Review of the Book:
The Long Emergency
by James Howard Kunstler
H. William Batt
[This book is published by Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005.
This review is reprinted from
GroundSwell, May-June 2006]
Belatedly, a year after its initial publication, I am reviewing
James Howard Kunstler's fourth non-fiction book, The Long
Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First
Century. I am doing so first, because I promised him I would,
and second, because this book is important. It is a keeper, because
it has staying power much like the books of Jared Diamond's Guns,
Germs and Steel, and his later book, Collapse. Readers
will find themselves referring to it a decade from now for its
prescience. Unlike other books that address the prospect of "peak
oil," the looming acme of oil extraction after which we will
see a decline in supply, Kunstler explores the likely impact of this
unfolding specter. But in taking a view of history covering not just
the "age of oil" but the before and after, he offers his
interpretation of what our civilization likely faces beginning in
the near future -- a future which may already have begun.
The book proceeds in logical order, first by reminding us how much
our whole mode of living is premised on the existence of cheap and
convenient fossil fuel energy sources, mostly petroleum and natural
gas. It then traces how we got to this point, the evidence that
changes are in store, and what other energy options, if any, are
possible. The author adds a short chapter on what other crises will
likely be coterminous with peak oil's arrival: climate change,
epidemic disease, water scarcity, habitat destruction, and how much
the industrial age can explain these threats. (One is reminded here
also that he is far from alone in anticipation of these; for a
comparable list, check Colin Mason's book, The 2030 Spike,
accessible online in part at www.2030spike.com, and worth looking
at.)
It is in the next to last chapter, however, where the book really
outclasses others of the genre. Here the author steps into the deep
waters of economics to address globalization, ecological impact, and
future welfare, and he manages to explain the issues in clear
English without stumbling. Few others have been so bold or as
successful. He actually refers to the school of ecological
economics. Doing so requires a discussion of entropy, the second law
of thermodynamics, which posits that matter and energy stocks flow
toward an ever-increasing state of randomness. It is worth quoting
him here at length, as few conventional economists appreciate the
importance of energy sources as anything but one more commodity in
their equations:
. . . A hot cup of coffee cools off sooner or later. Its
heat is diffused until the temperature of the coffee stabilizes to
equilibrium with the air around it. It never gets spontaneously
hotter. A tire goes flat, it never spontaneously reinflates. Windup
clocks wind down, they don't wind up. Time goes in one direction.
Entropy explains why logs burn, why iron rusts, why tornadoes happen
and why animals die.
The reason that everything in the real world does not fall apart at
once is that the flow of entropy faces obstructions or constraints.
A given system will automatically select the paths or drains that
get the system to a final state - exhaust its potential - the
fastest possible rate given the constraints. Simple, ordered flows
drain entropy at a faster rate than complex disordered flows. Hence,
the creation of ever more efficient ordered flows in American
society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding
down of American potential, which is exactly why a Wal-Mart economy
will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national agglomeration of
diverse independent small-town economies. Efficiency is the
straightest path to hell. (p.191)
So if we are to maintain social order, it is necessary to build
in stops, fixed points that offer us the opportunity to build
structures of every sort to assure a greater comfort and security
for our lives. Economic globalization may offer one kind of
rationality, perhaps, but it compromises others, and Kunstler shows
how it is that we have destroyed our towns, our family and social
relationships, our very modes of living, all for the sake of a
cheaper hair dryer or coffee maker. All the imported goods coming
from beyond our national borders depend on our momentary reliance on
cheap oil, while we at the same time trash our own manufacturing and
distribution infrastructure, allow our labor force to wither away,
and eviscerate the community bonds that hold together the body
politic.
A particularly interesting digression involves the shift we have
experienced in the nature of capitalism. This is apparent not only
in the transformation from farming to agribusiness, but also going
from manufacturing to finance capitalism. Until the past generation,
money was mostly earned through labor. Increasingly we have
witnessed an ever larger proportion of income derived from
manipulation of paper and property, all unearned. The ten pages
devoted to the "abstracted economy" as he calls it -- the
chapter is titled "Running on Fumes" -- trace the growth
of the joint stock company, its evolution and recognition in law as
a "person," and the implications of according corporations
limited liability, all of which is leading to ever more power and
dominance of business rationality over our daily lives. Immediate
and short-term payoffs become the signposts of every part of our
existence. But all of this transformation is possible only because,
and insofar as, the true costs of energy are not recognized --
because petroleum is priced as a free good, no more than what it
takes to pump it from the ground and bring it to our neighborhoods.
