I suppose I'm the eternal optimist. I don't see the glass as half empty and draining, I see it half full and from my personal experience, I've seen that when given the opportunity to embrace rational alternatives to living in their cars, people will do just that. I live in (suburban) Houston but recently, by pure happenstance, found myself at Southlake Commons in Southlake, Texas a suburb on the northwest edge of DFW Airport between Dallas and Fort Worth. With its very narrow streets and three storied brick buildings, I at first wondered what in the world these people where thinking when they built an entire "old town" on the Texas prairie. After all, hadn't we just spent a half century destroying little towns in America?
But, this place was alive with activity........a band playing in the town square.......a post office (open on Saturday).......a new hotel being built at the back of development......apartments going up on the west side......people sitting at streetside tables at numerous restaurants (and mind you, this was TEXAS in early June) and EVERYWHERE.....people WALKING to and fro. While I was at first put off by the narrow and winding streets and the "claustrophobic" feel of this place, it took only a few minutes to recognize what was going on in the planning of this community, and I quickly got the idea. And, it's working; this place was a beehive of activity at 11:00 on a Saturday morning. Meanwhile, a strip center a mile down the road (as new as this commons area) was all but empty. Amazing how it works!
In a real sense, this (Canadian) production was at least partially right......suburbia has not worked. Humans are the most social of all animals. We want to BELONG and suburbia's great downfall is that rather than foster a spirit of community, it has robbed people of their sense of belonging. We're all strangers living in our postage stamp kingdoms, aware that there are other kingdoms very near by (just a few feet across the 'privacy' fence) but we have no idea who 'those' people are or why they're here.
The good news is that the free enterprise system is, as always, at work. I've spent some time in the past couple of weeks reading about Southlake Commons style developments and odds are one is coming soon to a BURB near you. In addition to DFW....Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, Denver and Charlotte all have these kinds of developments in place now and their enthusiastic acceptance in each of those markets bodes well for many more of these kinds of communities the future. They are designed and constructed to NOT be car friendly. The constancy is people walking and in at least one place I've observed, it's working. Incidentally, I got to this place in my much loved 2005 Ford Excursion (not an easy fit on those tiny streets) so I'm no treehugger by any stretch of the imagination.
AND, NO..........I'M NOT A REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER. I'm just an observer of people (damned interesting beasts, actually).
But, back to the original question: ARE WE RUNNING OUT OF OIL? Probably, and in any case, the worldwide demand for the stuff can do nothing in the near term but grow explosively (anybody notice that a nation of 1.5 BILLION people is developing a market economy in Asia, one that is already using more than 40% of the world's concrete and more than 30% of its steel? And China has a neighbor [India] with more than a billion people itself which is now developing a market based economy nearly rivaling that of China. India had been a close ally of the USSR but with the demise of the Soviet Union, it had to either change or wither. Like so many other nations: Indonesia, Vietnam, etc, it has gone the way of a free market economy. Demand for oil in these two traditionally underdeveloped nations can do nothing but grow at an ever faster rate).
But, where the producers of "The End of Suburbia" see only gloom and doom, is it not just as easy instead to see incredible opportunity? One way or another, the era of fossil fuels WILL come to an end, most likely sooner rather than later. So are we just going to sit around in the dark, cook our home grown veggies over an open fire and ride our mules to town once a week for some high priced staples? I THINK NOT.
The ultimate energy source, indeed the SOURCE of all energy is the SUN. Like oil, it's life is limited too but the best estimates we have now indicate the sun will burn itself out in something like another 4-BILLION years! Hence, LIMITLESS is the only word which describes the energy available to us from the sun. The only way to develop the technologies which will allow us to use it is to wean ourselves off oil. But like most animals, we won't stop sucking from the teet (in this case, oil) and do what it takes until we're ripped from that teet.
