Corn -- The New Gold
03rd Jun 08An article that I read recently stated that we were losing farmland at a rate of 100,000 to 300,000 acres a year per state. It was an old magazine, published in 1994, so I'm not sure what the statistics are now in 2008. But even at half that rate, we are losing farmland at an astonishing pace, and with it, our self-reliant lifestyle we founded our nation upon.
Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.
By James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, May 25, 2008; B03
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament
on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear
an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom
of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among
the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to
keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its
byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and
nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil
will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway
system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have
to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the
"peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the
instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon
as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems
can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the
price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week,
these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will
bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which
will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist
industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will
squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration
and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all
interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by
the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking
across our nation.
And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow
focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the
environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute
has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years --
inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.
Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told
their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for
negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious
beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades.
The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come
true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion
of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you
wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic
differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the
difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen
through earnest effort.
The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can
get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite
religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned
riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you
combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish
upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies
our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently
to the energy crisis.
These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of
meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications.
The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our
current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which
politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?)
The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when
we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food
shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks,
the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have
been stripped clean.
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have
to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life.
We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will
require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to
the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic
networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically
destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and
retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional
towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to
make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local
farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we
could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the
country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it --
especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are.
The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of
fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already
offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At
least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the
past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again,
Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the
presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot
afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that
hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us.
We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals
who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting
something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe
really works.
James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.
2008 The Washington Post Company
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/05/22/are-you-being-controlled-by-corn.aspx
Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.
By James Howard Kunstler
Sunday, May 25, 2008; B03
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament
on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear
an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom
of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among
the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to
keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its
byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and
nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil
will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway
system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have
to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the
"peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the
instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon
as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems
can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the
price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week,
these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will
bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which
will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist
industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will
squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration
and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all
interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by
the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking
across our nation.
And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow
focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the
environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute
has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years --
inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.
Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told
their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for
negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious
beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades.
The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come
true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion
of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you
wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic
differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the
difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen
through earnest effort.
The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can
get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite
religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned
riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you
combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish
upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies
our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently
to the energy crisis.
These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of
meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications.
The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our
current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which
politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?)
The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when
we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food
shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks,
the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have
been stripped clean.
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have
to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life.
We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will
require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to
the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic
networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically
destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and
retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional
towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to
make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local
farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we
could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the
country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it --
especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are.
The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of
fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already
offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At
least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the
past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again,
Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the
presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot
afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that
hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us.
We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals
who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting
something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe
really works.
James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.
2008 The Washington Post Company
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/05/22/are-you-being-controlled-by-corn.aspx
