The word generally has a negative connotation nowadays -- and rightly so! -- save perhaps in the minds of the neo-cons, and such sophisticated enablers of theirs as Niall Ferguson.

Still, the example of ancient Mediterranean imperialism should be recalled, especially the Roman example, in the context of Jon Rynn's excellent ideal of the urban centre surrounded by an agricultural hinterland, as he has expressed in other threads.

That was the typical state of affairs in the Mediterranean in antiquity: the farmers, or the landowners, lived in cities, but went outside the walls to do the work, or oversee the work, that the agricultural enterprise required.  In time of bad luck, famine or siege, the food from outside the walls was not available, and the population suffered.  That happened often, even though nearby cities did not share similar bad luck, and had food that might have been shared.

During the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans regularly invaded Attica, the Athenians' farmland, and destroyed the crops.  The Athenians retreated behind their Long Walls, which connected the city to the port of Peiraeus, and were fed on grain imported from lands around the Black Sea.  When the Athenian fleet was catastrophically destroyed in the Hellespont, the Athenians were doomed, and surrendered to the Spartans.

A few centuries later, the city of Rome was the largest city in the world, and the population could not depend on grain grown in Latium.  It had to be imported, for a while from Sicily, later from Egypt.  But that meant that the person in control of the grain shipment had terrific political power ...

From this we learn that well-managed and benevolent political control of a large area can save any unfortunate single place.  So, are we permitted to refer to such control as "empire"?  If so, and if by "sustainability" we mean a very very well managed, intelligently managed, brilliantly managed, utterly benevolent, renewability-loving, recyclability-loving, biodiversity-loving, all-controlling regime, then perhaps "sustainability" can be found ONLY where there is "empire."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Dear Friends,

Let us remember that an ordinary fellow named Noah built the vital Ark that saved life as we know it. It took a remarkably large number of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe to construct the colossal, now sunken wreckage known as the Titanic.

Sincerely,

Steve

  I sent that e-mail to one of the best people in the World on climate his answer.

Weather is NOT climate.  The natural variability between seasons at a site is typically larger than the global warming that has happened so far, so that while many more record highs than lows are being set, record lows do occasionally happen still.  The 1 degree or so of global warming is scientifically unequivocal but still not highly evident unless you're paying attention; the changes coming under business as usual are much bigger, and will be evident to everyone.

Human beings inhabit a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet we wishfully think of, and magically regard, as if 'our' tiny Earth is actually some sort of cornucopia that will forever fullful each and every human desire.

Surely we can agree that the human species is not like a suckling babe and the Earth not like an endlessly providing teat.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

Imagine how a sustainable empire might work.

How does a commercial empire work?  It creates a technological revolution that increases productivity.  With that surplus, brought about by greater productivity, it takes over markets.

The british empire used coal/steam/iron technology to grab markets from agrarian cultures.

If a new commercial empire that switched to renewable energy/electricity/silicon, lithium, composite based technology and distributed manufacturing, could be started, would it capture markets?  Or would it be coopted by military dictatorship?

Probably both.  The key would be to develop easily replicable manufacturing techniques, as it was with the coal/steam/iron age.  Certain pivotal inventions/discoveries pushed this commercial empire.  

What are the key inventions/discoveries for the next commercial empire?  

Plug and play renewable distributed power switches?  That use internet communication to regulate power flow.  From one home with a solar panel or biogas generator..all the way up to a whole continental grid, made up of millions of these computer switches.  All working together like a colony of ants.

Plugin hybrid vehicles and renewable electric mass transpotation.  All the way from electric assisted bikes and plugin hybrid cars..to plugin hybrid buses and high speed electric commuter rail.

Organic fertlizer/biogas energy systems and mechanized organic farming.  

These are breakthroughs that magnify human productivity in terms of quality of life.  Rather than using more and more resources to raise human standard of living, these developments raise the quality of human life, in symbiosis with the living planet.  That way technological innovation and economic growth can be sustainable.  

Human progress compatible with life.

