Dear Readers

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

- from “For the Children” by Gary Snyder

My mind is in a fog lately. Since I started reading books and web posts by James Howard Kunstler during the past few months, everywhere I look I see signs of impending doom. My senses are alert. I listen to the news on the radio. I read the Globe. I look around. Every tidbit about the war, the election, the global food crisis, the energy crisis and the credit crisis falls perfectly into the pattern of collapse that Kunstler predicts. I’ve pretty much always felt it would come to this, but the crisis took longer to get here than I imagined. I couldn’t articulate my concerns in an organized way, but Kunstler gives these issues a structure that shows the interconnectedness of our follies in a way that helps make things clear, and the vision is not a pretty one. Even though they were written a few years ago, his books, particularly The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, shed a bright light on the errors of our ways.

Just imagine a family of four, five or six in a big new cul-de-sac out in the country. They took out a second mortgage to pay for the two SUV’s in the driveway and the power boat, ATV and jet skis in the three-car garage and the hot tub out back. That wasn’t a problem because the value of the house went up year after year. Mom drives the kids to school, dance class, Gymboree, baseball and soccer and then ferries them to the mall. Dad works in town for a big financial company and drives 50 miles each way because they could get so much more square footage a couple of towns further out.

Of course, no one is going anywhere if the parents can’t drag themselves out of the master bathroom. You see, it’s like a mini-spa in there with heat lamps, whirlpool bath and one of those showers with eight shower heads. The house is so elegant. There are bedrooms and bathrooms for everybody and a special room for every use. It has a grand entrance that is open to vaulted ceilings two stories up.

The kitchen is state-of-the-art with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. There is a machine for every chore, but luckily there aren’t many chores to do because such a busy family eats out often or does take-out. When they do cook, it’s really easy because everything is pre-packaged, pre-cooked and heats up in the microwave. Cleanup is a snap because all the packaging simply goes in the trash compactor.

The house is always so comfortable with air conditioning in the summer and oil heat in the winter. They never have to bother with opening and closing windows; the thermostat takes care of everything automatically. The kids are too busy to mow the lawn, being so busy with their cell phones, iPods, and all, but Dad doesn’t have to worry either because the lawn guys come every week and keep the sweeping lawnscape perfect and green with their fleet of stand-up mowers and roaring hive of leaf blowers. The sprinklers are on a timer and come on automatically every morning and the latest chemicals prevent those embarrassing weeds.

Now, imagine gasoline at four, five, six dollars a gallon. It costs a hundred bucks just to fill up the Durango. Imagine the monthly payments on those two (or three) adjustable-rate mortgages after interest rates jump up a couple of points. Not only are the payments higher, but as society realizes the unsustainability of this lifestyle and more and more similar houses come on the market, the value of the property will drop and the family will be upside-down on the loans. That is, they will owe more than the house is worth and even if they are able sell, they will still be deep in debt.

Dad’s job at the finance company is looking less secure as the mortgage securities that made them so much money just a few years ago become worthless as more and more people default on loans. The oil truck pulls up to fill the tank with winter on the way, and that first bill of many comes to $1250.

But still, little Sis will simply have a total meltdown if Mom doesn’t score those Hannah Montana tickets, and Dad has plans to drive up to New Hampshire for the big NASCAR race. McCain wants to drill in Alaska. Obama wants to use more crop land to produce corn ethanol. Thanks to the Jimmy Carter implosion of the 1970’s, you can be absolutely certain that not one major candidate will ever don a sweater and sit in front of a wood stove and tell America that they need to wake up and start living like very hard times are just around the corner.

These are the kind of things I find myself thinking about lately. I’m constantly looking at my own life and the lives of those around me and I wonder how things will be in just a few years. I worry about our kids who are just now launching into their own lives. At least they haven’t screwed those lives up yet and I tell them to build lives where they don’t depend on cars and stay out of debt.

I’m not getting into the woods much these days. We are in peak deer tick season and I have zero interest in getting Lyme disease again. I’m doing more cycling this summer, so my weekend mornings are pretty busy anyway. But I think the main reason I’m not coming up with any posts for the Moose Hill Journal is that I’m so preoccupied with the events unfolding around me that my thoughts just aren’t going in that direction.

