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.

Wandering in the Desert

Vacations can be wonderful things. Life on vacation can seem so simple, with the world reduced to the few objects along for the trip and even fewer worries. A vacation can be a time for extended daydreaming and fantasy. Being away makes it easier to get lost in an alternate reality.

When I visit a new place, I like to think about how it would be to live there (See “Could I Live Here?”, August 26, 2006). I also wonder where all of us middle-agers might go when we retire (See “Boomers on the Move”, May 18, 2006). When on vacation, I also like to pick up a good book that will help set the tone for my noodlings. Often, it seems, something from a newspaper or magazine will help assemble pieces of the mental framework. All these things came together for me last week.

I just got back from an extended stay in Scottsdale, Arizona. Yes, many Boomers will likely move there, and no, I could not live there. The book was Deep Economy by Bill McKibben, and the newspaper article was a piece on cohousing in the New York Times.

Scottsdale and Phoenix, for me, typify what seems so common in the New West. Everywhere one looks there is mile after mile of bulldozed desert with acre after acre of new subdivisions and strip after strip of malls and big box stores. The beautiful, smooth, efficient highways carry big, shiny, new SUV’s, many of them touting “Flexfuel” labels. The sun beats down and there is not a solar panel in sight. The desert is parched, and yet and canals carry water from miles away and the golf courses are green.

One of my favorite places to make pilgrimage in Scottsdale is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. On a tour I took there I saw a photo of the compound taken from the nearby McDowell Mountains. Taliesin stood alone in miles of unbroken desert. Way off in the distance was Old Scottsdale. Now, development presses in from every side and off in every direction. Gated compounds even push up into the mountains themselves. I was shocked to notice that the photo was taken in 1970. In less than forty years, well within the span of my own memory, Scottsdale has exploded from a sleepy little town in the hot, dusty desert to a vast, sprawling modern suburb.

I think of Scottsdale as a town with no soul. There are no neighborhoods, only alternating subdivisions and shopping centers that all look the same. There are bike lanes and sidewalks along most of the wide boulevards, but no one uses them, even in the beautiful spring weather. Walking through a development, there is nowhere to go on foot. There are no community stores or coffee shops. Want a newspaper? Hop in the car, turn on the AC, and drive. For the life of me, I can’t imagine where all the water, electricity and gasoline to support this mirage in the desert will come from.

Scottsdale is a great place to read a book like Deep Economy. Bill McKibben paints a grim picture indeed about how we are running out of money, energy, water and atmosphere. He argues that in our zeal to grow and become ever more efficient by concentrating everything – from water, to agriculture, to power production - in the hands of big producers, we have come to rely on the slave of fossil fuel. That fuel is running out and the carbon dioxide released by burning it is changing the atmosphere in ways that are accelerating and may well be irreversible. Moreover, he argues that our unending quest for personal wealth is not making us happier.

He suggests that by living more cooperatively and trying to live together in tight-knit communities, we can decentralize the production of food, water, energy and many other things we need. As key examples, he offers the local food movement and solar and wind power.

McKibben is a dreamer, but acknowledges the challenges. It is inherent in the American dream that we all want our own piece of the pie to eat as we choose. He calls it “hyper individualism.” He has a tough row to hoe. In this one trip I saw three little examples of behavior and human nature that lead me to believe we have little basis for hope.

At the airport baggage carousel, everyone rushes forward to stand next to the moving belt, blocking the view and way for everyone else. If we all stood back and waited, everyone could clearly see their bags emerge and calmly walk forward to pick them up.

At the resort, people rise early in the morning to place towels and magazines on prime poolside chairs to stake a claim, even if they don’t plan to sit in the sun until after lunch. If sunbathers only sat when they wanted to and cleaned up after themselves when they were done, there would be chairs for everybody.

In a busy parking lot, drivers circled for several minutes waiting for a space to become available. Even though spaces were clearly rare and in demand, a driver in a big new gas hog had no compunctions about perfectly straddling a line to take up two spaces for himself.

Just as I was thinking about what it might be like to live in a community of like-minded souls who want to respect the Earth and cooperate to make life better for everyone I came upon an article in the New York Times that described a variety cohousing projects. (See www.cohousing.org) I don’t know much about cohousing yet, but imagine it as something like forming a commune or kibbutz for the twenty-first century. Some resources are private, some are shared, and all members are drawn together by common interests and worldviews.

I used to wonder where all the Boomers would retire to. I may have been asking the wrong question. What may be more important for our generation is who we retire with. I hope enough of us find creative ways to live together in sustainable communities that leave something for future generations. And soon.