Would this lend itself to commercial empire if a Walmart, for instance, were to mass produce this model in nation after nation with local production?  Look at their CFL efforts.  How would a commercial empire ever be motivated to go after local production, rather than the lowest cost manufacturing model that Walmart uses?

It's a big problem.  Empire, by it's very nature, concentrates capital and power in fewer and fewer hands.  Sustainable human progress needs protection from empire, that is what representative government was supposed to do.

Taxation without representation?  Ring any bells?  The US was founded as a reponse to the Walmart of revolutionary war times.  The British East India Tea Company backed by the british army and navy.

Would the spread of representative government along with earth friendly technology constitute an empire?  A new kind of empire?  I'm not sure if it would still fit the definition.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

If we were anything like an imperial society they would have been able to sell the war on that basis.  They could have pitched it as a permanent role for us in the middle east.  They could have sold it as our destiny.

No, the war was sold as "self defense" because we are not naturally an imperialistic people.  We are strongly isolationist and it took the biggest hammer they had, self preservation and "a smoking cloud in the form of a mushroom cloud" to move us.

(I say generically "us" because in fact I opposed the war, before there was a war.)

Americans are conditioned from birth to view themselves as exceptional beings, devoted to law and good, while also being conditioned from birth to treat the other people of the world as vassals whose purpose is to provide the goods and services Americans choose not to provide for themselves, no matter how dangerous or dirty the providing becomes.  Any country that dares suggest an alteration in this relationship rates an intervention from the plainclothes military (CIA) or from the regular forces.

Most of the terror directed at the rise of China is based on the dawning awareness that all empires fall and that it's possible for the prior masters to be the servants of the next empire.

The 5% Project

It would be different if we had a few hundred thousand civil administrators spread outside our native domain.  As the British did at the height of their Empire.  As the Soviets did at the height of their Empire.

I think I heard it once described as the only Empire every voluntarily surrendered.

"Voluntary" does not seem at all the right word to characterize why the US granted independence to the Philippines.

Anyway, that country was long a de facto colony of US business.

More generally, it would be believable to say the people of the United States are inherently hostile to the idea of their being an "empire" if they granted independence to, say, Illinois.  Could it really have escaped the more thoughtful of those residents of the Atlantic coast that they were building an empire, as they pushed into the Ohio Valley and Transylvania, then as they acquired a chunk of the French empire, then as they dribbled on out to the Pacific and seized a chunk of the former Spanish empire, justifying it with an appeal to Manifest Destiny?

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

The gigantic scale and rapid growth rate of the unbridled, global big-business empire, the one we recognize as the predominant human construction on Earth, appears to be approaching a point in history when this economic empire irreversibly degrades Earth's frangible ecosystems, dangerously dissipates its limited resources, and recklessly diminishes Earth's capacity to offer a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

The problem is in the growth of the distinction between the "core," meaning first of all the centers of wealth-exchange (Wall Street) and of capital-creation through money-printing (the President, the Congress), and the "peripheries," that 40% of humanity that survives on $2/day... can't go on indefinitely, thus not sustainable...

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

We certainly have had a mercantile foreign policy, and that has not always been a good thing.  It would be a mistake though, and IMO it lessens our understanding, to think of that as Imperial.

I'll grant you all that "Imperialist is a good epithet, and sometimes effective in staving off "bad things."

But we should hold some distinction between the word as weapon and the word as rational description.

Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916  statute announcing the intention of the United States government to "withdraw their sovereignty over the Philippine Islands as soon as a stable government can be established therein." The U.S. had acquired the Philippines in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War; and from 1901 legislative power in the islands had been exercised through a Philippine Commission effectively...

Not sure what you mean exactly by capitalism (Marx's original straw man). If by it you mean voluntary exchange, prices as signals between traders, a blend of private and public property, enforceability of contracts, arbitration and litigation to resolve disputes, and decentralization, I don't see what is unsustainable. If you mean the current regime [well-connected corporate greedheads+venal politicians-(humility+caution+prudence)] to which many of our fellow citizens have at least acquiesced, count me in.


Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

"If you mean the current regime [well-connected corporate greedheads+venal politicians-(humility+caution+prudence)] to which many of our fellow citizens have at least acquiesced, count me in."

