Kunstlercast/Small towns

Funnily enough Cuba already dealt with this and pretty successfully from all accounts. Which brings up questions of free vs command economies when it comes to dealing with environmental collapse. PBS did an hour on it.

I have a PDF file for reference, which I will post below.

"Cuba's economic development and ecosystem management was tied to its communist trading partners in Europe."

"But all this came crashing down along with the Berlin wall. The Soviet Union's demise, coupled with the U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba, devastated Cuba's economy and its farms. Food imports were cut 50%, and parts for tractors, chemical pesticides and fertilizers were no longer available. To avert widespread famine, Cuba had to figure out how to produce twice as much food with half the inputs. The answer: convert to organic farming. Cuba was in some ways well prepared to tackle such a change. In the 1980s Cuba had invested heavily in science, education, and agricultural research and development. In the 1990s fledgling Cuban alternative agricultural techniques were put to the test: biofertilizers, creative uses of soil amendments, intercropping, wastewater recycling for irrigation, biological pest controls. Though a transition to organic agriculture takes time, Cuba's 1996-97 harvest provided the country's highest-ever production levels for 10 of the 13 basic items in the national diet. There were some complaints of a lack of variety in the diet, but widespread famine was averted."

I might buy a farm in Canada. With global warming, the winters will soon be shorter and more tolerable. Maybe Québec. Of course, some cultural shock is to be expected. I'll have to learn to enjoy curling and bad French. My wife won't move so I am looking into the legal status of polygamy in Canada. I'll need more than one woman to pull those ploughs anyway.

I'm personally thinking Frederick/Hagerstown, MD or Lancaster, PA. (Family's in Lancaster, I'm in Frederick.) Frederick is close to Washington, DC and Baltimore, and I think this area has the capability to produce a lot of food. Plus, you can get 1900-1950s style houses that have a decent sized yard for not too much money (relatively speaking for the area, anyway). Heck, go up 15 to Thurmont (near Camp David), which has bus service to Frederick, or down 340 to Brunswick, which has tons of houses on the market with yards and also has bus service to the local economic hub, Frederick. Plus, Brunswick has train service to DC.

Transit is, I think, going to become more important as gas continues to rise. Pooling resources is going to make travel affordable. In addition, if transit is funded in an adequate way, they can move quicker to new energy sources than individual consumers can.

Northern Michigan.

Winters will get more tolerable if the warming trend holds. Sunny, pleasant summers. Gorgeous fall colors. Lots of hunting and fishing. Not extremely arable, but enough so to support a good network of farmer's markets and CSAs, and there is a solid SWPL foodie contingent up around Traverse City. They are even growing grapes and making wine now. Water will never be a resource concern. Midwestern, not Southern, so the natives are more usually Catholics or Lutherans than they are Baptists or snake-handlers, though as in Dixie there is an ambient level of Pentecostalism and assorted other non-mainline Protestants. And they are all so friendly! Very little racial tension, because everyone is white.

Downsides: Being at the end of a peninsula, it isn't on the road to or from anywhere, so it is kind of removed from prosperous trade routes. The mosquito is the official regional bird. Taxes are high. The local community governments and chambers of commerce are dominated by (I kid you not) Masonic lodges--possibly the last part of the western world where freemasonry really is the big power behind the scene (Given that the average lodge member's age is about 75, though, this issue may sort itself out naturally).

Small town in East Texas

Staunton - pronounced "StANton" by locals - is a pretty nice place. There is also a small ski area close by...but GW might wreck that. The Shenandoah Mountain park and Blue Ridge Parkway are also within easy distance. D.C. is less than 3 hours drive.

The downsides are few. If you are not a Southerner of a certain flag preference, you might have culture shock in the outlying areas. They do get heavy rain and flooding during the summer. And then there are some terrific ice storms during the winter...I'm talking inches thick. Not so fun to navigate through that in a mountainous terrain. Bugs. Lots of Bugs. And bears.

