country was religious, and evangelical, in nature: the seminaries in the (then frontier) Midwest were hotbeds for radical abolitionist thought, and John Brown was an evangelical Christian who started his career as a violent religious radical in Kansas. There has always been contradiction in our religious history; there have always been both anti-human and pro-human forces at work.

At the Peoples Church of Fresno last summer the lead pastor, Dale Oquist, taught a series of lessons on ‘Jesusology’. The title, like the title of Oprah’s project with Starbucks – ‘Steep Your Soul’ – was mostly a sales pitch, designed to stimulate intrigue while maintaining just enough referential force to indicate its content. So Jesusology was the study of the ‘life, significance, and ministry of Jesus.’ So far, so good.

This is exactly what we might expect to be happening at a church of this sort. The online summary of the first sermon in the series listed three main points, and two of the three were unremarkable: ‘Jesus was in the business of reshaping people’s views of who God is,’ and ‘We are to make straight the paths of our lives for Yahweh to come to us.’

These indicated that the sermon, like many evangelical sermons, was both a discussion of what the life and teachings of Jesus reveal about the true nature of God, and a discussion of the Biblical injunction to work on reducing the obstacles in our lives that prevent our communion with God.

But the third main point of the sermon is worth pausing over. It bore italics in the summary, and read: ‘God is not mad at us!‘ It was explained in the following way: ‘People tend to believe God causes or allows things to go wrong because of something they did wrong. Today we learned Jesus was in the business of reshaping peoples’ views of God.

We can know that God is not angry at us.‘ (Italics again in the original.) In a sense, this too is a common piece of Biblical teaching. The point is that our sins have been pre-forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus, and that (if we accept God into our hearts) the path of salvation is therefore open to us. We will not be punished if we repent of our sins.

But there is still something remarkable about that initial phrase: God is not mad at us! Thinking this over, it might occur to us to ask a question: Why, exactly, would we think that he is mad at us? Or, to put it differently: What was Pastor Oquist is seeing in his congregation that made him want to reassure them in this way?

The answer is given in the explanation that follows: ‘People tend to believe God causes or allows things to go wrong because of something they did wrong.’ So Pastor Oquist seemed to feel that we are afraid things are going wrong in the world because of something we did, and his natural inclination was to comfort us.

God is not angry at us; we should not live in fear, or sadness, or guilt. Our goal, as articulated in the other bullet points, is instead to open ourselves up to God so that we can know the truth about the world.

One begins to see the connection to the platitudes of Oprah Winfrey on the Starbucks cup. Both originate in assumptions about the unhappiness, or un-fulfillment, of their audience. Starbucks and Oprah assume that we feel un-actualised, so they try to reassure us that there is a path open to actualisation; Pastor Oquist believes we are afraid that God is mad at us, so he reassures us this isn’t the case. And beneath both of these vision lies the old notion of progress.

Progress westward, progress towards a greater place, towards a promised destiny. Progress towards a world in which, through filling ourselves up as individuals – through our personal splendour, through our personal relationship with God – we will somehow find our way through to a world that is better for everyone.

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There is a strange sleight of hand a work in all of this. It takes place in the assertion that through focusing on the ‘I’ we will improve the ‘we’. The path to community, that is, takes place through individualism.

 Consider a final example: the architecture, or built geography, of suburban California, and indeed, suburban America. It has often been claimed that there is a sort of anesthesia in this geography, composed as it is of interstates and strip malls, endless one and two-story responses to population growth, streets like inescapable mazes, identical houses strung one after another to the horizon.

There is a truth to these observations: from the outside these suburbs can come to look like a physical manifestation of what Adorno and Horkheimer loathed in what they the termed ‘the culture industry’. The repetition and flatness of affect can appear ideological, designed to perpetuate a culture in which, ‘conformity has replaced consciousness.’

But from the inside – that is, actually driving among these neighbourhoods and interacting with their owners – that ‘conformity’ takes on a new aspect. We see that the birds-eye view of the horror of the place must be somehow integrated with an understanding of the experience of its residents. To many of the people who live in these suburbs, they are not a repository of conformist horror, but a confirmation of achievement.

Each property is a small, inviolable personal kingdom. They are fenced. Kids splash in backyard pools. The lawns are manicured. The cars are cared for meticulously, and there are very few older models. As with the houses themselves, the point of the cars is not that everyone else may have exactly the same model, but that I too have one.