I don't see the distinction (between an idealized "voluntary-exchange capitalism" and actually-existing capitalism. More correctly, as I see it, the first leads to the second, inevitably.

Why? Because that is how "power" works. Money and wealth become de facto political power.

Now of course, government and democracy can redistribute some of that wealth. But I don't think that can be sustainable in a finite world. (A 3% growth rate in GDP, leads to a doubling of ecological load in 70/3 = 23 years.)

Our problems are in some ways more insidious because ownership and responsibility are spread so widely.  Who lobbied congress for these laws?  Your pension funds did.  Fund managers (and other "managers") reign in a post-capitalist society.

Especially since we never left and, as with Cuba, we kept a force there for several years to prevent the Filipino people from actually attaining the freedom we had promised them.

Like the US troops sent to Russia after WWI to try and crush the Bolsheviks, the US forces long and bloody campaign in the PI has disappeared down the memory hole, replaced by the fairy tale of American's do-good nature of being a country that would kick out an imperial power and then have the decency to leave.

The 5% Project

Western market democracies all decided that regulation was rational and justified.  That's a multi-century trend now.

It's a strange twist that far right and far left pundits share a blind-spot, and pretend "free market capitalism" exists.

We were never an Imperial people.  We made plans from the beginning to leave the Philippines.  We embodied that in law.

... And it still took us decades.

THAT should have been the lesson before Iraq II.

Even if you don't desire Empire it can still take you decades to shake yourself loose.

I don't think 13,000 Americans really ever seriously expect to subjugate a nation, and install American Empire.

... especially not when it was that era's version of a Multinational Force.

Children view the world and see things differently from adults. Perhaps, adults would be wise not to inadvertently adopt the faulty ways of thinking and perceiving of children when it comes to understanding the role human beings are playing in inducing the daunting global challenges which loom ominously before humanity on the far horizon.

Not seeing that the colossal size of the multi-trillion dollar global economy is soon to become unsustainable in the relatively small finite world we inhabit is a misperception;

not seeing that increasing per-capita consumption of Earth's limited resources by six billion, soon to be nine billion, people cannot go on much longer, much less forever, is a mistaken impression; and

not seeing that absolute global human population numbers, just like the population numbers of other species, cannot increase endlessly, relative to a limited resource base, is a misconception.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

"I don't see the distinction (between an idealized "voluntary-exchange capitalism" and actually-existing capitalism. More correctly, as I see it, the first leads to the second, inevitably."

I don't agree with you that the first necessarily leads to the second, and certainly not inevitably. There are plenty of local examples of voluntary exchange (Dead show parking lots were closer to a free-market than Hong Kong on its best day).

The point of corruption isn't so much a when as it is a how: The more the state becomes a mechanism for the distribution of privilege (money and power) the more it neglects its original and legitimate charge - to formulate, enforce, and adjudicate then rules by which citizens interact with each other. Michael Oakeshott once said something to the effect that an umpire who becomes a player in the game (affecting its outcome by favoring one side or the other) is no longer an umpire. This is where the rent-seeking starts.

Money, in and of itself, is nothing more than a simpler way of exchanging what we have to offer for what we want.

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

But the environment doesn't really care who stops beating up on it, as long as someone does.

Ask a bluefin tuna .. would you rather be not caught by a capitalist or not caught by a communist?

Sustainability is not natural.

The seasons change.   The earth changes.   Man changes.

Sustainability is only real in the minds of the misguided intellectual.

Big clues.

But the issue is the sustainability of empire, and on that score it is clear that empire is not sustainable economically, because military establishments are extremely expensive, and eventually kill the geese that lay the golden eggs -- that is, the wealth-generating productive part of the economy.  A huge surplus eventually goes away, because nothing is being put back to replace it -- sort of like fossil fuels.

Since governments with huge military apparatuses aren't even concerned with the long-term health of the economy which keeps them powerful, they certainly aren't going to be the least bit interested in the environmental foundation of their power -- the Soviet Union being the premiere example, although Jared Diamond discusses a few others in his book "Collapse".  Once a group of elites gets used to lording it over the masses, there is basically nothing that can stop them until the whole structure collapses.

