Title: "The C********** Nation Manifesto"
Author: James Howard Kunstler
Year Published: 2001 - Present
Rating: 3 Locally-Produced Artisanal Cheeses (out of 5)
Summary: Several months ago, Martha wrote about the "Mary Sue" — a wish-fulfillment fantasy disguised as fiction. These are endimic to post-apocalyptic sci-fi: the world is changed in such a way that suddenly [ survivalists | SF Bay concept artists | unemployed veteran gunnery sergeants | live-action role-playing Wiccan RenFaire-ists ] either run the world or at least become the valued and important members of society that they currently are not. Kunstler's manifesto is not, technically, science fiction — rather it's an essay predicting a future which cannot be escaped, but could perhaps be ameliorated by adopting New Urbanist planning immediately.
Setting: After a catastrophic supply crunch of petroleum, America is reduced to a society of pedestrians and cyclists. Suburban yards are cultivated for food by the few poverty-stricken residents foolish enough to remain in the sprawl zones. The majority of the population, however, is split between smallish New Urbanist cities and multipurpose farms which produce the same kinds of high-profit artisanal foods that are currently only sold as luxury goods. Nobody will drink Budweiser — everyone will drink a local microbrew.
When America last experienced the conditions Kunstler describes was a bit before the 1980s. This was not, frankly, an era noted for its connoiseurship. Why the New Urban Men in Kunstler's society wouldn't drink a local equivalent of Hamm's, Lone Star, or Schaefer from their local microbreweries is never explained.
Catastrophe: Peak Oil — which for some reason the market never adjusts for, despite the profits of the futures market, popularity of hybrid vehicles, and 55-gallon barrels of ink spilled on doom-and-gloom predictions.
Representative Sample:
Posted by Ben Brumfield at March 10, 2006 08:01 PMAgriculture faces a similar predicament. Today, we grow a few monocultures of grain or milk or beef or pork in vast quantities on gigantic factory farms, process most of the outputs at a similar enormous scale, and truck it great distances to gigantic super-stores. The end of cheap oil means this will no longer be possible. We are going to have to grow at least some of our food closer to home. We will have to do it with fewer petroleum inputs, the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. Our methods will have to be along lines that are today labeled as "organic." Farming will have to be done at a smaller scale, and it will probably entail more intensive human labor. A class of people will re-emerge on the scene: American agricultural laborers. Their lives will probably be far from idyllic. Don't count on this kind of work being done by foreign migrants when we are engaged in border disputes and demographic / territorial contests with Mexico. When the US economy shudders and stumbles, life will become worse by orders of magnitude in Mexico, which is already struggling.
The re-localization of farming in America is going to be very difficult. Our relationship with land the past half century has been one almost exclusively of brutal commodity exploitation. A lot of farmland in California is close to being ruined from over-irrigation; you can see the salt precipitates in the fields off Interstate Five in the Central Valley today. Some of the best eastern farmland has been paved over. The years ahead will require us to rediscover a relationship of caring for land and doing so by hand, tenderly. In an age when the farmland around our towns and cities seemed to have value only as potential development - for monocultures of suburban houses and discount shopping - stewardship was regarded as merely prissy. In the future, our lives will depend on how we take care of the land.
The re-localization of agriculture presumes that many so-called value-added activities will take place on a more local and regional basis, too: the conversion of milk into dairy products, the production of meats, hams, sausages, wine, preserved foods, and so on. Europeans never stopped doing this. Their models and methods exist to be emulated, and we will have to do it as the end of globalism becomes a more emphatic condition of life. Today, there are probably fewer than fifty immense factories producing most of the cheese in America, all absolutely dependent on long-haul trucking based on cheap diesel fuel. Twenty years in the future, there may be thousands of smaller dairies operating across the US. They will probably put out better products. They will employ people in complex vocations. They will have regional differences.