I feel that we are on the verge of a major turning point for America but the scale and scope of the forces bearing down on us are way more than a simple man like me can ever comprehend. I want to observe the changes and write about them, but it’s all beyond me. I do know that driving Priuses, screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs, shopping at Whole Foods and putting recycling bins on the curb will not save us. That said, I don’t want to get all preachy and stuff. Glass houses and all that.

So, dear readers, I’m still here and still thinking about things to write about. I just haven’t figured out how I want to do that yet. Until I do, please check back here once in a while and check my Moose Hill Notebook where I post shorter, more scattered thoughts and observations. I would love to read your comments about where you see our world headed and how we can stay ahead of the crushing wheels of history. Until then, I leave you with the closing lines of the poem “For the Children” by Gary Snyder. This wonderfully prescient poem was passed along to me by Robin Andrea of the Dharma Bums and I find myself clinging to these words as a life ring of hope:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Dispatches from the Dark Side

WARNING TO READERS: This post is not about a happy nature walk in the woods. Persistent reading may cause eyes to glaze over and promote cravings for the latest Nancy Grace show on “Where the White Woman At?”.

Scottsdale, Arizona

April 24, 2008

We live in a time and place full of contrasts, variety, freedom, mobility, opportunity and distractions. There are times when my life is going in so many directions at once, it’s a chore just trying to grasp how – and even if - it all fits together and makes sense. One week I can be riding my bicycle to Moose Hill to wait for woodcocks on a chilly evening, and the next I can be sitting by the spa pool at a five-star resort. But I can’t relax because all the rich people around me can’t just turn off their cell phones and enjoy the moment. Last night, back at home, I was at a live concert and a young boy sitting in front of me was listening to his iPod. In Iraq, people are killing and dying in our name, but our news sources tell us of the outrage over a 15-year-old pop singer posing for a photograph with bare shoulders, and a prominent news figure spills her guts about an illicit relationship with a U.S. senator just to pump up book sales. We are so busy rushing ahead, we never pause to think about where we are headed. As they say, we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making great time. I find myself wishing a magical sprite would whisper the Truth in our ears.

Scottsdale, Arizona is a place where they’ve been making very good time, indeed, but every time I go there, I see lemmings rushing forward, not seeing the cliff just over the next hill. It is a world of highways and big box stores. It is populated with Escalades, Expeditions and Yukon XLs. Even in the warm, sunny, dry weather of April, there were very few people on foot or bicycle. There are fancy new sidewalks and bike lanes, but they go mostly unused. The bright sun shines every day, but there are no solar panels in sight. The bewilderment I felt when there last year (See “Wandering in the Desert,” April 13, 2007.) was only reinforced this time.

In the past, when going on vacation, I would take a stack of books and magazines, fantasizing about endless hours of quiet reading. With age comes at least a little wisdom and I now know that our trips are much too busy for that. Now, I try to bring one good book and immerse myself in it for the whole trip. Last year, it was Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy about how we need to start decentralizing everything and start building lives close to home based on the inter-connected web of community.

This year, I learned more about exactly why that is by reading James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. (Yes, that guy again.) His basic argument is that the oil is already running out and, at the rate we’re going, it will soon be gone. In the past century, everything we have built was - and everything we do is- based on the assumption that fossil fuel will be cheap and plentiful forever. There is no magical technology on the horizon that will save our sorry butts when the taps go dry. I have the bad misfortune of believing everything he says. Life would be so much more fun if I didn’t find myself constantly looking around me and imagining what life will be like with no electricity, no natural gas, no gasoline, no diesel fuel, no heating oil. Where will plastic come from without petroleum? Food prices are on the rise now, but what will a loaf of bread be worth when we’re trying to grow wheat on the golf courses, by hand, without farm machinery, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and fossil water pumped from deep underground? God, I’m depressed. I wonder what’s happening on Wisteria Lane?

I saw signs of the impending Long Emergency everywhere I looked that week in Arizona. One day on the front page of the New York Times there was one article about how one of Saudi Arabia’s last big oil fields is turning out to be more difficult to pump than expected. There was another story about a guy in Boulder, Colorado who is making a business of tearing up lawns to put in mini-farms (The neighbors are not happy.) because of the increasing cost of maintaining those lawns and remorselessly rising food prices. Another article describes how some warehouse club stores like BJ’s, Costco and Sam’s Club are rationing rice because people are hoarding it. Imagine that! Hoarding and rationing food in the USA. John McCain, and then the desperate Hillary Clinton, were crowing about a summer driving season (read voting season) gas tax holiday, further proving to me how gutless our leaders are on this issue.