Percy Bysshe Shelley  1818

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Thanks to each and every one of you, Gristians, for opening and maintaining discussions of this kind.

Only the elites, their bought-and-paid-for politicians, talking heads in the mass media and other minions benefit from their carefully instilled idea that "silence is golden." Yes, evidently, it does work for them, but unfortunately not for the billions of less fortunate people among us.

Keep going and keep speaking out.  You cannot even find this quality discussion in the New York Times blog today.

Sincerely,  

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
 

Printing money is not capital creation. Also,

Printing money is the essential step in capital creation; someone uses the money to buy capital, and voila! capital has been created.  Keynes' main insight.

Not sure what you mean exactly by capitalism (Marx's original straw man). If by it you mean voluntary exchange, prices as signals between traders, a blend of private and public property, enforceability of contracts, arbitration and litigation to resolve disputes, and decentralization, I don't see what is unsustainable.

First off, look at Chapter 6 of Meadows et al. Beyond the Limits: there you will discover an analysis of the 1973 embargo to find that price signals do not offer technological society an adequate stimulus to switch to "alternative technologies" in any sort of time to meet increased demand for them.  They don't promote sustainability; more an obsession with the economy of the present moment.

And btw is "voluntary exchange" your straw man?  The primary archetype of "voluntary exchange" is Esau's exchange of his birthright for Jacob's mess of pottage.  "Voluntary exchange" extends inequality and power difference: it typically allows those with power to have even more power over those whose exchanges are less "voluntary."  People who must work for particular employers to avoid death, for instance, are still making "voluntary exchanges" of their labor for continued survival.  Some societies, however, call such people slaves.

If you mean the current regime [well-connected corporate greedheads+venal politicians-(humility+caution+prudence)] to which many of our fellow citizens have at least acquiesced, count me in.

Politics is not this pristine realm free from commodity exchange.  Politicians own a commodity, political power, that makes a spectacular investment.  Ask the CEOs at Halliburton, Blackwater, and so on.

So, as a general rule, if you're a fetishist of "voluntary exchange," and don't mind a regime in which it rules everyone's lives from sun-up to sun-up, you've got to put up with "well-connected corporate greedheads."  If, however, you're like me, and generally view "voluntary exchange" as another piece of fake hype for a civilization that is at heart bored and lonely, then you need no greedheads.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

What knowledge I have of the historical trajectory of capitalism comes from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. There you will find his detailed historical analysis of how "voluntary exchange markets", a hallmark of all societies, became transformed into modern capitalism. Or as he calls it, a "market society", whereby people become imbedded in markets instead of markets being embedded in human society. The original "laissez-faire" ideals of self-regulated markets soon broke down (think Dickens and penal transportation) and degenerated into social displacement and unrest, until Governments were forced to intercede to save capitalism. If I haven't butchered it, that's the book in a nutshell.

Incidentally, the state does more than adjucate between citizens. It also sets up the infrastructure (roads, education,...) that makes modern capitalism possible. Though in your view, these services might be better privitized?

Always interested to hear contrary histories and viewpoints...

Money, in and of itself, is nothing more than a simpler way of exchanging what we have to offer for what we want.

From Marx, "The Power of Money" (1844):

That which is for me through the medium of money -- that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) -- that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money's properties are my -- the possessor's -- properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness -- its deterrent power -- is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has a power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

I may be politically inept, sadistic, and ideologically-rigid, but money (about $400 million last time) will make me President.

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

  Further, many of the biggest empires have raped and pillaged their places of conquest, being more interested in conquest than sustainability.

  The US use of dispersed uranium in Iraq is hardly a sustainable action.  The terrible environmental conditions of former US military bases in the Phillipines is hardly a mark of sustainability. (And no, we didn't "voluntarily" leave there, read Daniel Schirmer on the the Phillipines).

  Is the US an empire??  It becomes a semantical debate.  Does the US have a respectable foreign policy?  Ah, clearly NO, empire or not.

patrick in Beijing

It was more fear than imperial avarice.

