(Author’s Note: a version of this article appeared in the Green Horizon Magazine issue of Fall 2006.)
Steve Welzer review of:
The Long Emergency
By James Howard Kunstler.
Grove Press, New York, 2005.
Our times are characterized by a growing sense of pending crisis. Varying explications of the what, when, why, and how are reminiscent of the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant while feeling just parts of the whole. Debates rage about whether the signs portend sudden collapse or gradual decline; whether we’ve got decades to change course or merely years; whether technology will ameliorate the crisis or exacerbate it.
Author William Kotke (The Collapse of Civilization and The Seed of the Future) highlights the depletion of topsoil as the crux of the problem. Economist Laurence Kotlikoff (The Coming Generational Storm) cites public and private financial debt. Ecologist Lester Brown (Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble) points to general resource exhaustion. The Peak Oil coterie (Richard Heinberg, Michael Ruppert, James Howard Kunstler, et. al.) focuses on fossil fuel/energy scarcity.
Kunstler is an engaging writer, passionate, and never reticent about predicting in detail what he expects to unfold in all the major areas of social life: commerce, education, transportation, healthcare, religion, racial and geopolitical relations, even morality. Needless to say, the picture he paints is foreboding, based on the premise that fossil fuel prices are bound to rise over time. The effects will ripple through the industrial economy. The coming Long Emergency period—which Kunstler projects lasting a century or two—will require radical readjustments of our technologies, production methods, transportation systems, consumption habits, residential configurations, etc.
Paradigm of affluence versus quality of life
Kunstler’s message may tend to get dismissed as crisis-mongering, but a careful reading of The Long Emergency reveals that he is not a total gloomster. He maintains that the end of the historical aberration he calls The Age of Cheap Energy (about 1800-2000) could have an upside. As the hypertrophied economic-technological mania of industrialism implodes, devolution, re-localization and a re-grounding in nature-based limits and balances could potentially have a liberatory dimension. The paradigm of affluence western civilization has become familiar with may be doomed, but quality of life may not suffer as much as the modernist sensibility tends to fear:
Everyday life deeper in the twenty-first century will be as starkly different to people living today as the America of 1955 was different for someone who was a child before World War I … If there is any positive side to the stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of closer communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of a locally-based enterprise that really matters, and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to boredom. (The Long Emergency, p. 304)
Preoccupation with energy scarcity
Some of Kunstler’s work can be stimulating and engrossing, but it is also problematic in a way that’s characteristic of the whole Peak Oil phenomenon: Too much significance is given to just one aspect of the crisis we are facing. Those who are becoming overly preoccupied with the issue of energy scarcity would do well to remember how social change momentum was derailed during the 1960s when the broad and holistic critique/alternative movement got swamped by the particularism of the protest against the Vietnam War.
Narrowness of focus is also evident in Kunstler’s historical and political perspectives. He romanticizes pre-industrial American small-town life and medieval European urban culture, failing to recognize how the problems underlying the emerging crisis go much deeper than recent-century patterns of development and sprawl, deeper than the depletion of specific energy resources, deeper than industrialism. His romanticism about the past seems to reflect a resigned cynicism about the present. One would be hard-pressed to find in his numerous books and articles any interest in an ecological political alternative. Rather, his anti-establishment proclivities eventually resulted in a disappointing MAGA turn (!) late in life.
A civilizational blindness
James Howard Kunstler’s case of limited vision and disorientation is indicative of how fundamental aspects of our lifeways are now being debated and contested to an unprecedented extent. Kunstler did note how, for all the time that human societies have been dominated by ideologies of development and accumulation, living standards (especially elite living standards) have been dependent upon cheap labor, energy bonanzas, ecological irresponsibility, and stealing from future prosperity. Before the invention of industrial-scale mechanical slaves fed by fossil fuels, productivity rested on the backs of human slave/serf/wage labor, animal labor, a subjugated colonial proletariat, or a heavily taxed domestic peasantry. That should suggest that we have much more to face up to than just Peak Oil. Devolution and disruption loom because our civilization has cultivated a blindness toward a whole array of fundamental issues: hyper-urbanization, overpopulation, pollution, depletion, ecological imbalances, generalized social malaise.
The Long Emergency was an early example of twenty-first century literature centered on themes of crisis and collapse. Some of it reflects despair to the extent of advocating “deconstruction of the whole mess.” But we stand at a singular historical moment where we can neither “go back” to an earlier way nor “go forward” along the prevailing trendlines. At this point, during this century, humanity must face up to the totality—all those problems that have been festering under the long-standing mystique of “expansion, progress, and development.”
Kunstler was prescient twenty years ago in warning that humanity will almost certainly now be confronting a period of contingency and dislocation. A more comprehensive analysis than he can offer is needed to make sense of it all and to engender a fully adequate response. The most critical issues are more likely to be climate disruption and habitat destruction than petroleum scarcity. But what’s clear is that the sooner we turn onto a path of sustainability, the more hopeful we can be about our ultimate emergence into a world of responsibility and sanity at the other end of the Long Emergency.
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