'The End of Suburbia'
After peak oil comes what fresh hell?
Gonna wash that house right out of our hair?
When I had to go pick up a screening copy of The End of Suburbia, I decided I should use my own two feet. I put on my running shoes and ran a mile or so. But on the way back, I gave in, got on a bus, and sagged into the seat.
"This is a great deal easier," I thought as the bus roared down the road, the sudden increase in speed almost intoxicating.
Humans always seem to have to learn things the hard way. Maybe we're just an exceptionally stubborn species, but more likely we're simply slow on the uptake.
There has been a faint chorus of people warning about the end of oil since the 1970s. These days the chorus is getting a bit louder but most folk are still watching the approaching calamity like an enormous tidal wave far off on the horizon. "Look at that . . . It's pretty big, hey? Hmmm, getting closer now. Yep . . . Umm . . . oh SHIT!"
It probably won't be until an actual physical toll has been enacted that things will change significantly. But as the demand for oil continues to increase, and the easy to find oil is used up, the prices of everything, most especially food, will also increase. Possibly exponentially. It becomes, as peak oil theorist James Kunstler has aptly termed it, The Long Emergency.
Poking at peak oil
But, in the meantime, a group of Vancouver thinkers, activists, and ordinary folk have decided to get organized and actually do something. The screening of Gregory Greene's documentary The End of Suburbia serves as the opening volley from a brand new organization called The Vancouver Peak Oil Executive (VPOE). The VPOE is dedicated to working towards the relocalization of Metro Vancouver. This is not simply the 100-mile diet for everyone, but a means for Vancouver to support itself when oil prices skyrocket upwards.
As a film, The End of Suburbia is a blunt instrument. It hits you over the head with talking heads and huge amounts of info. But what it lacks in style, The End of Suburbia makes up in prescience.
The film was released in 2004, when oil was still a mere $38 per barrel. With the price currently hovering around $110, the film seems almost quaint in light of the recent market meltdowns, credit crises and other alliterative issues. But many of the ideas that the documentaries initially broached have only become increasingly pressing in recent years. The grim reality of the situation has resulted in oil executives stating openly that there is indeed a problem.
In his book The Long Emergency, James Kunstler took a long look at the state of his nation and said something's got to give. Mr. Kunstler's ideas comprise a good portion of the The End of Suburbia, and he's a very convincing speaker, quick with a quip to sum up the current state of what he calls Clusterfuck Nation. His description of suburbia is apt: "We're literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up." But the end of the American dream won't come easily. There is simply too much invested in maintaining this way of life. Even as the choices continue to dwindle for average Americans, people will fight to maintain a way of life they feel entitled to have.
Remember the dream?
It all began with gloriously good intentions. In the post-war boom of the 1950s, freedom from oppressive smelly industrial cities was packaged up and sold to millions of Americans, who bought the cartoon-version of country living, little pink houses, with a square of lawn in front and a barbecue in the back. Massive developments were built, all supported by vast arterial networks of roads and highways. The systematic dismantling of trains and streetcars and the easy, cheap availability of oil created a world that was made for cars.
All of this leading, we now see, down the road to hell or to what Kunstler himself acidly describes in his book The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. Namely, the ". . . depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading -- the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the 'gourmet mansardic' junk-food joints, the Orwellian office 'parks' featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain gang security guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call growth."
(And, if you think that sounds bad, you should hear what he has to say to about Vancouver.)
The entire vast teetering edifice of suburban culture was predicated on an abundance of cheap energy, which for a time was in ample supply. But as many of the people interviewed in the film point out, every party has to end sometime. The tricky part in any debate, although there really isn't much debate left, is to differentiate from the clamor of competing voices, who has a good idea, and who doesn't. Especially since, even among the peak oil pundits, there is a great deal of dissension. A case in point is Joseph Romm's recent article in Salon which started a firestorm of argument on the Internet.
Alarmist, loud and clear
One of the most reasoned voices in The End of Suburbia belongs to Matt Simmons, chairman and CEO of Simmons & Company, who offers up a lucid and thorough explanation of the blackout that turned off the lights in Toronto and most of the eastern seaboard in the summer of 2003. With regards to the coming peak oil crisis, Simmons's book Twilight in the Desert is well-worth reading.
