Kunstler Reports on His Visit to Maui

After reading The Long Emergency and many of the posts on Kunstler.com, I've wondered what Kunstler thinks of Hawaii and its fate after oil production diminishes. This post answers my questions in part.

March 26, 2007 Zowie

For all of you out there disposed to twang on me for riding a jet airplane all the way to Maui, please consider that United flight 35 would have flown from San Francisco to Maui with or without me on it. Here's the deal: I had to go to San Fran to give a talk at the Commonwealth Club. From there, I had a lecture gig on Maui. I stayed three extra days and nights -- since I'd come all that way. So, sue me. Now, to the business at hand, which is my impressions of Maui. Beautiful as much of it may be, it is hard not to view it through a tragic lens. Most of the damage on Maui has been inflicted over the past 30-odd years -- that is, since the Pepsi Generation got their mitts on the island. Certainly, there were massive prior insults, starting with the first landings of the Haole (foreigners, in particular caucasians) in the late 18th century, the introduction of cattle, eucalyptus trees, the mongoose, the monoculture of sugar cane, and other intrusions that upset the island's ecology. But the boomer-hippies really iced it. Those who managed to stop smoking marijuana long enough to string two consecutive thoughts together grokked the related notions of tropical paradise and land development with predictable results. That is, they turned the place into just an annex of California. The flatlands were allowed to develop along the lines of Fresno or Lodi, while the uplands became Pacific Palisades Lite. The longest stretch of the best beaches in the place with the least rainfall was converted into a strip of jive-plastic supersized resort hotels. The automobile was given first dibs in all civic design matters. The island's beauty has not been entirely defeated, but the usual complaints are heard for the usual reasons -- mainly, that the overwhelming majority of buildings, both residential and commercial (including the big hotels), are graceless industrial sheds, deployed artlessly on over-engineered streets, which has conditioned the public to believe that all man-made things are worthless pieces of shit. This in turn conditions the public to believe that nothing man-made can be ultimately beneficial, which makes it impossible for us to imagine coexistence with the rest of nature, and so on into the usual swamps of suburban dialectic. The terrain, of course, has largely determined the situation with the car. Maui is mostly composed of two rugged mountains, and cars have made it possible for people other than farmers to settle the slopes. Without motor vehicles, a person living up in Makawao, maybe two or three thousand feet above sea level, would be lucky to get down to the main trading town once a month, let alone to a job every day. But work-a-day Maui operates just like work-a-day California, and all the associated norms of behavior are in place. You drive everywhere for everything. As far as I could tell, even the educated locals out in Maui today are consumed with the same trivialities about traffic and "density" that you'd hear back in any mainland town. They are not thinking beyond the usual NIMBY issues. But it seems perfectly obvious that Maui life will change drastically in a future of oil-and-gas scarcity. The commercial airlines are the "canaries in the coal mine" of advanced industrial civilization, and they are very sick canaries right now -- even with the price of oil relatively stable the past six months. The airlines have pared down their employee ranks about as far as possible. The scene at the Maui airport this Sunday was a clusterfuck -- largely due to the fact that United Airlines had only one person manning the ticket counter, and 98 percent of the visitors have to check through luggage. A couple more rounds of oil price spikes and the airlines are going to be lying tits up with glazed eyes. Perhaps aviation will then reorganize itself on a smaller scale serving only the elite, for a while, anyway. In any case, that will be the end of the mass middle class consumer phase of commercial aviation -- and also of mass middle class type tourism. [Cf. Paul Fussell: "The touristic class is predominantly the middle, the one that has made Hawaii, as Roger Price unkindly designates it, 'Roob Valhalla.'" (p. 109, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, New York, 1983, Rpt. 1992)--P.Z.] Few people on Maui I spoke to were mentally prepared for the implications of this. But it's perfectly obvious that the Hawaiian Islands will become much more isolated again, and that the way of life that has developed there since 1970 will have to change drastically. I'm glad I went. I don't know if I'll ever go back. Beautiful as it was, I got tired of being in the car all the time and there was really no place to walk.

