Will edens be the emcee?

Metro Pulse reviews the Monday night Kunstler lecture.

I have always thought that the Global Economy was a short sighted view based on cheap fuel stock. The idea of far flung agricultural is the one of the greatest mistakes of our federal government.

A typical Harvard Business school short term business model. The latest spinach E. Coli tragedy shows how stupid our agribusiness model is. All Kunstler jokes aside, our welfare is dependent upon water and agricultural. Condos are not our salvation.

Some high points: 

He sees hope only in making cities more resource-independent, and in greater reliance on rail and water transportation. The American railroad system is one “Bolivians would be ashamed of.”

Though Kunstler would generally seem a friend to new urbanist projects, he startled a few in the audience when he questioned the fact that “waterfronts are being converted into condominiums and parks,” which sounds a lot like the city’s long-term Southside waterfront project. “We’re going to need them again,” Kunstler said. “For docks, wharves, and whorehouses for sailors.”

Americans, he said, will have to live “more intensely and profoundly locally than we have in a long time, with a return to local agriculture and manufacturing.”

While acknowledging writers like Thomas Friedman who posit that the future of mankind is necessarily a global economy, Kunstler called globalism a “transient” phenomenon. “It’s a fallacy that globalism is permanent,” he said. “Globalism is a set of transient relations dependent on world peace and cheap energy.”

“We will soon see the end of the skyscraper and the megastructure,” he said. He thinks major cities will fail because of their lack of water supply and agriculture.

“Phoenix is not going to make it. Las Vegas is not going to make it.” He believes smaller cities and towns will stand a better chance, especially those with their own water supply.

We discussed the problem with globalization just the other day in regards to the spinach crisis. If communities still grew their own vegetables, etc. the whole country would not have to give up spinach because one county in California had a problem with E.coli.