We'd do more to avoid foreign entanglements in the future if we could shake off that kind of often irrational fear.

The fear factor and the greed factor are used as tools by too many leaders to promote their own selfish interests as well as to suppress honest, honorable efforts to "connect the dots," and to "understand the levers" pulled in rigging the global political economy.

If you can find adequate information, check out the activities of the World Economic Forum (starting tomorrow in Davos) or, later in the year, the specified pursuits of the Bilderbergers and the members of The Multilateral Commission at their 2008 meetings.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

Thanks,

Steve

Not really: money hasn't created the capital at all, it is just the means by which it is  transferred from one holder to another. Not sure that I would look to Lord Keynes for insight, if that's what you are seeking.

Regarding the 1973 embargo, I believe that the Japanese were able to provide alternative technologies in the form of higher mileage cars, and other steps were taken. That the resulting fall in demand for crude lead to a breakdown of the OPEC cartel and brought the lower per barrel prices of 1980s got us in the SUV craze of the 90s is a fair point, but I think that could have been avoided.

How is voluntary exchange a straw man? I have no talent for making shoes. But I do need them. If I exchange something that I have of value, namely my labor, for a means of exchange (money) that I can then use to purchase my shoes, and these transactions are entered into by all parties voluntarily, rather than coercively, how have I increased inequality and power difference? Am I being naive? Preemptively: assuming that the workers who manufacture the shoes are not being kept at their machines at gunpoint, their employment is voluntary - as is mine(and if anything, it is easier today with all the information available, to make informed buying decisions). I am free to quit, but I am then no longer entitled to compensation for my labor. Or should we go back to making everything for ourselves? Really - blogging would be a lot less popular.

I never suggested that politics is, or was ever free from corruption - especially our system. But if I implied that I think that more could be done with our system to limit and control it, then I plead guilty.

How is it fetishistic to prefer voluntary exchange to coerced? Not to set up a false dilemma, are there other alternatives that I am missing? Being ruled from sun-up to sun-down, which I try to avoid, and well-connected greed heads who limit peoples' choices for their own shallow ends represent the antithesis of freedom that is the basis for voluntary exchange.

When you come up with a way of getting what you want but can't make for yourself without exchanging something that you have for it, without resort to violence or force, let me know. Even the Lord Buddha wore a robe and carried a bowl.

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

I seems to me that you have Polyani right, although I probably not the best judge. Does this sound right: the State needs a larger more dynamic economy to enhance its own power, so it replaces the cumbersome traditional and decentralized market system with a state-enhanced market society, then benevolently intervenes to correct the excesses that this transition and its continuation impose on its citizens? If so, then the state's thirst for power is the driving force behind the transformation.

Would we necessarily have the problems that followed from the Great Trans without the initial motive for national power (and all that goes with that)?

As far as infrastructure is concerned, I think that localization is a viable alternative to privatization. One key to me would be divorcing government action from any sense of national purpose or glory. That may help to avoid some of the irrationality toward "them" that odograph spoke of in an earlier post.

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

Your mention of Polyani reminded me of an essay by Michael Oakeshott that addresses, albeit somewhat obliquely (typical MO), some of the themes we have been visiting here: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=4057
As distinctive as they are, Oakeshott and Polyani share some common ground.  Cheers,  


Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

Not really: money hasn't created the capital at all, it is just the means by which it is  transferred from one holder to another.

No, money creates capital by paying people to assemble it.  Money brings the workers in, gets them to harvest the raw materials, build the factories, etc., and when the government prints money, it uses this money to do just that.

Am I being naive?

Yes.  Spoken like a true possessor of the world's reserve currency.

How is it fetishistic to prefer voluntary exchange to coerced?

First off, "voluntary" is a privilege.  It isn't "voluntary" for the rest of the world to supply resources so that the US economy can be based on "voluntary exchange."

Second, the exchange of labor for the goods of survival is never "voluntary."

Being ruled from sun-up to sun-down, which I try to avoid, and well-connected greed heads who limit peoples' choices for their own shallow ends represent the antithesis of freedom that is the basis for voluntary exchange.