My entire family is obsessed with James Kunstler at the moment. Conversations often begin with "Well, Kunstler says this . . . blah blah blah." Or, "According to Kunstler . . . yadda, yadda." Others in the journalistic profession see the fine Mr. Kunstler following in the long established tradition of American demagoguery.
But this isn't actually a bad thing. He blows his wheels off occasionally, but usually in an entertaining fashion. To his credit, Kunstler admits that his own job might not be very useful in the future. No more book tours, no more mass paperbacks. He predicts he might eventually start a local newspaper. His most recent book, World Made by Hand, posits a more hopeful version of scaled down future. Thinking how much might possibly change, it's very easy to fall into fantasy land, either idyllic or not.
Watch 'The End of Suburbia' and add your ideas
A panel discussion will follow the screening of the film on Friday, April 11th at 7:30 p.m. at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 154 E. 10th Avenue, Vancouver.
The thing that stops me in my tracks is the sheer scale of the transformation needed. We have evolved so far beyond the human scale, not only in transportation, agriculture, architecture and just above everything else, that the idea of going back to what we can create by hand fairly boggles the mind. It's akin to returning to walking after you've been on a jet airplane.
Lapping at our ankles
After I watched the film, I walked to Safeway to get stuff for breakfast, and found myself standing transfixed in the cereal aisle, staring at a box of Special K that cost almost nine dollars. A box of cereal reaching perilously close to double digits in price? "When did this happen?" I wanted to ask somebody. The distant rumblings of food riots in faraway places, and the doubling of the price of rice reported this week by the New York Times, all came flooding in.
Maybe this was it, the actual first damp touch of the tidal wave.
Related Tyee stories:
- Suburbia's Worst Enemy
Peak oil doomsayer James Howard Kunstler on the mega-impact here. - Plan Well or Perish
Vancouver architect Richard Balfour on readying his region for oil scarcity. - Why We Pay Too Little for Well Travelled Food
Charging the true cost of "food miles" could change the way people eat. Fourth in a series
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
watcher_t
03-04-2008
End of Surburbia, love it.
I would like nothing than to see the decline of shopping malls, big box stores and the return of Mum and Pop stores run and owned by local people on the main street of our towns and cities.
Get rid of the cars, bring back the horse and buggy, but then if we get the city people as upset about the body functions of horses as they do dogs, we might have another environmental problem on our hands to worry over!
:-)
ME2
03-04-2008
Sharing the blame
There is no "Peak Oil" crisis anyway near being at hand, there is only the certainty of an end to "Cheap Oil", particularly as the demand for energy continues to rise.
The Sun article that Woodend suggests we read, "Oil age nearing the end", ends with this quote:
"but Kendall noted that a recent impact assessment of plug-in hybrid vehicles in the U.S. concluded that power companies already had enough energy to charge 84 per cent of cars in the country, driving an average of 53 kilometres per day."
However, everything I've read on the subject of electricity demand in the US suggests that its supply is now stretched to the max, and that even if Americans today threw all their resources into developing "Green" supplies (which they aren't), it would take 20 years to build the necessary plants just to take care of increased demand.
I've also read that automobiles represent only 20 per cent of oil use. That suggests to me that as prices rise, the increase will be disproportionately shunted onto the gasoline (and home heating) consumer and away from industry which uses the other 80%?
This prompts me to ask... "When am I going to read a TYEE article that instead of trying to induce me to shoulder all the blame for Global Warming, when am I going to read an expose detailing the waste of energy which routinely occurs in industry?"
I suggested on another TYEE thread that gov't's first response to higher costs for industry will be subsidisation in one form or another. So if blame is to be put, let's share it properly, so we can seek solutions which will involve all sectors equally and pehaps hasten any solutions which might be found.
Skookum1
03-04-2008
I hate to be a pessimist but...
