Djelloul Marbrook

Acting in its usual role as the national mind the press has decided that the rising fuel price is bad news, end of story. But it may be just the beginning of a much more important story.

Since the end of World War II we have built a society predicated on cheap gasoline. The suburbs sprawled inexorably into the countryside. Highways sliced and diced communities and farmland. Immense malls rose in remote spots, sucking the blood out of established commercial centers. Schools were consolidated into education factories, giving rise to huge bus fleets and loss of community control. A long-distance tourist industry developed. Small farms fell to developers and agribusiness combines. Agribusiness depends on huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, and on diesel-guzzling farm equipment and long-haul trucks to take farm products to market.

We can no longer support this kind of society in vast swaths of America. Rural life is already stunned by rising fuel costs. And yet none of the presidential candidates is addressing the inevitable transformation. They are acting as if we are confronting a temporary inconvenience rather than a sea change—witness the patently silly gas holiday proposals of McCain, Clinton & Co.

We must challenge the existing mindset that suburban development is the only way to improve the local economy. Apply to every community issue this question: Would doing this be energy-efficient?

With each consequence of a society presuming it would always have cheap fuel, another way of life vanished. As property taxes rose to support suburbs and exurbs, the young and the elderly found it difficult to pay them. Homes and farms and small businesses could no longer be passed to

—————————

What small communities can do

1. On the town web site and in the town hall publicize businesses and artisans who are willing to take on apprentices so local kids can find jobs. Municipal web sites are all too often passive affairs. They could become interactive with citizens, banning partisan politics but encouraging a free exchange of ideas.
2. Offer a carpooling match service so people who can’t afford to drive to a job can cooperate to make it affordable.
3. Give an incentive to a local car repair service to convert diesel engines to use vegetable oil (and start with the town highway vehicles)
4. Maintain a centralized exchange co-op so a person with one skill can exchange work with a person with another skill.
5. Offer incentives such as tax forgiveness and expedited building permits to small businesses to move into the village.
6. On the town web site and in the town hall maintain a roster of local skills, services, businesses, and contractors, especially those who don’t advertise, including hairdressers, house cleaners, ironers, handymen, landscapers, window washers, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, builders, carpenters, painters, roofers, haulers, hunters, trappers, farmers, orchardists, dairymen, gunsmiths, taxidermists, excavators, sewer pumping, repair skills of all kinds (bicycles, sewing, autos, tractors, small engines, appliances, lawn mowers), and teachers of all kinds (swimming, music, art, English, foreign language, cooking, catering, gardening, computers, woodworking, horseback riding), doctors, dentists, chiropractors, veterinarians, attorneys, physical therapists.
7. Make a list of all municipal and community services that could benefit from volunteers. Recruit the elderly, especially those living in retirement homes and communities, to develop and maintain the municipal web site, help maintain public buildings, volunteer at town halls and in school offices. Prepare a volunteer contact list.

————————

the next generation. Our merchant marine shrank to a shadow of its former glory, fed by shippers’ greed and avoidance of Coast Guard safety regulations and union salaries. Deregulated airlines now imprison passengers without water or toilets during long waits to take off. Antiquated air control systems contribute to long delays.

Then, when the manufacturing sector was exported, we switched to what we called a service economy, but the service economy failed to support the growing middle class created by the manufacturing sector. To supplant manufacturing wages we began to build, buy and sell homes on a scale that by the nineteen-nineties had become the basis of our economy.

Inefficient construction methods with lone drivers running around in their pickup trucks, pedestrian-hostile malls and housing developments, highways traveled by lone drivers in fuel-guzzling cars and trucks—all of it presumed endless cheap fuel.

Meanwhile we failed to maintain and expand efficient, nonpolluting transportation: river barges, railroads, subways, light rail and electric trolleys and buses. We sneered at economy vehicles and we pooh-poohed innovation such as lighter-than-air transport. We built a short-sighted society, and we were assisted in that delusional task by a conspiracy of the oil, media and political elites.

But there is an upside. We can renew urban and village life. We can revive local and regional transit systems. We can reshape the way food comes to market. For example, up and down New York’s Hudson Valley and in New York City, farmer’s markets sell produce and products brought short-distance by the farmers themselves, eliminating middlemen and costly long hauls and enabling the farmers to keep on farming instead of selling their land for unsustainable developments.

This is the moment in history to rationally define the word sustainable. Because fuel has been cheap we have presumed that building as many houses as possible makes for viable, sustainable communities. It doesn’t. Developers will promise anything, but they intend to deliver toilet water. Communities have been allowing growth where the aquifer can’t supply enough water and the earth can’t absorb enough waste. Villages have assumed that all growth is good when in fact certain kinds of growth should be limited for the common good. Communities have assumed that more houses will invariably produce an adequate tax base, but this flies in the face of our national experience of strained fire, police, road and water-sewer services. The anchor store of a mega-mall will pick up and relocate or shut down at the drop of a hat, as is already happening in the weakening economy. These stores have no roots in a community, no loyalty except to profit, just as absentee-owned newspapers have no commitment to the communities from which they expect advertising.

We must examine all these issues and ask ourselves the hard questions needed to reshape a society based on fuel efficiency, not wastefulness. We must redress the lies of the oil and auto companies and undo the results of their continuous lobbying against building a fuel-savvy society. We have the tools to do this. For example, we can use computer modeling to create sustainable communities and examine how they would function under certain conditions. We don’t have to reshape society by guess and by golly. But we must find the political will to do it, and we must be willing to renounce the lies that have been our comfort food. This is the work of heroes. We can do it.          —DM