I love it when someone writes something that not only covers all the ground I was thinking, but does it comprehensively. Another item off my to-do list.
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/46846/
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the single worst impediment to clear thinking among most individuals and organizations in America today is the obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs. Even the environmental community is guilty of this. The esteemed Rocky Mountain Institute ran a project for a decade to design and develop a “hyper-car” capable of getting supernaturally fabulous mileage, in the belief that this would be an ecological benefit. The short-sightedness of this venture? It only promoted the idea that we could continue to be a car-dependent society; the project barely gave nodding recognition to the value of walkable communities and public transit.
The most arrant case of collective cluelessness now on view is our failure to even begin a public discussion about fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system, which has become so decrepit that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of it. It’s the one thing we could do right away that would have a substantial impact on our oil use. The infrastructure is still out there, rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. The restoration of it would employ hundreds of thousands of Americans at all levels of meaningful work. The fact that we are hardly even talking about it — at any point along the political spectrum, left, right, or center — shows how fundamentally un-serious we are.
This is just not good enough. It is not worthy of our history, our heritage, or the sacrifices that our ancestors made. It is wholly incompatible with anything describable as our collective responsibility to the future.
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.
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I still remember growing up in then-rural NH and having a huge garden (I mean *huge*, like 10m x 60 – 80m) that supplied almost all of our veggies, and my mom canning and freezing stuff. We had goats, chickens, ducks. Later on, in Maine, we also would raise a pair of pigs and a steer every year and put them in the freezer later.
I’ve been urban-gardening for many years, and looking forward to having a ‘real’ (to me) home, meaning an acre or two, a big garden, and chickens. I’d also like to finally build an earth-sheltered or earthship home with a solarium and thermal-mass heat pump, like I’ve been studying since the early 1980’s. In a fairly mild climate like most of northern CA, OR, and WA, one could do most of one’s heating that way.
The transformation of society question has been quietly burning in my mind for the past several years, since I heard that signs were pointing to global warming. I don’t talk about the stuff much, except with Mike and another close friend, as the topic seems to either overwhelm or bore most people. There’s a blueprint for a sustainable cityscape out there, in many different forms, all it takes is support by local governments (access laws, legal support for roof gardening, solar panels, etc).
Relentless Inquiry 
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