Too Much Magic
A book by James Howard Kunstler
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012, 256 pp., $25 hardcover
In case you’re wondering, James Howard Kunstler is sticking by the scary scenario he presented in his 2005 book, The Long Emergency. The folks who doubted that the world had reached, or was about to reach, peak petroleum production—after which scarcity will intensify and the economy will be in very rough shape—have ceased to be so sure of themselves, he says.
Yes, it’s time for a book-length update from America’s überpessimist, the most entertainingly dark-humored friend New Urbanism has ever had. In Too Much Magic, Kunstler, gloriously explosive as ever on the printed page, uses the follies of the past seven years to pound home a message he’s been certain about all along: America is in big trouble because of its refusal to organize its communities and its economy with foresight.
“The middle class is dissolving,” he writes. “Americans have lost jobs they may never get back, in occupations that may cease to exist. They are getting tossed out of their houses at a rate never seen before. Government is broke at all levels, along with households and corporations. Foreign nations have gone bankrupt. ... Times are hard and look like they will get a whole lot harder soon.”
Much of the calamity, he says, can be ascribed to the way we have set ourselves up for failure—by building communities that require massive quantities of energy, to support a physically and spiritually unhealthy way of life.
Is America in the grip of decline? Collapse? “For now, I’ll refer to the defining condition of these times as contraction,” Kunstler says. “We’ve reached certain limits of planetary resources: of oil and natural gas, of uranium, of many common metal ores, of clean fresh water, of good soil, and most particularly the ability to pay for things with borrowed money.”
To those who think tar sands in western Canada, shale gas beds beneath the Alleghenies, oil discoveries in foreign lands, and a proliferation of solar panels, wind turbines, and other alternative energy sources will allow a bloated nation of 314 million consumers to continue behaving in fundamentally the same pattern that we’ve followed since the Second World War, Kunstler says no.
Even if energy sources are available, he argues that it’s going to be increasingly expensive to tap them, particularly given the rampant growth of the world’s population and the emergence of developing countries that have ravenous appetites of their own. There isn’t room in this brief review to examine the specifics of his energy analysis, but I have to say, I find Kunstler’s view of the connection between energy and wealth, and of the challenges this poses for a sprawling way of life, quite persuasive.
For new urbanists, the critical question is what Kunstler’s forecast—even if only a portion of it comes true—means for metro areas, cities, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Some suburbs will be retrofitted into town and villages—places that are more complete than today’s typical suburb, he suggests. Some others, lacking the community cohesion with which to compensate for failures in government services once trouble starts, will degenerate. Big cities will have problems because in a logistically challenged era, it will be difficult to keep them fully provisioned.
“Our smaller cities and towns are scaled better for the energy realities of the future,” Kunstler believes. “Most of these places are in sad shape now after decades of disinvestment, but they are sitting there waiting to be repopulated and reactivated.” One of the advantages of the smaller cities and towns is that many of them can obtain food from areas nearby—where farms will be smaller, with fewer big machines and more reliance on working animals than in the past few decades.
In recent years, there’s been a cottage industry of seeing America’s future revolve around gigantic conurbations that stretch from north of Boston to south of Washington; from Chicago to Pittsburgh; and so on. It’s hard to imagine that such enormity will remain a killer advantage if the economy shrinks as Kunstler believes it will.
Large, complex old cities “will contract and densify around their old centers, and around their waterfronts, if they are lucky to have them,” he predicts. Detroit, the subject of so many sad stories, actually will benefit from being situated on a short stretch of river between two Great Lakes. If Kunstler is right, things are going to be done on a smaller scale. Geography will make a difference.
New Urbanism’s rescue operation
“The United States does need a body of principle and skill that will allow us to assemble places with a future, and the New Urbanists laboriously retrieved this information from the dumpster of history where it was carelessly tossed by two generations in thrall to the phantom of limitless expansion,” he observes. “The New Urbanists recognized the resource limits we are now up against and the threats posed by climate change.”
“I don’t think there’s any question that we must return to traditional ways of occupying the landscape: walkable cities, towns, and villages, located on waterways and, if we are truly fortunate, connected by rail lines,” he maintains. The magic in the futuristic visions of “techno rapturists” is wearing off, Kunstler avers. We’re coming back to reality.
Each reader will have his or her own assessment as to how much of Kunstler’s vision is likely to materialize, and how soon. To me, it seems clear that America is in for a bumpy ride. But there will be genuine compensations. In Kunstler’s words, “It turns out that the human spirit needs texture, not sleekness in everything, and it needs things human-sized to feel human, and despite all the striving to escape it that is exactly what we’re going to get.”