Karen,

But *The Ghost Map* concerns the very different circumstances of London in the 19th century. And -- ironically -- it was precisely the sorts of problems that Johnson describes (squalor, pollution, disease) that led to the emergence of suburbia in Britain and the rest of the industrial world in the decades after *The Ghost Map* is set. I don't dispute that it's worth considering models of sustainable urban as well as sustainable rural or small-town environments. But I think there is also a tendency to romanticize urban life in general -- and particularly a tendency to overstate the environmental sustainability of urban life -- that we need to resist if we are to think rigorously about what may need to be done to face the challenges that Rod describes, in the decades ahead. Too often environmental issues are used as merely one more stick with which urban "progressives" beat their "backward" peers in the small-towns and suburbia. Just as one example, there is a failure to factor in the environment impact of the transportation of goods on which urban life depends. Just because one doesn't drive to work doesn't mean that one's lifestyle is not contingent on oil-based transportation. It's just that what's being transported is not one's physical self, but rather the various goods on which one's physical self depends. An economic model in which manufacturing and agriculture are conducted locally is likely going to be the way to go, looking ahead. But that's a scenario that mitigates against the urban nostalgia of which Johnson partakes. Big cities are historical products of particular economic and technological contingencies. There's nothing to suggest that they are "the end of history," so far as human social structures go -- and much to suggest that they are not.

Posted by: Daniel | May 30, 2008 9:22 AM

Daniel, that hasn't been my experience. The small town I live in is of a size that I walk to the local grocery store, hardware store, and post office. For individual family agricuture, hand tools are sufficient - maybe a once a year use of a gas powered tiller, homeschooling seems to be popular, but the local school district has bus routes that pick up the outlying kids, my house here is smaller than the one I had in the big city and it is cooled by two window units and heated by a Dearborn free standing natural gas heater. My electric bills are a third of what they were in the city.

permanently high fuel prices will of necessity shorten supply lines...we'll likely see more agriculture and manufacturing done locally, for local and regional customers, instead of for customers living thousands of miles away...it won't be so easy to bring cheaply manufactured crap to the US on boats and then onto trucks that are too expensive to operate.

I can see this happening to some extent. OTOH, for transporting goods:

1. One could electrify the rail lines, and use rail in lieu of trucking more often (e.g., for long hauls). IIRC, even diesel trains are more energy efficient than trucking.)

2. One can use hybrid (*) or electric (**) trucks for shorter hauls where rail is inconvenient.

Then you run these off nuclear-generated electricity, and/or (if you really, really, have to) oil shale & tar sands.

In general, the degree to which "relocalization" occurs would depend on how expensive the aforementioned solutions are vis-à-vis the costs (e.g., foregone gains from trade, inability to exploit comparative advantage & efficiencies from specialization) associated with producing everything locally. I can see peak oil generating some relocalization. How much depends on the balance between the two factors mentioned above.

As for shipping...AFAIK, the (ahem) bulk of international trade is maritime (not, say, airborne) - maritime transport is far more energy-efficient (in terms of ton-miles per unit energy) than either trucking or rail (***). I dislike dependence on Chinese imports, but I'm not sure peak oil would be sufficient to kill them off.

(*) fedex.com/us/about/responsibility/environment/hybridelectricvehicle.html

(**) peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2007/12/320-electric-trucks.html

(***) peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2005/08/55-will-peak-oil-make-long-distance.html

We have a local talk jock who'd like to take about six or so nearby WNY counties and secede from the rest of NY. If he could pull that off, I'd stay right where I am, except a few miles farther out in the country. Failing that, I'm trying to talk my husband in to relocating to Moosonee, Canada. Don't ask me why, I just like the name.

After learning about peak oil about 3 year ago, we moved to the outskirts of a small city (population 20,000) in upstate NY. Not far from Kunstler, actually. It's walkable, near a train line, has a waterfront and is commutable (2 hours) from NYC. Five to ten minutes out of the city you're in farmland. We have a lot of CSA's around these parts. Parts of it are somewhat economically depressed but we're hoping that as the cost of oil becomes prohibitive more folks will start moving here from the outlying areas.

We live in Hagerstown, MD, which is in the Allegany mountains about 70 miles northwest of D.C. WE have 4 acres and keep most of it wooded; we also have a large vegetable garden, which, when we built here 4 years ago, was mostly a hobby. Now we're serious about it, can a bunch of food every year, and are doing what we can to prepare to be self-sufficient and be able to survive with our kids and extended family should the need arise. We're not "black-helicopter" weirdos. We just think we're being prudent.

The added benefits are wonderful too: we spend time as a family outside DOING things; can't put a pricetag on that. We're passing on great lessons to our kids, both practical and those of a more character-building bent.

Our next big plan? We have the emergency generator; next come some solar panels for long-term use.

And while Hagerstown is becoming something of a DC/Baltimore fringe bedroom community, we're blessed with a large population of Mennonites who seem to be resisting the siren song of the builder's dollars.

