by Nudge

      Knowing what we do now, it’s all too easy for those of us in America to ask, “Why are you doing it?” of the peoples in China and India when we see them emulating our industrial lifestyle in all its panoply, even down to building exurban homes and having big SUV’s parked in their driveways. It’s as if we’d love to tell them that industrialism isn’t a straight blessing, that it has many downsides that aren’t apparent up front, and that it may not even be much of a real advantage in the long run. But that’s a complex lesson that hasn’t quite made a splash in the stream of mass media we export to the rest of the world, other than a few movies like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi. It’s hard to distill that lesson down to a set of easily-believed sentences that could be easily and believably communicated.

      Jared Diamond covers this subject somewhat in his books. We see the effects of it all around us in the form of human overpopulation, waste of resources, the concomitant species extinction rate associated with the loss of habitat and the destruction of the larger environment around us. The essence of it is that the instincts that we needed for survival in earlier times (such as breeding huge families so that maybe on or two of them survive to adulthood) don’t serve us very well in modern times, for example once we’ve already ensured the survival of most of our young ones through modern medicine. Yet here we are, living fossils of sorts, still running on prehistoric cave-dweller software in the nuclear age.

      We can ask all we want about why people buy SUV’s (even now) or why no politician will do anything to impinge negatively upon the greater motoring republic. We know it would be good but painful medicine to add a special tax of $2 per gallon on all motor fuel, with the proceeds going into setting up basic public transportation in most of the country ~ yet it will never happen in a system where any politician suggesting such a thing would be dragged from his or her own giant black SUV and strung up on the nearest tree.

      JHK touched on part of this in his recent book WMBH, at the beginning of one of the chapters where he described the narrator’s dream scene of driving.

      Driving, like flying, enables one to transcend a basic physical threshold and enter some magical realm where one’s physical abilities have been augmented in ways that the ancients would have called godlike. Do you remember the giddy feeling of the first time you drove on the road and saw how effortless and fast it was compared to walking or bicycling? Flying an airplane is like that but cubed .. it’s like something you would dream about but never be able to do without machine support.

      Unlike itty bitty hybrid cars, SUV’s are more like the land-god he- or she-man powersuits. They put the driver high off the road, in a commanding physical position, and they roar like thirsty dinosaurs when the gas pedal gets tromped on. It’s no mystery why some of the most aggressive SUV drivers are these sub-100lb cellphone-yapping suburban blondes .. they are playing out a fantasy of physical dominance in a world where they could never act that way outside of their high-and-mighty chariots.

      We don’t have numbers on it, but I’m willing to bet that for the people who’ve been exposed to the driving experience, and who have the opportunity to own or borrow a vehicle when needed, only a very small percentage would willingly give it up for reasons of saving the environment or for drastically reducing their use of energy. Most of us are still hardwired with all the wrong instincts for doing the right thing in the modern era. We could no more give up the illusion of godlike physical extension (as provided by our motor vehicles) than we could willingly cut off our own limbs.

      This is just a long way of saying that we shouldn’t be hoping for much when we fantasize about our current political establishment, here in the US anyway, ever waking up in time to deal with the fossil fuel crisis and to take the appropriate measures to scale down our use of artificial power while still maintaining civilization as we know it. There is a lot that could be done in this regard but is not being done or even discussed anywhere in the most hushed of tones.

      In Sweden, the government is taking strong and active measures to become completely independent of fossil fuels. Germany and China are the world leaders in rolling out wind energy. The nations of southeast Asia and western Europe are models of providing fast, effective, comprehensive public transit systems. France gets a huge percentage of its power through nuclear energy. Clearly, appropriate steps can in fact be taken by human governments … just not here in the US.

      The failure to act is an act of failure. Assuming there is no change in the way we do things here in the United Parking Lot of America, we will crash and burn most spectacularly as we try to keep up our fossil-fuel guzzling ways in an era of decreasing production of the same. Already our nation spends more per year on its military establishment than all the other nations added together. (All of our nuclear reactors here in the UPL. Save for the ones at universities, are designed to produce bomb-making materiel. Yet we have the gall to chastise China for spending a little moron military this year than it did last year, or to complain that others are setting up nuclear reactors at all.) We are ramping up our efforts to violently induce other nations to do things as we want, or else. It seems almost unnecessary to point out the fact that this story will not end well. Perhaps the best realistic outcome would be for the UPL to go bankrupt through military overexpenditure just as the USSR once did.

      The “fasten seat belts” light is off. Be prepared to drive less in the future.