The End of Suburbia focuses on the role of the American suburbs in the vastly underrated global oil crisis.
Documenting decline
By
Sandy Lyon and
Nick Vander Puy
When the gauge says we have less than a quarter tank most drivers get worried about running out of gas. We fill up our cars, trucks, and SUV’s, and while lately we are feeling pump shock, when we think about the world energy crisis that we can vaguely remember from the evening news what we remember is that there are still billions of barrels of oil left in the ground. We are told there is enough oil left for 30 or 40 years. Why worry about running out, right?
So we tool on clueless down the road, even though almost everything in our society depends upon cheap and abundant fossil fuel, even our food. The “Peak Oil” idea—which says world oil production will go into irreversible decline sometime in the next decade—originates with M. King Hubbert, a top American oil geologist. Back in the 1950s, Hubbert predicted United States oil production would peak in 1970 and then irreversibly decline.
The documentary film, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, advises us to think about worldwide oil extraction as a bell curve. We are near the top of the bell right now; world oil and gas extraction has peaked. About half the oil reserve in the Earth has been extracted, and the population has doubled since the 1970s oil crisis. Because the developing world wants something Americans have, energy demand exceeds supply. Industrial society’s voracious appetite smacks up against finite, non-renewable fossil fuels. Prices drive skyward. As the wheels of commerce slow the law of diminishing returns sets in. Since virtually everything we produce is dependent on cheap energy, industrial civilization declines. The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart or the food stores. As the The End of Suburbia points out, “It’s the end of the three-thousand mile Caesar salad.”
Most industrial political leaders shroud this reality. Vice President Cheney declares, “The American way of life is not negotiable.” The United States, with four percent of the world’s population, hogs 25 percent the world’s oil. The suburbs, where half of America lives, are wrapped up in this “American Dream”; the long drives, town-and-country McMansions, square lawns, skinny trees, and double three-car garages.
Using great wit, strong evidence and dark humor, The End of Suburbia predicts the suburban lifestyle will soon collapse. And no amount of indignation, outrage, or feelings of entitlement can change this. The movie suggests we may soon, like it or not, be living more than one family to a house, growing vegetables and raising chickens on the front lawn.
How did we get into this mess? The suburban project took off after World War II as a kind of payback for returning soldiers. One of the funniest scenes in The End of Suburbia shows a GI in some old footage, during a battle, pulling out a brochure and imagining a nice air-conditioned castle back home with a big lawn and a cooler of beer. Shortly thereafter the car-centered suburbs and the interstate highway system were built, General Motors destroyed light rail, and a miserable template for development was institutionalized.
James Howard Kunstler is the incisive star of The End of Suburbia, and he calls the suburban project “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.” Kunstler goes on to say, “America has squandered its wealth on a living arrangement that has no future.” Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, nine novels, and the forthcoming book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century, will be in Wisconsin on April 20, speaking on the UW-Madison campus. Kunstler will discuss the decay of America’s cities and places, and tally up the economic, social and spiritual costs of our car culture.
There are other experts on the energy crisis featured in The End of Suburbia-Mike Ruppert, Richard Heinberg, Michael Klare, Dr. Colin Campbell, and Kenneth Deffeyes-but the most compelling is lifelong Republican energy investment banker Matthew Simmons. You see anxiety in Simmon’s eyes when he says, “When Peak Oil happens the economy no longer grows.”
When asked for a solution to the impending natural gas crisis Simmons says, “I don’t think there is one. The solution is to pray and to build lower ceilings. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered there will be no crisis for maybe two years. After that it is a certainty.”
The filmmakers do not think alternative energy, or wind and solar power can be ramped up fast enough to make a difference for many people, though may prove valuable on a local scale. They treat other technologies like hydrogen fuel cells as delusions.
What we are left with is dusting off those old issues of Mother Earth News for information on how to do more with less.
April 17, 2005
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Sandy Lyon lives in Springbrook and is executive director of Anishinaabe Niijii/Protect The Earth.
Nick Vander Puy is lead producer for the Superior Broadcast Network in northern Wisconsin.