The most likely ways for that to happen, sadly but by what will turn out to be dire necessity, is for there to be refugee camps and soup kitchens in between. The big box society relies on functioning transportation; no transportation, no goods. Goods including food. North America is headed for an unprecedented shakedown, and the consumer lifestyle has put people a few notches further from natural reality than they were when the =1930s came along. And there's umpteen times as many people now, too. it won't be pretty, but it's the only way the old system will be thoroughly discredited enough to be undone. After the chaos, then small merchants might[/;'i] arise again, but there's gonna be a lot of hunger and hurt before it's all over; maybe the Hope Campaign is somewhat prescient, people seeing hope in Obama because they know it's maybe all they've got..... But I don't see people giving up the way they live now without being forced to; by people I mean politicians and corporate people; most others want change, they just don't see how, or just don't have the ability or the tools or the access to decision-making. Those who do, if they don't respond adequately....well, that won't be pretty either....
Unless the owners of Wal-Mart go through an epiphany and spend their zillions rebuilding smalltown American/Canadian economies.....but [i]that
, Wal-Mart decapitalizing, could precipate the unwanted crisis.Main point is you can't get from A to B without having to go through one hell of a lot of crap along the way.
To get the animals thing implemented you'll have PETA to deeal with too....
Ms. Woodend's observation/gestalt in her local marketof the impact of skyrocketing world grain prices (and lockdowns on rice exports from the largest producers...) is only just the very beginning of something that will become increasingly more obvious in coming months. Life is going to get a lot more expensive, some things are going to be a lot harder to get....
I'm used to doing without, and to getting around on foot or by transit. I pity those who don't. Especially if they live in suburbs and towns laid out like suburbs (any number of small BC towns aren't all that small...)...
nightbloom
04-04-2008
Great article - thanks for
Great article - thanks for this!
Jeffrey J.
04-04-2008
Excellent Article
A fabulous review about a great film. End of Suburbia really captures the massive scope of North America's great experiment driven by cheap energy. Now anything but cheap, expensive oil has triggered a slow motion dismantling of suburbia. Which has already begun. A related film worth watching is Radiant City. Filmed in Calgary, it features interviews with Kuntsler and others. Very worthwhile. Keep up the great reporting Tyee and Ms. Woodend!!
Gregory Greene
04-04-2008
END of SUBURBIA- the little doc that could!
thanks for supporting our doc The END of SUBURBIA! we have just released the follow up film, about the peak oil movement, called ESCAPE From SUBURBIA. check us out at www.escapefromsuburbia.com and have a great screening next week!
best regards-
greg greene
anarcho
04-04-2008
My only worry
My only worry about peak oil and the collapse of suburbia is that the Dominators will find some way out of the problem and it won't happen. Otherwise, to paraphrase one of the architects of decline, "Bring it on!"
Budd Campbell
04-04-2008
ANOTHER ACQUISITIVE, EVEN AVARICIOUS REAL ESTATE AGENDA
Ms Woodhead's article is one more piece of an extraordinarily acquisitive, even avaricious real estate agenda masquerading as environmental and urban analysis. The purpose of Kunstler and others, such as local disciples of the Gordon Price-Stephen Rees-Bill Rees variety, is to alter consumer preferences, to do some clever "product differentiation" that will drive demand away from suburban and towards more urban residential properties. That way, the urban prices of $600 per square foot will be supported and and even enhanced, which is the only real goal of these "advocates". The rest is just chatter, a smokescreen to disguise their true intentions.
Does anyone seriously believe that suburbs are in any material way more dependent on energy usage that urban cores? How on earth do people in urban apartments go about the business of daily life? They use space heat and transportation services directly or indirectly like everyone else. If it can be shown that per capita usage in single family dwellings is higher than in apartments, that difference may well be a price people are willing to pay for the addtional space, both indoors and outdoors.
The "peak oil" thing is one of the biggest and most laughable scams of recent years. To the degree that there is any validity whatsoever to this pop-science thesis, it refers only to conventional liquid oil in pools, and ignores the non-conventional sources and also overlooks the practically limitless supplies of coal.
As far as oil prices are concerned, the IMF three years ago projected that world oil prices to 2030 would not exceed $60 per barrel. To those who say they have obviously been skunked by "reality", think again. It's the consumer who's been skunked by market manipulators and speculators, backed up by the Bush-Cheney-Haliburton Administration.
The $100 barrell of crude is NOT the result of resource depletion or rising demand in Asia (the IMF took full account of an eventual rise in China's vehicle fleet to 400 million cars and trucks). It's the result of the Bush-Cheney-Haliburton Administration's brilliant strategy of using the entire panoply of US foreign policies to drive up prices. Come January of 2009, watch for crude prices to turn the corner and start coming downwards as soon as Barack Obama utters the phrase "... so help me God" on the Capitol steps.