That is to say, from the inside, these suburbs are not representations of conformity, but of success. It is the success of I too. It is purchased with sweat, and perseverance, and hard-won dollars. All of my neighbours may have one, sure, but I too have a small castle of my own.

Looking closely, we can see the way in which this is a physical synthesis of the Oprah/Starbucks exhortation to splendidness and Pastor Oquist’s reassurance that God is not angry, you simply have to open yourself up to him. It is a geography, physical as well as social, that assures you of the possibility of achievement. It is a geography that reinforces the notion that even if there are awful things going on out there in the world, here you can have stability and comfort and be among the like-minded. Here, God is not angry.

All of this is possible; achieving it, deeply and truly, simply requires faith in the dream, along with a continued and constructive work on the self. For Oprah, this work is a filling up of the self; for Pastor Oquist, it is an acceptance of what was done for you, that is, an acceptance that it was on your behalf that Jesus died on the cross. In both cases, what is required is that belief in the validity of the self, the joy in the self, the acceptance of the self, the perfectibility of the self.

And the ultimate reassurance is that it is through this focus on the self that the ‘we’ lurking behind all of the encomiums will be created. We will have our malls and our movie theatres, our clothing stores and our cars. It is through the ‘I’ that the ‘we’ will be triumphant.

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We might return to the drama of the drought in California and the difficulty of taking measures to offset it. What becomes clear, if we look at the way people are living and what they are being told, is that to be asked to reduce, be it water or any other consumable, runs counter to nearly every mandate, belief, and historical self-understanding of our culture. California, and by extension America, is about having.

It is not about not having. It is about doing, not about not doing. If the choice is between some relatively abstract notion of preservation on the one hand, and washing the car on the other, we will choose washing the car.

We will choose to eat out-of-season vegetables to promote our health, and we will choose to take our regular showers to maintain our sense of hygiene. Why? Because when we are confronted with doubt, or difficulty, the accumulated weight of the system of beliefs in which we have operated for the entirety of our lives rests on the side of continuing to fill ourselves up.

It rests on the side of displacing our fears that we might bear responsibility. It rests on our belief in our own destiny, and our movement towards it; it rests on our belief that through the consuming ‘I’ we will reach the promised ‘we’. These bad things are not happening because of anything we’ve done; God is not mad at me, he cannot be punishing us.

In these ways, the need to use less water is nearly impossible to negotiate, because it is a worldly annoyance running up against transcendent imperatives. It is competing with self-actualisation. And self-actualisation, we are told over and over again, is the entire goal of our lives. It is through self-actualisation that we will, in Donald Trump’s phrase, ‘Make America Great Again.’

We are meant, we have been told more times than we can count, to have our own small place in the sun; we have worked for that place, we have been promised it, and we’re sure as hell not giving it back.

It is here, I think, that the great sad force of the metaphor of American culture as a wave becomes finally and fully apparent. A wave is not a movement of water, it is a movement of force through water.

And the force that moves through us is the very notion of progress itself. When it runs up against the reality of California, the reality of the drought, we see that it is boundless and unstoppable, and at the same time enervated, dissipating. It is a force at once ever-expanding and ever-thinning, an endless taking-in, an endless self-fulfilment, and the continual emptying-out of these things.

It is the notion of California, land of the blossoming star, land of the internet billionaire, land where we can each have our personal kingdom; it is the notion of the new electronic frontier sweeping out away from us and across the world, promising a California for every human on earth, regardless of how devoid of meaning that promised land is.

It is this force, this idea of progress, with which we need to contend. When we see Oprah’s slogans on our coffee cups, we should howl with laughter at the idea that we will be made better by coffee. When we hear of Pastor Oquist’s sermons we should ache with sadness at his need to so reassure his congregation. We should long to tear down the sterility and separation of the suburbs, their imprisoning message of false achievement.

We should agitate and organise and foment. We should proclaim that the natural world has an inherent value that is greater than the value of our personal or financial success; that transcendence comes not from a filling-up of ourselves but from a re-awakening of our connections to each other and to the non-human world; and that we must not pretend that we are something other than responsible agents, fully capable of destroying ever single thing around us.

But we should do none of this in service of the idea of progress. We should do it because if we don’t we are not living, experiencing, cognisant beings. We are simply inanimate objects through which destructive force is transmitted.

• Tyler Sage lives and teaches in California. His fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Common, Bright Lights Film Journal, The L.A. Review of Books, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. You can find him at tksage.com.

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