Later on Kunstler opines that,
. . . the America of the 1980s and 1990s was [a]
commoditization and conversion of public goods into private
luxuries, the impoverishment of the civic realm, and, to put it
bluntly, the rape of the landscape - a vast entropic enterprise that
was the culminating phase of suburbia. The dirty secret of the
American economy in the 1990s was that it was no longer about
anything except the creation of suburban sprawl and the furnishing,
accessorizing, and financing of it. It resembled the efficiency of
cancer. Nothing else really mattered except building suburban
houses, trading away the mortgages, selling the multiple cars needed
by the inhabitants, upgrading the roads into commercial strip
highways with all the necessary shopping infrastructure, and moving
base supplies of merchandise made in China for next to nothing to
fill up those houses. (p.222)
The book argues that the artificial pricing of motor fuels for the
distribution of our goods and services has led more than anything
else, to the growth of suburbia -- what he terms "the greatest
misallocation of resources in the history of the world -- a design
which has no future." It is here where a better understanding
of Georgist economics and the concept of ground rent might have
served him well. In an earlier book -- Home from Nowhere -- he has
devoted a chapter to describing land value taxation as a means by
which to foster urban infill and revitalization, remove the
penalties on improvements, and to reverse the centrifugal forces of
sprawl. But here, in this book, he makes no mention of Georgist
thought, focusing almost exclusively on energy rather than land
resources. That they are in a sense reciprocal is a point perhaps he
will emphasize in his next book.
The concluding chapter offers the authors thoughts on what he
thinks this country -- indeed the world to a lesser degree -- will
face when the petroleum crisis is really upon us. Having shown
earlier that no alternative and no combination of alternatives are
likely available to supplant our century-plus indulgence -- what he
at times calls the "oil fiesta" -- he explores with
inexorable logic what kind of society we are likely to become. He
points out how much even food we eat relies on petroleum input --
long before it is brought to our table: that "under the current
industrial farming system it takes sixteen calories of input to
produce one calorie of grain, and seventy calories of input to
produce one calorie of meat." This is all due to the
energy-intensive agriculture system that relies on enormous
quantities of water and fertilizer, farm machines, and other
mechanization. Reversion at some point to a system where human labor
is once again primary leads to the conclusion that many more people
will be involved in growing food, and that our diets are likely to
change drastically.
From here he goes on to explore the implications for land use, for
property rights, for urban land use configurations, for
transportation, and for just about every other dimension of our
lives. "The Long Emergency will present conditions Americans
have never experienced, and the non-rich masses may resort to the
kind of desperate action that other historically put-upon people
have taken." His allusions to the political possibilities are
veiled but nonetheless conveyed. The possible changes in our
institutions -- businesses, schools, and even national borders are
touched upon, but necessarily remain broad-brush speculation. He
concludes by saying that "we spent all our wealth acquired in
the twentieth century building an infrastructure of daily life that
will not work very long into the twenty-first century." He
didn't add that future generations may well resent our
shortsightedness and self-centeredness.
In the final analysis, however, he is quite clearly a puritanical
Yankee in his outlook, as it is evident throughout that he believes
that people should earn their keep and not live off the largess of
others or of nature. This becomes particularly clear in his account
of how attitudes toward gambling have changed in his own lifetime.
. . . in the 1950s and 1960s of my youth, gambling was
considered a vice, with criminal sanctions applied to it, occupying
the distant margins of society. Now, forty years later, gambling is
a mainstream recreation in an entertainment-saturated culture.
Following that a little further, though, one can't fail to see how
the new attitude toward gambling reflects a deeper fundamental shift
in normative thinking - that so much current behavior is predicated
on the belief that it is possible to get something for nothing. (p
302)
But it's not just gambling; it's looking for lawsuit windfalls,
or flipping real estate parcels. As our own society divides
increasingly between those who work for a living and those who rely
upon economic rents -- what David Korten, Michael Hudson, and others
are calling "finance capitalism" -- the moral dimensions
of our economic designs, as well as their study, are becoming ever
clearer. "Landlords grow richer in their sleep without working,"
wrote John Stuart Mill. It's an apt and useful quote to remember.
The record of the book's sales, likely well over six figures, is
warranted, as Kunstler is an extremely skillful writer, as well as
witty, hard-hitting and on target. Amazon.com's posting space
contains over 300 comments on the book, most of them laudatory even
if often disturbing. The book suffers for not having an index or
even a short bibliography. But that's only a reflection on the
nature of publishing today. Now that the paperback edition is
available, for only $14, it should be part of many university
courses as well as a choice of reading clubs. His hope in writing it
was to jolt our society out of its "sleepwalking"
ignorance and lack of preparedness for what is likely an alarming
future; he says at the beginning he's neither as gloomy as the
die-off crowd, or as polyannish as the technocrats. Students coming
of age today should have this book assigned in their classes. They
need the perspective, which Jim Kunstler offers, as it should be a
factor in how they plan their own lives. As a former university
professor myself, I can envision the book used in all social science
and policy courses, in philosophy, history and American studies, and
even for courses of a technically oriented nature. It is the
technocrats, after all, that need to be disabused of their hubris
that solutions to our energy future are just around the corner.