End of suburbia? That's the Price-Rees dream, no question, but I would caution "Not so fast!" As long as the building industry refuses to build family sized apartments in central locations, unless charging a million dollars plus for them, people will still be looking for suburban homes instead of cramming themselves, their famillies, and all their possessions, into a $300,000, modestly sized, one-bedroom apartment.
Stuart the Drone
04-04-2008
That Movie Was So Four Years Ago
I stopped worrying about peak oil when I realized that the top of the peak is flat for a decade before things plummet. I think Kunstler and others resort to a parade of horrors when they rule out every alternative to the current oil-based logistics system. However, we only need a decade or so of major investments in different ways of doing things. We'll have a bit of stagflation, sure, but I'm not convinced we will all starve and the government will be unable to answer the phone, as they suggest. And I just cannot buy that the electrical grid will collapse; their case for this is very weak. Rather, we will eat local produce, drive hybrids, bus or walk more often, take the train or boat when we travel, use ground-source heat pumps, reduce room temperature to 18C, become flexitarians, and repair rather than replace our stuff. There is a huge backlog of environmental technologies that we have yet to implement. It will just be an expensive and arduous transition, and a few retrograde wankers will implode in their denial. Remember, a bunch of things are getting better at the same time, so it should all come out in the wash.
Leaflet
04-04-2008
Save YOUR money
Legs as a mode of transport is where I'm putting my investments. How can you go wrong with dividends like:
1. How many tons of CO2 will I breath out walking up the hill from Kits beach
2. Weightbearing exercise (like walking) helps maintain bone strength and thus guarantees good posture well into my declining years
3. Exercise reduces stress and my cost to the medical system
4. Global conversion to leg transport will halve the rate of global warming giving us more time to sort out these acquisitive, avaricious types who bottomline (verb, transitive) everything to bottomless perdition.
(I could go on endlessly with the revolutionary societal changes that would be derived from the Leg Transportation Authority being properly funded by government. And while we are on about public funding, free and convenient public transport would probably save so much money in infrastructure costs that taxes could be reduced as we give up our cars for walking and the busses.)
Skookum1
04-04-2008
comment re leaflet's post
3. Exercise reduces stress and my cost to the medical system
Yup, exactly.
So, consider....other than fatalities and injuries that are directly caused by the use of automobiles and other similar devices....the various kinds of damage to public and personal health incurredx by their use indirectly. From pollution and inactivity/obesity/postural and ergodynamic problems to various cancers adn other diseaese/syndromes to the environmental impact of roadways and parking lots, and psychological/cultural impacts onbehaviour and bodily function and so on...including lost farmland and other tertiary effects from development/technology enabled by automotive transport......has anyone ever calculated the cost to the public health cost of "cheap gas"??
Do you think they'll ever tear down statues of Henry Ford they way they did Lenin and Saddam?
Glen Murtz
05-04-2008
Nice inheritaance - bwahahahahaha
Hey kids, remember those "good jobs" in white collar offices? Kiss them goodbye!
We're gonna need hands on the farm and believe you me, after we shovelled off the homeless and criminal, we'll be coming for you.
southdeltawalker
05-04-2008
Earth Day April 22
As Earth Day is coming this month make sure you request this film for your library.
Libraries are the original re-cyclers.
http://escapefromsuburbia.com/
There is even a special rate for libraries.
Try to have your own environmental film fest.at your home....get some films from the library and invite friends over for a screening and a 100 mile potluck dinner.
Bailey
05-04-2008
horse manure
like watcher_t I've been kinda looking forward to getting horses back. All the two car garages become mews and the lawns become hayfields and pasture.
Very cool.
The manure won't be a problem since it's methane potential will make it much more valuable than it used to be.
A shame it probably won't happen though, since other energy sources are increasingly available to run the technology.
More and more versions of water burning devices are showing up all the time, for example, that split H2O into HHO and then burn it like propane, natural gas or any other gas.
If the oil companies slip up even a little, these innovations will sneak in and save the world of humans.
Savagely curtailing, sad to say, the employment opportunities for unborn generations of horses.