Not at all.  The superrich few give lots of money to politicians to get what they want, in "voluntary exchanges."  

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

1. Again, money creates nothing - what brings the workers in is what they can get with the money. The government can't just print however much they want (and get away with it indefinitely-case in point the US).
   
2. Do you make all of your stuff? Or pay for it in  yen or euros? If not, better act now: the dollar may not be the reserve for much longer(see #1).
   
3. Is anyone sending us anything (resource-wise)that we are not paying for?
   
4. And amazingly enough, the wealthiest 5% of our population still manages still have enough money left over to account for something around half of all Federal tax revenue (and quite a bit of state and local revenues also, at least here in MD). Politicians must be getting cheaper. probably something to do with oversupply.

Is it the curse of "victory" in the Cold War to become a more efficient version your enemy?

Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.

Again, money creates nothing - what brings the workers in is what they can get with the money. The government can't just print however much they want (and get away with it indefinitely-case in point the US).

1. Money makes people go places they otherwise wouldn't go, so it LOOKS as if money is directing everyone around.  That, after all, is what for-profit business is about: directing people with money for profit.  

2. The rest of the world will prop up the US economy because the US still holds the world's reserve currency.

Do you make all of your stuff? Or pay for it in  yen or euros? If not, better act now: the dollar may not be the reserve for much longer(see #1).

The investor elites, even outside the US, will not want to "disappear" nine trillion dollars.  No, the Bank of China will want to make sure it gets something in return for the $1 trillion it owns.

Is anyone sending us anything (resource-wise)that we are not paying for?

Politicians must be getting cheaper. probably something to do with oversupply.

Does this sound right: the State needs a larger more dynamic economy to enhance its own power, so it replaces the cumbersome traditional and decentralized market system with a state-enhanced market society, then benevolently intervenes to correct the excesses that this transition and its continuation impose on its citizens? If so, then the state's thirst for power is the driving force behind the transformation.

An interesting take. You got me to dig out my "Great Transformation" and delve a little deeper into English history... As Polanyi saw it: The state has a much longer history than the "market economy", which Polanyi defines such:

The market economy is an economic sytem controlled, regulated and directed by market prices; order in the production and distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism

I am in sympathy with your aims of localism (and anti-nationalism), but I don't think Polanyi's insights are widely-enough appreciated. A localism based on "free markets" would quickly degenerate into haves, have-little and have-nots. Which is not to say that markets don't have a role to play, only that the governance of the community has to re-integrate the political and economic realms. A more complicated task, but one for which we are well equipped, given that is how we evolved over millions of years. (I'm channeling Polanyi here!)

by James Howard Kunstler

The dark tunnel that the U.S. economy has entered began to look more and more like a black hole recently, sucking in lives, fortunes, and prospects behind a Potemkin facade of orderly retreat put up by anyone in authority with a story to tell or an interest to protect - Fed chairman Bernanke, CNBC, The New York Times , the Bank of America... Events are now moving ahead of anything that personalities can do to control them.

The "housing bubble" implosion is broadly misunderstood. It's not just the collapse of a market for a particular kind of commodity, it's the end of the suburban pattern itself, the way of life it represents, and the entire economy connected with it. It's the crack up of the system that America has invested most of its wealth in since 1950. It's perhaps most tragic that the mis-investments only accelerated as the system reached its end, but it seems to be nature's way that waves crest just before they break.

This wave is breaking into a sea-wall of disbelief. Nobody gets it. The psychological investment in what we think of as American reality is too great. The mainstream media doesn't get it, and they can't report it coherently. None of the candidates for president has begun to articulate an understanding of what we face: the suburban living arrangement is an experiment that has entered failure mode.

I maintain that all the "players" - from the bankers to the politicians to the editors to the ordinary citizens - will continue to not get it as the disarray accelerates and families and communities are blown apart by economic loss. Instead of beginning the tough process of making new arrangements for everyday life, we'll take up a campaign to sustain the unsustainable old way of life at all costs.