Comfort Food, Various Links to Purveyors of

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-03-22-comfort-food_N.htm?csp=34

http://www.smacnyc.com/

http://www.wichcraftnyc.com

Miami Rice Pudding

Rice to Riches

http://www.cereality.com http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2004-12-08-cereal_x.htm

http://www.springwise.com/food_beverage/dessertonly_restaurants/

http://www.nyr4d.com/

http://www.chikalicious.com/

http://www.epicurious.com/gourmet/blogs/foodeditors/2006/12/dessert_bars_ia.html#more

West Egg Cafe
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Lickity Split Chocolate

Happy Birthday, Paul Fussell!

Paul Fussell, critic and historian, turns 83 today.

Why Newspapers Won't Go Out of Style

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/10/keillor/index.html

I Hear Voices

http://www.wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

LibraryHistoryBuff.org

I found this site while searching online for a card catalog, namely the cabinet that holds the cards. It looks interesting.

Lawns to Gardens

I'm adding to the list of links lawnstogardens.com, which I found through Kunstler. It's a peak-oil website, but addresses many other topics as well.

Ted Steinberg's book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (Norton, 2006) is out in paperback next month. I've been meaning to get a copy but kept forgetting about it. The best (i.e., most eco-friendly) way to keep a lawn trim is to let animals (e.g., goats, deer) eat the grass. Close behind are regular mowings with a push-mower. The Brill Luxus is a nice example.

I'll be discussing lawns more soon.

Kunstler Speaks with Salon.com

Browsing dKosopedia, I found this link to a Kunstler interview with Salon.com.

Divided They Fall

"Nader and Libertarians Not Welcome: A Splintered Antiwar Movement"

There was not a single Libertarian speaker even though the Libertarians and Old Right have been far more outspoken in opposing the war than the liberal "Left." Compare the pages of The American Conservative or Antiwar.com [not to mention Chronicles--P.Z.] with the editorials of The Nation, which endorsed the pro-war Kerry candidacy in 2004. This writer tried for months to get Ron Paul, the Libertarian/Republican Congressman from Texas, now a Republican presidential candidate, invited to speak at the rally and did so also in 2005. Several of us made an appeal to get Justin Raimondo, the Libertarian editor of Antiwar.com invited to speak. We got no response from UFPJ, and still have received none. In contrast, Raimondo advertised the UFPJ demonstration in a prominent place on his web site, and he even offered to pay his own air fare to D.C. to speak. But no response was forthcoming from whatever committee decides on the speakers, a committee which is none too visible. UFPJ was just plain rude to Raimondo. In general it appears that the liberal "Left" has scant knowledge about the Libertarians and less desire to acquire it. Libertarians are just "a bunch of selfish people," according to the PC liberals. But there are more things in heaven and earth than the very PC have dreamed of.

Airships

http://www.aerosml.com/news-press.asp

From high-altitude surveillance to a hybrid luxury cruise liner, our skies may soon be home to the next generation of multi-purpose airship....

Here is a fun blog on airships by animator Sean Hayden.

Advice from Kunstler on Surviving the Long Emergency

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

...The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
...
We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient....Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.


We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff....We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.


The age of canned entertainment is coming to and [sic] end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).


We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing....

We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to ... demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Making Other Arrangements

http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/07-1om/Kunstler.html

Excerpts therefrom:

There may be other ways of moving things above the ground, for instance balloons, blimps, or zeppelin-type airships. But they will move much more slowly and carry far less cargo and human passengers than the airplanes we've been enjoying for the past sixty years or so. The most likely scenario in the years ahead is that aviation will become an increasingly expensive, elite activity as the oil age dribbles to a close, and then it will not exist at all.


We have to do better. We have to start right away making those other arrangements. We have to begin the transition to some mode of living that will allow us to carry on the project of civilization—and I would argue against the notion advanced by Daniel Quinn and others that civilization itself is our enemy and should not be continued. The agenda for facing our problems squarely can, in fact, be described with some precision. We have to make other arrangements for the basic activities of everyday life.

In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial "inputs," and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now. These changes are also likely to revive a menu of social and class conflicts that we also thought we had left behind.


The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives and, increasingly, a luxury that will be resented by those who can no longer afford to participate in the "happy motoring" utopia. The interstate highways themselves will require more resources to maintain than we will be able to muster. For many of us, the twenty-first century will be less about incessant mobility than about staying where we are.