And oil executives such as Mr Cheney and Mr. Bush.
alda
05-04-2008
Catch-22
While I'm a fan of Kunstler, I do feel that his outright condemnation of the suburbs might be off in at least one way, and that is the fact that those with large yards in the suburbs could be in an advantageous position when it comes to growing self-sustaining gardens. But, Budd Campbell is way off the mark when he conveniently ignores the huge energy waste that non-rail linked suburbs and McHouses perpetuate.
Campbell misses an even more critical point when he states that peak oil is "one of the biggest and most laughable scams of recent years" and suggests that non-conventional energies and coal will save us.
According to all evidence, non-conventional sources such as wind and solar and geo-thermal --thanks to big oil and govt. -- are years off, if ever, from making a serious contribution as North American energy providers. Other non-conventional sources often pointed to as our saviors (such as coal, tar sand and shale oil) are INTENSE greenhouse gas emitters, both in the refining and end-use product. Those who idiotically point to Alberta's tar sands as the part of the answer to the North American energy crisis are blind to all reality and logic.
What this province gains from the peddling of oil (greenbacks, that is), we lose in water security. In the north, the oil extraction process is putting the Athabasca and South Saskatchewn rivers at monstrous risk. Elsewhere, increased global warming perpetuated from the oil industry (through its emissions as the worst greenhouse gas emitter in Canada, and its by-products, of course), exacerbates glacial melt in the Rockies, thus limiting even more water for the already drought-prone, semi-arid Southern desert and its aquifers.
Is it worth the trade-off? Not to thinking persons. But then, that's the problem - getting ordinary, apathetic voters to imagine what all this so-called fantastic development actually portends, other than pay checks. It's an impossible feat in our corporate-media controlled society.
Here's the bare-laid truth:
By the time the rapacious oil corporations are finished with Alberta come a century, this paradise will be nothing but an industrial Asian-style backwater - a polluted, poisoned landscape scarce of quality and quanities of water needed to sustain the increased population we'll have now gained, precisely thanks to oil industry who's pushed for it - a Catch-22 situation if you've ever seen one, cheered on by philistine oil execs, spineless bureaucrats, and our corrupt and/or dimwit politicians.
Worrywart
05-04-2008
"Does anyone seriously
"Does anyone seriously believe that suburbs are in any material way more dependent on energy usage that urban cores?"
The suburbs are more auto dependent then the city core. It is easy to live without a care in the city, which means using less energy for transportation.
Kunstler advocates building walkable communities.
If Peak Oil was a sham, why would the oil companies invest $100's of billions in the tar sands? The tar sands provide an energy return of about 1.5 to 1. Traditional crude wells presently provide a return on energy invested of about 20 to 1.
"As far as oil prices are concerned, the IMF three years ago projected that world oil prices to 2030 would not exceed $60 per barrel." So the IMF not only wreck traditional economies worldwide through structural adjustment policies, but they are also oil price experts? I would not trust the IMF to mow my lawn!
alda
05-04-2008
All you need to know
Like Worrywart, I've always maintained that you need no further logical proof than the Tar Sands (illogical to waste all that water squeezing oil out of sand - obviously a last ditch measure) that North America is desperate for oil and that Peak Oil is real.
That, the billion dollars invasion into Iraq, and the one into Afghanistan to support the U.S.'s desire to build the pipeline from the Caspian Basin for oil is all you need to know.
RickW
06-04-2008
Quote:It all began with
Thank you, Mr. Disney!
Well, we got Suburbia -- but where oh where is the leisure society that was implied if not promised, as well?
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All go to the university,
And they all get put in boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
And there's doctors and there's lawyers
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
Budd Campbell
07-04-2008
KUNSTLER WANTS TO KEEP SUBURBIA FOR HIMSELF
Hate to break it to you Budd, but if you take off the tinfoil hat and actually read Kunstler's book, he advocates for a return to the age-old format of smaller towns supported by outlying farming communities
Kunstler lives in a small town called Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, not far from Albany. IOWs, he lives in an NYC suburb or exurb. Like many he likes the small town lifestyle and want's to keep it for well-to-do people like himself, a natural enough impulse I suppose. Construing his self-interested pronouncements with serious analysis is more than a bit naive.