aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, April 28, 2005
The Long Emergency
I missed the 2003 North America Blackout, I was already here. (I was there for the New York City blackout of 1977.)
At three o’clock this morning the power went out on campus. Rumor is that the electricity grid collapsed. Maybe it was only a rumor, we like rumors here. I have no idea what the condition of the electricity grid is. A cursory search didn’t turn anything up, so maybe it’s in great shape. But the lack of electricity raises all kinds of doom and gloom scenarios for me.
So for the occasion I dug up this post from James Wolcott in which he quoted James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency:
I notice lately that there are two kinds of hubris operating among the ‘forward-thinking’ classes in America (which is to say, those who are thinking at all). One I call techno-hubris. It represents the idea that there are really no limits to our powers of innovation and it is obviously the product of our experience in the past century, especially of our victory in World War Two and of the 1969 moon landing. The other kind is organizational hubris, the certainty that we can organize our way around the oil bottleneck, global warming, and population overshoot. What both modes of thinking have in common is that neither recognizes the probability that we are moving into a period of discontinuity, turbulence and hardship. Both modes of thinking assume that we can negotiate a smooth transition from where we are now to a new-and-improved human condition.
There is a remarkable consistency in the delusional thinking at every level of American life these days. When Americans think about the future at all, they seem to think it will be pretty much the way we live now. The buyers of 4000 square foot McHouses think that they will be able to continue heating them with cheap natural gas, not to mention commuting seventy miles a day. The stadium builders assume that major league sports will continue just as it is today, with chartered jet planes conveying zillionaire athletes incessently back and forth across the continent. The highway engineers and the municipal planners are focused like lasers on providing more roads and more parking spaces for evermore cars. The architects are designing more skyscrapers, despite the decrepit condition of the electric grid and the frightful situation with our depleting natural gas supply. We’re so confident, so sure of ourselves.
Raised as I was in the context of a duck and cover Armageddon, I’m vulnerable to this line of thinking. Fortunately, there’s Kevin Drum to bring me back to earth. He agrees with much of what Kunstler says but considers his arguments “crackpot” and “harmful” so calls him a crank and moves on.
Georgia Power has already restored power to part of the campus. Time for me to move on too.
