by: James Howard Kunstler

It is difficult for Americans at every level to imagine a different way-of-life, but we’d better start tuning up our imaginations, because endless motoring is not our destiny anymore. Thus far, the Obama team has not been willing to identify the suburban system as the heart of our economic problem. They can’t recognize it for what it truly is: a living arrangement with no future – and an economic, ecological, and spiritual disaster. It is, of course, the primary reason why we find ourselves in the deadly predicament of importing over two-thirds of the oil we use every day.

We have to rehabilitate thousands of downtowns all over the nation to accommodate the new re-scaled edition of local and regional trade that will follow the death of national chain-store retail of the WalMart ilk. We have to reform food production (a.k.a. “farming”). Petro-dependent agri-biz will go the same way as the chain stores. Its equations will fail, especially in a credit-strapped society. We have to get passenger rail going again because the airlines are going to die the next time there is an uptick in oil prices, or a spot shortage of oil.