A reader sent me a passel of recent clippings last week from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution . It contained one story after another about the perceived need to build more highways in order to maintain "economic growth" (and incidentally about the "foolishness" of public transit). I understood that to mean the need to keep the suburban development system going, since that has been the real main source of the Sunbelt's prosperity the past 60-odd years. They cannot imagine an economy that is based on anything besides new subdivisions, freeway extensions, new car sales, and NASCAR spectacles. The Sunbelt, therefore, will be ground-zero for all the disappointment emanating from this cultural disaster, and probably also ground-zero for the political mischief that will ensue from lost fortunes and crushed hopes.

From time-to-time, I feel it's necessary to remind readers what we can actually do in the face of this long emergency. Voters and candidates in the primary season have been hollering about "change" but I'm afraid the dirty secret of this campaign is that the American public doesn't want to change its behavior at all. What it really wants is someone to promise them they can keep on doing what they're used to doing: buying more stuff they can't afford, eating more bad food that will kill them, and driving more miles than circumstances will allow.

Here's what we better start doing.

Stop all highway-building altogether. Instead, direct public money into repairing railroad rights-of-way. Put together public-private partnerships for running passenger rail between American cities and towns in between. If Amtrak is unacceptable, get rid of it and set up a new management system. At the same time, begin planning comprehensive regional light-rail and streetcar operations.

End subsidies to agribusiness and instead direct dollar support to small-scale farmers, using the existing regional networks of organic farming associations to target the aid. (This includes ending subsidies for the ethanol program.)

Begin planning and construction of waterfront and harbor facilities for commerce: piers, warehouses, ship-and-boatyards, and accommodations for sailors. This is especially important along the Ohio-Mississippi system and the Great Lakes.

In cities and towns, change regulations that mandate the accommodation of cars. Direct all new development to the finest grain, scaled to walkability. This essentially means making the individual building lot the basic increment of redevelopment, not multi-acre "projects." Get rid of any parking requirements for property development. Institute "locational taxation" based on proximity to the center of town and not on the size, character, or putative value of the building itself. Put in effect a ban on buildings in excess of seven stories. Begin planning for district or neighborhood heating installations and solar, wind, and hydro-electric generation wherever possible on a small-scale network basis.

We'd better begin a public debate about whether it is feasible or desirable to construct any new nuclear power plants. If there are good reasons to go forward with nuclear, and a consensus about the risks and benefits, we need to establish it quickly. There may be no other way to keep the lights on in America after 2020.

We need to prepare for the end of the global economic relations that have characterized the final blow-off of the cheap energy era. The world is about to become wider again as nations get desperate over energy resources. This desperation is certain to generate conflict. We'll have to make things in this country again, or we won't have the most rudimentary household products.

We'd better prepare psychologically to downscale all institutions, including government, schools and colleges, corporations, and hospitals. All the centralizing tendencies and gigantification of the past half-century will have to be reversed. Government will be starved for revenue and impotent at the higher scale. The centralized high schools all over the nation will prove to be our most frustrating mis-investment. We will probably have to replace them with some form of home-schooling that is allowed to aggregate into neighborhood units. A lot of colleges, public and private, will fail as higher ed ceases to be a "consumer" activity. Corporations scaled to operate globally are not going to make it. This includes probably all national chain "big box" operations. It will have to be replaced by small local and regional business. We'll have to reopen many of the small town hospitals that were shuttered in recent years, and open many new local clinic-style health-care operations as part of the greater reform of American medicine.

Take a time-out from legal immigration and get serious about enforcing the laws about illegal immigration. Stop lying to ourselves and stop using semantic ruses like calling illegal immigrants "undocumented."

Prepare psychologically for the destruction of a lot of fictitious "wealth" - and allow instruments and institutions based on fictitious wealth to fail, instead of attempting to keep them propped up on credit life-support. Like any other thing in our national life, finance has to return to a scale that is consistent with our circumstances - i.e., what reality will allow. That process is underway, anyway, whether the public is prepared for it or not. We will soon hear the sound of banks crashing all over the place. Get out of their way, if you can.