It’s called cognitive dissonance, and I was exhibiting all the symptoms.There I was, jetting back and forth across the continent at something like 500 miles per hour, eating gluttonous quantities of imported gourmet food, swimming in heated pools, and enjoying a green manicured and watered landscape in the middle of a desert. We flipped on the air conditioning with barely a second thought and enjoyed the fountains and man-made waterfalls spraying water into the arid air. In the 10 days of our visit, our group went through literally thousands of bottles of spring water, all of it trucked in from elsewhere and none of the plastic bottles recycled. On one side of my brain I could clearly see how we are all headed to Hell in a hand basket, while on the other side I was having a wonderful time. It was great to be together with family and to have every creature comfort instantly available.

I was a guest on this fabulous vacation, so I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but I felt as though I was on an anthropological expedition to a world where money and privilege isolate some people from the realities of diminishing resources while poor souls elsewhere struggle to survive. I looked around at the hundreds of other vacationers and wondered if any of them even considered the eventual consequences of such decadence and waste. I also reminded myself that my own lifestyle back home – which I like to consider modest - is unbelievably extravagant in the big picture of things. I thanked my lucky stars to be an American and to have lived most of my life in the golden age of oil.

I clearly recall driving around in the mid-1970's, not long after the 1973 Oil Crisis, and thinking I'd better enjoy my driving now because we won't be doing it much longer. I remember my organic chemistry professor explaining, in 1973, that losing gasoline was only a part of the problem and that many vital organic compounds are derived from petroleum. It has always been evident to me that fossil fuel supplies were finite and that we should use what we have wisely and conservatively. I never understood why we wouldn't want to save some for our grandchildren.

Now, I know where we live in New England, we also drive everywhere and we have to heat our homes in the wintertime, but there’s something about the Phoenix area that makes the modern American lifestyle seem so much more foolish. Maybe it’s because New England was settled by Europeans long before fossil fuel powered everything and it’s possible - on some level – to imagine life without it. At least we have our own water and it’s easier to warm a home without petroleum than it is to cool one. We have lakes, rivers, oceans and the remnants of rail lines to travel on as the oil disappears. We can actually grow food here. The desert has lots of solar power, but there will never be enough of that to power all those cars and air conditioners. Without fossil fuel to power the pumps, the canals that carry their water will dry up. Scottsdale, as it is today, didn’t exist 40 years ago. In 40 years from now, it will be gone.

Any drive or jog around Scottsdale will take the traveler past many gated communities. Along with granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and three-car garages a gate and – better yet – a guard house at the entrance to the development is evidence of fine upscale living in 21st Century America. I would love to get some candid opinions about what these people think they’re fencing out. I suspect it’s Mexicans or, perhaps, judgmental tourists. But no matter how fancy the gates, or how high the walls, these people will not be protected from the disruption and upheaval that awaits us all during the Long Emergency.

Just Over the Horizon

Sunday, March 9, 2008

The bluebirds must have been feeling pretty cocky. The pair sat atop nesting boxes in the middle of the big hayfield near the top of Moose Hill Street. They had their pick of over a dozen boxes and were hawking down into the stubble to pick up morsels I could not see. As I pushed my bicycle along the edge of the field heading for home, I imagined that they were dreaming of a happy and productive season as they perched in the bright spring sunshine. They selected just the right home, and thought of the limitless supply of insects that would soon be hopping around in the fresh grass. The small flock of robins that probed for earthworms in the soft soil along the edges of rainwater puddles presented no threat. They paid no attention to the loving pair of doves flying overhead. Could it be that they didn’t know what was approaching just over the horizon? At that very moment, millions of tree swallows were winging their way north like squadrons of dive-bombers, and soon dozens would descend on this field to swoop and squabble over nesting sites. Bluebird heaven would be transformed into a world of constant vigilance and stress.