Will there be some hard times and will millions, perhaps billions of people struggle during the transition? Of course! There have always been and will always be 'Haves' and 'Have-nots.' Might suburban dwellers like you and I be among those who suffer greatly? Chances are lookin' pretty good that if we don't change our egg suckin' ways, we'll pay the price of an empty henhouse (I'm getting ready to communicate in the more rural community of the future. How am I doin'?). And if we middle "boomers" manage to escape the transition period, odds are exceptional our children and certainly our grand children will not. Nevertheless, the cycle will continue, people will strive to have meaning and purpose in their lives......and society will move forward. Remember, there are curves in EVERY road and finding out what is around the bend is a whole lot of the purpose of the trip.
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my_pants_burn
18 years ago
Personaly, i refuse to live in anything short of a global society. not to dis on agrarian communities, you have your likes, i have mine. the LAST thing i want is to end up livin in a community of 150 people, where a mango is considered "rare" cuz it has to be brought in from india. A world where religion will gain credibilty (you have your views, i have mine) and begin to overshadow science. Where an inability to travel will lead to predominately homogenous communites, leading to a lack of inter-racial marriage, leading to inbreeding. The LAST thing i wanna see the world go into is a new dark age, which when (if) we emerge from, we will be right back here, with racism, sexism, conflicts of religion vs. science and so forth. WORST CASE SCENARIO, say what you will about globalization screwing the world over, globalization has broken down cultural barriers which 50 years ago where common place, it allows the advancement of our society at a RIDICULOUS pace (anyone notice computers being way fater?). The average quality of life has RISEN, yes many people still work in sweat shops, but hopefully through a global community and world goverment, we can overcome this. Harder said than done, but i dont believe that working on a local as opposed to global scale will help this. With advances in nuclear power (europe is working on a practical nuclear fusion reactor in south france) and battery, cars will be pratical, although public transport will be more practical and will hopefully win out. High density skyscaper intensive landscapes will become common place and wipe out suburbia which is concuming our planets greenspace. The virtually limitless supply of electricity could pave our way into space, bringing asteroids into our solar system and using them as resources to go further and further, space elevators will allow cost affective transport into orbit (virtually) chemicly free. from there we could build orbital docks, and larger and larger ships, eventually o'neill space colonies (like the ones in MS gundam). Eventually terraforming mars, maybe even interstellar travel. All of these things are theorecticly (except for interstellar travel) possible. All we need would be nuclear fusion to give us a enoguh power and the will to do so and humans could conceivably colonize our solar systems lagrange points, terraform planets (mars) and colonize moons within the next 1/2 millenium. Yes its a long time, but time is the one thing a species as opposed to a person has.
in conclusion, lookin locally isnt the solution, the best possible society is one where a person in London considers Tokyo to be as close to home as Leeds, where we think on a global, not national, provincial or god forbid, local scale.
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rgcustomer
13 years ago
It's not that simple.
There can be problems in small communities run by people who are stupid, power-mad, or insane. But this also happens in large communities. Have you seen the US recently? I thought Bush was all three, but he's almost ideal in comparison to what's coming in 2010, 2012, and beyond.
You can choose your community of 150 while you have time. Lead it if you want. You can do things to ensure you don't end up in a place run by a local nut.
Globalization isn't breaking down barriers. It is creating them. Do you think the US would have been attacked in 2001 if it hadn't become so involved globally?
Faster computers is not a societal advancement.
There will be no world government working to end sweatshops. The governments of today are mostly by and for corporations (i.e. the people, because corporations are considered people) and corporations are required to maximize the bottom line in any way possible. That means using the cheapest labour available (worldwide) and that means the country where sweatshops are permitted will get the work. It's that simple. It's a necessary consequence of globalization.
I think the remainder of your post wanders into science fiction. Sure, we've turned it into fact before, but I just don't see that happening for much longer. We're ALREADY IN the next dark age. Science is not trusted (being incorrectly blamed for the failures of engineering, business, and politics). Education is handed off to people with various indoctrination agendas.
Humans, to survive the sun's expansion, will necessarily need to leave Earth at some point. But I think at the current time, we need to focus on cleaning up our mess on this one, and come up with plans that will last for a thousand years, instead of planning only for the next 50 years (at best) that happens now. We need to slow down, and do the right things. Most of what we do (indeed most of the films on IMDb) are completely unnecessary wastes of time. That is what is killing us.
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