[A-List] We Want Solutions!

[Bill Totten]

by Jim Kunstler

www.kunstler.com (May 28 2007)

Wherever the environmentally-informed gather these days (that is, the
clusterfuck-aware), a nervous impatience often mounts, and ends up
expressing itself as an outcry for "solutions". For example, at the
Telluride Mountain Film Festival, where I happened to be this past
weekend, along with a couple of hundred other people who spewed airplane
exhaust across the stratosphere to get there. This year's twin themes
were the Castor-and-Pollux of Clusterfuck Nation, Global Warming and
Peak Oil.

Many frightening documentary films and Powerpoint talks were served up
in the opening symposium (including ones by Dennis Dimick, the editor of
National Geographic, Daniel Nocera of MIT, and yours truly) and, as the
morning wore on, the audience grew visibly impatient, until one speaker
dropped the word "solutions", and the audience gave out a big whoop of
approbation.

It only made me more nervous, because this longing for "solutions",
strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for
techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil
hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth's
ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is,
in itself, at the root of our problem - certainly at the bottom of our
incapacity to think clearly about these things.

I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of
my fellow festival attendees.

My position on this can be easily misunderstood. I don't want
civilization to collapse (I like Mozart and access to root canal). I
don't want Homo sapiens to go extinct, or the planet to parboil. I
certainly don't believe in doing nothing in the face of this emergency.
But I also don't believe we are going to make any hassle-free switch in
the way we run things - or that we should want to. Would the USA be a
better place if we could run Wal-Mart and Las Vegas on wind power? I
don't think so. Would the public benefit from another hundred years of
suburban living - and an economy based largely on creating ever more of
it? All the Prozac in the universe would not avail to offset the
diminishing returns of that bullshit.

In my travels, I have noticed a disturbing theme among the educated
minority of eco-advocates: they are every bit as dedicated to the status
quo (in their own way) as the NASCAR morons and shopping mall
developers. The eco-advocates want cars, too, and all the prerogatives
(like free parking and country living) that go with them, just like the
WalMart shoppers. If this were not so, then why do the eco-advocates
cream in their jeans whenever somebody presents a snazzy new vehicle
that runs on a fuel other than gasoline? Indeed, why are some of the
eco-friendly pouring all their efforts into the invention of such things
instead of into walkable communities and the reform of our stupid
land-use laws?

I encountered this ethos most strikingly a few years back at Middlebury
College in Vermont, where angry biodiesel advocates assailed my lack of
enthusiasm for their particular "solution" - which seemed geared mainly
to allow them to continue to drive their dad's old cast-off SUVs to the
snowboarding venues of that progressive little state. But the wish to
keep running all our cars permeates what little public discussion there
is of the global warming / energy crisis issues at all levels. Even the
elder statesmen of the eco-movement talk it up incessantly. The first
great victory will come when they shut up about it and put their minds
to other tasks.

The eco-advocate community is still hooked into the Faustian bargain of
technology with little consciousness of its diminishing returns, and to
some extent have made themselves unwitting tools of the truly clueless
and wicked who run business and politics in our land. With this
particular group in Telluride, which was composed heavily of Boomer
eco-adventurers (mountain climbers, trekkers, kayakers), the infatuation
with ever-cooler adventuring techno-gear extended naturally, it seemed,
to their uncritical view of magical techno-fixes aimed at "solving" the
climate / oil mess.

And the setting of the festival - the Rocky Mountain ski resort town of
Telluride - itself induced some eerie moments of reflex nausea as one
contemplated the many 10,000 square-foot peeled-log dream palaces built
by Hollywood producers, who derive their fortunes by selling violent
masturbation fantasies to fourteen-year-olds. One couldn't fail to
notice that three-quarters of the storefronts along the little main
street were occupied by real estate sales offices.

But I don't want to be doubly or triply misunderstood as appearing to
twang on the kind people who invited me there, or to evade the obvious
fact that I went (by airplane and shuttle van). I thought it was worth
going to carry this one little message: let's stop talking about making
better cars and start talking about occupying the landscape differently
- which we're going to have to do anyway.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation/


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