Prepare psychologically for a sociopolitical climate of anger, grievance, and resentment. A lot of individual citizens will find themselves short of resources in the years ahead. They will be very ticked off and seek to scapegoat and punish others. The United States is one of the few nations on earth that did not undergo a sociopolitical convulsion in the past hundred years. But despite what we tell ourselves about our specialness, we're not immune to the forces that have driven other societies to extremes. The rise of the Nazis, the Soviet terror, the "cultural revolution," the holocausts and genocides - these are all things that can happen to any people driven to desperation.

Regards,

James Howard Kunstler

for The Daily Reckoning

Editor's Note: James Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine . In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, The Long Emergency describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.

The good works of Paul and Anne Ehrlich, John Holdren, Sir Nicholas Stern, Mickey Glantz, Walt Reid, Alex de Sherbinin, Jerry Glenn, Robert "Bob" Watson, Jean-Francois Rischard,  Lindsay Grant, Al Bartlett, the late Garrett Hardin, Richard C. Duncan, the late Alexander King, Rajendra Pachauri, Ken Whitehead, Jim Lydecker, Al Gore, B.L. Turner II, James "Jim" Hansen, Dave Gardner, Virginia Abernethy, Russell Hopfenberg, David Pimentel, Ken Caldeira, Michael Mann, John McRuer and Ken Smail have been either debunked and otherwise dismissed just the way JHK's writings are being "written off" in the link to which you refer us.

All the denialists and naysayers in the world disavowing good science will not change "the facts on the ground."  Whatsoever is is, is it not? Given the current huge scale and unbridled global growth of human consumption, production and propagation activities now threatening to overwhelm Earth's global ecosystems and limited resources, please explain how a relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planet like the one inhabited by the human species can sustain life as we know it much longer, much less forever.

Comments from one and all are welcome.

Always, with thanks,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/  

Pundits (and prophets) who make ironclad predictions about our human future are, IMO, like people with a gravity equation applying it to a feather.

Yes, any simple factor you name will be just that ... a factor.  But what none of us knows, what makes "prediction hard, especially about the future" is that we rarely know what will be the driving factors.

Kunstler's approach is to make the same prediction again, and again, in the hope that odds will eventually favor him, and what he believes is his driving factor.

I am not a prophet.  I don't believe that I know the one factor.  I think history moves like a slime mold.  That's good and bad, but certainly all of us can be part of the motion ... and choose our own direction.

There is not one of your sentences with which I disagree.  Even so, there appears to be a noticeable difference in our perceptions.

While I am content with what you report, something continues to worry me, something that appears self-evident, clear and simple.  Given its huge size and anticipated growth, can the human species behave much longer as an insatiable infant, recklessly suctioning the resources from the bosom of Mother Earth?

Human beings inhabit a relatively small, finite, noticeably frangible planet that we seem to wishfully think of, and magically regard, as if `our' tiny Earth is actually some sort of gigantesque cornucopia which will forever fulfill each and every human desire.

Surely we can agree that the human species is not like a suckling babe and the Earth not like an endlessly providing teat.

What am I missing?  What are y'all seeing?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/

I loved the Gapminder visualizations already linked on Grist.  I should really go back and catch up on the vids they've made since.

I think Gapminder illustrates the many things going on at once, and yes, how large populations can trap themselves in bad outcomes.

Of course, it is fair to ask what the family of humanity could choose to do "ably and differently." There are several ideas that come to mind.

1. Implement a universal, voluntary, humane program of family planning and health education that teaches people the need for setting a limit on the number of offspring at one child per family.

2. Establish an upper limit on the growth of the individual human footprint.

3. Restrict the reckless dissipation of limited natural resources so that the Earth is given time to replenish them for human benefit.

4. Substitute clean, renewable sources of energy, through the use of substantial economic incentives, for the fossil fuels we rely upon now.

5. Recognize that everything human beings do on the surface of our planetary home utterly depends on the finite resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth. Perhaps the time is nearly at hand when an endlessly expanding, gigantesque global economy on a relatively small planet of the size and make-up of Earth becomes patently unsustainable.