We have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, meaning a return to traditional cities, towns, neighborhoods, and a productive rural landscape that is more than just strictly scenic or recreational. We will probably see a reversal of the two-hundred-year-long trend of people moving from the country and small towns to the big cities. In fact, our big cities will probably contract substantially, even while they re-densify at their centers and along their waterfronts.

It is harder to predict exactly what may happen with education and medicine, except to say that neither can continue to operate as rackets much longer, and that they, like everything else, will have to become smaller in scale and much more local. Our centralized school districts, utterly dependent on the countless daily trips of fleets of yellow buses and oppressive property taxes, have poor prospects for carrying on successfully in an energy-scarce economy. However, we will be a less affluent nation in the post-oil age, and therefore may be hard-pressed to replace them. A new, more locally based education system may arise instead out of home-schooling, as household classes aggregate into new, small, neighborhood schools. College will cease to be a mass-consumer activity, and may only be available to social elites—if it continues to exist at all. Meanwhile, we're in for a pretty stark era of triage as the vast resources of the "medical industry" contract. Even without a global energy crisis bearing down on us, the federal Medicaid and Medicare systems would not survive the future as currently funded.

As a matter of fact, you can state categorically that anything organized on a gigantic scale, whether it is a federal government or the Acme Corporation or the University of Michigan, will probably falter in the energy-scarce future. Therefore, don't pin your hopes on multinational corporations, international NGOs, or any other giant organizations or institutions.

Recent events have caused many of us to fear that we are headed toward a Big Brother kind of governmental tyranny. I think we will be lucky if the federal government can answer the phones, let alone regulate anyone's life, in the post-oil era. As power devolves to the local and regional level, the very purpose of our federal arrangements may come into question. The state governments, with their enormous bureaucracies, may not be better off. Further along in this century, the real political action will likely shift down to the local level, as reconstructed neighborly associations allow people to tackle problems locally with local solutions.

The Quick and Dirty IQ Test

http://www.blogthings.com/quickanddirtyiqtest/

Germans in Hawaii

http://www.islander-magazine.com/germans.html

More later.

New Found Blogs

Ilind.net today mentions a blog by Oahu-based historian and UH-Manoa professor Dr. Andrew Wertheimer. "Dr. Drew" writes mainly about the histories of libraries and Japanese-Americans. Ilind also points its readers to "SusHI" or Sustainability in Hawai'i, a blog by Ken Stokes.

One key phrase for a journalist: quietly disclosed

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Low
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Medium

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Aristotle On Youth

Jimmy Akin quotes Aristotle's commentary on young men.

Happy New Year, Part One

The first movie I saw this year was Hibari no Hanadata Tantei Gassen (1958). I fell asleep about 10:15 New Year's Eve and woke up about 12:15 a.m. The TV was on NGN3, which plays Japanese movies. It was fifteen minutes into the movie, which played from 12 to 1:35 a.m. (Every New Year's our cable company has a free preview of Nippon Golden Network, which plays over three channels. During this time people can sign up for NGN at a discount, which is what we did this week) I watched about thirty minutes before falling asleep again.

Much later, from 4 to 5:35 p.m., the movie played again. I missed the first ten minutes but watched it until the end.

Also known as Detective Duel, Hibari is both a romantic comedy and mystery about two detectives competing to solve the case of a missing woman. Yukiko (played by Misora Hibari) is a sleuth up against the more experienced gumshoe Mitamura Eiji (Takakura Ken).* They tease each other but soon unite to solve the case of a missing woman, and thwart an intricate plot against her. (*In Japanese custom, surnames are placed before given names; e.g., Takakura Ken.)

Kunstler's Predictions

Like Janus, Kunstler simultaneously looks back at 2006 and ahead at 2007. He concludes a lengthy but worthwhile post with this:

To sum it all up, I believe 2007 will be the year that the US finally feels the pain. More disorder will appear in the system. More cries of anguish will be heard throughout the land. More paralysis will set in. The bid for leadership may not follow the current story line -- Barack...Hillary...Edwards...McCain...blah blah blah. Jokers and wild cards could step into the frame. America will be looking for a man on a white horse and instead they'll get Newt Gingrich on an electric Humvee.

As the Year Ends

what do you remember most?