I ride my bicycle because I can, not because I have to. Of course there were times when simply jumping in the car to run an errand was not an option. Simply traveling to work or to secure the things needed to survive was a chore, if not an ordeal. But in this age of wealth and luxury, biking and walking are things some of us do because we think them fun or good for us. Most adults who ride bicycles today, do so solely for recreation, exercise or sport. I suspect most of us, upon seeing a grownup riding a bike simply to get from point A to point B, wonder what’s wrong with them. Homeless? DUI? Broke? Unstable? I sometimes wonder if people seeing me returning from Moose Hill with my tattered clothing and backpack hanging from my shoulders as I struggle up Depot Street to the center of town might think perhaps I have a few loose screws, too. Surely, no middle-class, middle-aged American would ride a bicycle because they have no other choice. Well, the day may be coming when bicycling looks like the best choice of all.

One of my regular business chores involves a five-mile round-trip commute. Most days, I’m carrying tools, bundles or supplies, so I drive. I’m trying to arrange things so once or twice a week I can make the trip on foot or by bicycle. Sunday was one of those days.

I rode the touring bike to do my work and then took the long, scenic route home. This involved mostly climbing through the cool, very windy air to get to, and then over, Moose Hill. This was no race; I was just enjoying the feeling of the wind and sun on my face and the pulsing of blood through my body. I passed the Audubon visitor’s center where groups of young families were gathering to go see the maple sugaring demonstration. I coasted down the south side of Moose Hill and pedaled over to our local farm stand where I bought a muffin and had my vacuum bottle filled with fresh coffee. I packed these in my bag and headed back to the woods. I had a few things on my mind and wanted to sit and think for a few minutes.

I found the abandoned and barely noticeable old trail that leads to The Mikveh. This is the old stone-lined springhole I stumbled on early last winter when I was thinking about my recently-deceased high school buddy, Martin. (See “Living Waters,” December 17, 2006.) I guess returning to this spot was my way of acknowledging the 20-year anniversary of the tragic passing of another high school friend, Marcie. No new insights rose out of the crystal depths of that pool; only that even the most gifted, kind, talented and beautiful of us can stumble upon unimaginable misfortune. For the rest of us, life goes on and we should try to be better people in the time we have left.

Just beyond The Mikveh a bedrock outcrop rises above the surrounding forest and this is enhanced by a couple of granite boulders stacked on top in a way that makes me think of an alter. In the event I need to offer up any sacrifices, I’ll know just where to go. On this day, the only thing I was offering up was coffee and a muffin. I put on my fleece hat and jacket and put my little foam pad on the outcrop so I could sit in the warming sun and lean against the alter to get a little protection from the wind.

I shuffled through my thoughts and tried to pick one to focus on. My thinking sometimes gets stuck on a theme and recently that theme has been the grim prospects for our future as prophesized by James Howard Kunstler (See sidebar), with thanks to Eleutheros at “How Many Miles from Babylon” (Sidebar) for pointing me in that direction. I was even lucky enough to score Kunstler’s new novel, World Made By Hand, at the library and read it in a few short days. Kunstler has been preaching for years that, in a nutshell, the age of cheap oil and cheap credit that has made the unsustainable expansion of the suburban way of life possible is just about over. Recent events on the nightly news make it hard to dismiss his claims. He marvels at our collective ability to suspend belief about the impending collapse of business as usual and at our willingness to think that technology and casinos will save us.

The prospect of life without fossil fuels can lead to endless daydreams. Will we plan a wise and orderly transition to conservation and renewable sources of energy, or will we descend into chaos as we squabble over the last few drops of petroleum. In the future, after the oil fields have gone dry, perhaps every one of us will have fantasies about what we could have done with the gasoline burned at just one NASCAR race. Just the night before, I was listening to a friend describe his one- to two-hour (each way!) daily automobile commute to a new job. Maybe he is among those who think we will soon discover more oil and more hours in a lifetime buried under distant blood-soaked desert sands.

It was time to go, so I packed up and headed for the trail. I paused one more time at the springhole just in case there was new wisdom to be found there, but I saw only the same old bewildered face staring back at me from the smooth surface. I was worried about the troubles that may lie just over the horizon but I was also optimistic about the approach of Spring so I pedaled back up Moose Hill to see what was new in the big meadow.