2004-07-28

Our decentralized future

Jim Kunstler over at Clusterfuck has this to say about a very different future:

I get a steady stream of e-mails criticizing this blog for being excessively pessimistic in general, and in particular for not offering constructive ideas, solutions and remedies. So perhaps these horse lattitudes of summer are a good time to review the things we can do to prepare for a very different way of life in the post cheap oil world.

The salient features of that world will be turbulence, economic systems failure, and falling standards of living. The greatest imperatives for Americans will be the reconstruction of local communities and economic networks of interdependency and the re-establishment of local agriculture.

As the century advances, life will get increasingly local as the giant scale of enterprise falters in everything from the manufacture and retail of goods to food production to government. Many of my friends worry about the rise of a "Big Brother" type of despotic national government. I believe that the federal government will become increasingly impotent and irrelevant. Many of our state governments are already near insolvency and management paralysis. Local politics and local government will be everything. There will be a wide variation in the quality of it from region to region.

I was amazed to read these words written by someone other than me! It is fairly rare that folks think this way though I think it is a fairly accurate prediction. In fact, this is one of the reasons I'm so angry about the head in the sand Republicrats and the general populace. There will be no easy solution to our problems. If we are going to survive we are going to be forced to make massive changes not only to our political system, but in the very organization of our lives. Everything will be changing. Go read it.