The N&R is engaging in another bit of advocacy journalism, devoting pretty much the entire Sunday edition to tackling —gasp— big oil. The only way to describe their solution to the problem is a return to an agrarian society where individual rights and individual mobility are supressed. In other words, communism.
The front-pager on the “end of big oil” starts out with apocalyptic visions:
So what would Guilford County residents experience if fuel hit $8 a gallon? Or $10?
Picture more bicycles on Greensboro’s Battleground Avenue than cars. A dearth — for once — of “Made in China” wares on store shelves. Weeds and “For Sale” signs in desolate subdivisions.
But what I really found interesting were the quotes from Megan Quinn Bachman of The Community Solution, who offers up her vision of the future:
“I think we are going to be living a lot more cooperatively at the local level and not have a lot of these isolated, single-family existences,” she said.
Bachman expressed hope to a group of 40 people at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant that the city could become a model of sustainability in a post-peak-oil world.
“We need to recognize that if we don’t choose a different path, then the choices will be made for us,” she said.
More solutions are offered up in the Ideas section, starting with James Howard Kunstler’s wake-up call:
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we’ll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We’ll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life.We’ll have to restore local economic networks — the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed — made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.
We’ll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country’s oil consumption. The fact that we’re not talking about it — especially in the presidential campaign — shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don’t get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
On the subject of trains, the Triad’s favorite young liberal, Malcolm Kenton, writes (unposted) that trains are poised to make Greensboro the ‘Gate City’ once again. Kenton concludes:
When we start using bicycles, buses, trains and our own two feet for most travel, not only will we be saving money and polluting less, but we will also rediscover the camaradierie that our culture has lost in our heedless thirst for independent mobility. We may yet reclaim our railroad depots, and our buses and trains themselves, as the kind of gathering places so vital to a democratic culture.
You see where this is heading? The Community Foundation’s Bachman says if something isn’t done, ‘choices will be made for us.’ But it seems to me that if people like Bachman, Kunstler and Kenton had their way, then choices would be made for us anyway. Choices like how and where to live, how and when to travel, how to manage our own family affairs. We’d all be forced to adapt to their vision of society, which sounds more like the 19th century than the 21st century to me.
What’s more amazing to me is that our local paper of record is promoting that vision of society. Lets you know how they think down on East Market Street. It’s certainly not the way I think. I don’t need their form of social engineering, thank you.