No airport near Staunton? Au contraire. There is a little airport at Weyers Cave that handles those little planes (the puddlejumper things that seat maybe 30 people) that have hub service to larger airports. Also Charlottesville's airport is just 40 miles away.

I think Staunton has avoided the huge rapid uncontrolled growth of Harrisonburg (25 mi north, where I live) and is pretty nice but I don't know about the job market. I don't think it's real spectacular but unemployment is not too high.

One problem we have in Harrisonburg is all the people moving in and then we get ugly commercial strips that look like Northern Virginia and the housing costs go way up and its hard for the young people to afford a home. So it's ok if you guys come here to the Shenandoah Valley but not too many of you, OK?

We all know that perhaps as much of 50% of the office work done in America can easily be done from home. The barrier is social, not logistical or technological.

And when you realize that your (and those of many others') pension plan is heavily invested in urban office building REITs, you may decide to reinforce those barriers. :)

Bob: Yes, of course. But I don't think Rod was hypothesizing about a future where 80%+ of today's American information workers are needed in the fields. I'm sure home gardening will continue to grow in popularity. We're avid gardeners and vegetarians, and support our local farming community pretty heavily. New Mexico, due to it's low population density, is currently a state that can, in a pinch, do a lot to feed itself. Thank God.

K Street: Well, as a freelancer I have no pension and my future plans don't center on one. I definitely expect a lot of social turmoil though as all the folks whose future plans for their later years depend on resources that might not be there.

The flip side of building a stable life for oneself and one's family in these years, that perhaps we should talk more about on these threads, is that the folks who do succeed in living in and/or creating more stable communities/economies will need to be in the position to show a lot of charity to those who don't make out as well. My wife and I have started talking some about how after our kids are grown we may look at a smaller house on more land, where we could take in people if needed.

Bless,
Doug

I think I'd pick--here. The outskirts of Fort Worth, outside loop 820. I'd probably sell our current house and head just a little way out into the country, nearer to the church we're going to.

We did the ultrarural thing when the kids were small, and it was awful. We lived in the car--there was no shopping, not even groceries, closer than about a 25 minute drive. For many things, including church, we drove an hour or more each way. The huge lawn took hours each weekend for my husband to maintain (we couldn't afford a riding mower) but wasn't feasible for much gardening (we were in a more mountainous region, and unless we could have afforded to have the yard terraced...etc.). The worst aspect was the septic tank, which we finally had to replace, erasing any hope that we would recoup what we put into the house by the time we sold it. Rural's all very well, but I'd never buy a house with a septic system again.

Of course, the Internet was pretty young when we were doing all this, and we didn't even own a home computer at the time. Now, with so much online shopping available, it's a lot more possible to live in the country and not spend weekends driving into the city to find, say, toddler shoes because your children have inherited narrow heels and can't wear either of the two styles featured in the local Wal-Mart (as in, "the shoes won't stay on" can't-wear, not some sort of snobbery about the selection--we didn't have time for that kind of thing).

One final thought--heat, even Texas heat, could stay manageable with fans, shade, appropriate attire, slowing down etc. But when it gets cold in North Dakota and you're dependent on heating oil to keep from quite literally freezing to death, it's another story.

The gated community is the butt of jokes but is the Benedict solution all that different?

I like the Booker T. Washington solution to put your bucket down where you are.

The devil known is better than the devil unknown.

If you own any property in a genuine city, think hard before you sell it to escape to the country because you will never be able to buy yourself back in. Consider at least selling it to a family member. You may yet need a refuge in the city. As the family in the city may need a refuge in the country.

If you and likeminded folk create a little paradise where you are going,
it will become valuable and others, government particularly, will hound you out of it.

For taxes. And for class envy. Anything lovely, beautiful, desirable you create will arouse cupidity and damn you among the rich.

The way of the future is not going to be nuclear families hopping here and there and growing vegetbles to feed themselves but extended families with branches here and there co-operating for the good of the clan.

And last platitude and advice from a 70 year old---everybody develop manual skills. Traditional guy skills and traditional gal skills and cross them over between the sexes.

And one more, develop a sense of beauty so you know how to make the humblest surrounding a work of art.

Little Rock, AR. Most of my family's there is the main reason, and it's not terrible cold in winter. Plenty of rainfall. Few too many tornadoes and a bit warm in summer, but not as bad as, say, Kuwait.

It's pretty clear that major metro areas have smaller footprints per capita than rural areas and small towns. But, of course, that says nothing about the individual lifestyle that you choose to live. I just don't know too many small towns that are not heavily dependent on the automobile.