The Long Salvation: Remarks on the Long Emergency with James Howard Kunstler and others.
By Justin Good

'The American People will continue to live how they are living now until they can’t anymore, and then they’ll do something different.' James Howard Kunstler.

March 6th East Haddam, CT
The Sanctuary at Shepardfields, in partnership with the Earth Charter of the Lower Valley and the East Haddam Green Committee hosted what one participant described as the most radical discussion event he had ever witnessed in East Haddam Center. The high energy discussion concerned some of the most progressive and visionary schemes for mitigating against multiple global crisese including Peak Oil, Peak Debt, unsustainable surburban sprawl and global climate change being the key threats.

James Howard Kunstler, visionary author of The Long Emergency and other books on near future global energy famine and the history of suburban development architecture in the US, headlined the event with sobering analysis of the unsustainable debt levels in the US, gloomy petroleum production statistics and hilarious and frightening anecdotes about social and political narcosis unable to face near certain truths about the dark state of the American economy. A discussion panel which included Linda George from the Oracle Institute, Hans Lohse, a visionary green architect and musician, Patrick Pinnell, an architect involved with development in East Haddam center, and Maureen Hart, a pioneer in the use of sustainability indicators to quantify sustainable community development, spun a rich tapestry of hopes and dreams for a better society to emerge from the multiple stresses of an impossible situation.

Since the advent of Peak Oil and Climate Change in recent years, inspiring changes have begun to occur here in the lower Connecticut River Valley. Locally, we’ve seen a new proliferation of farmer’s markets, an interest in organic gardening, the sounds of chickens on front lawns which used to be reserved for quiet mowed stretches of green grass, clothing swaps and bartering and an explosion of interest and participation in community events, whether it be music or dancing or eating or giving. We’ve seen green committees and the development of municipal plans of conservation and development which are incorporating guidelines for sustainability and resilience. We’ve seen a Peak Oil caucus in our own state legislature and going green has become a new fad, a new lifestyle choice with broad appeal if not yet a coherent reality.

At the personal level, we are seeing people beginning to experiment with sharing, of productive resources and time as the pressures of debt and economic contraction make the maintenance of their material affluence increasingly stressful. All around I am listening to friends and colleagues rethink their lives, trying to imagine a life with less stuff and more time, less mediated entertainment and more enjoyment of the everyday, less travel and more staycations, while they struggle to pay their bills, keep up with the rising costs of food and energy, and keep the status quo on its rails a bit longer.

Nevertheless, while most of human existence has lived sustainably if not peacefully, we – the affluent citizens of the highly industrialized North - are still floating midair, like the Warner’s Bros. coyote who has overrun the mountain highway and has just realized that he is about to plunge downwards.

Local, state and national politicians still speak of economic recovery as inevitable and economic growth as inherently desirable and feasible. And most people still think of wealth in terms of financial holdings, take for granted the spectacle of food abundance at Super Stop and Shop, and see travel vacations to places like Hawaii and Mexico as necessary entitlements for the stress of their modern existence.

Our municipal leaders need to come to terms with the reality thatsustainable growth is an oxymoron, and that food and energy issues – local economic resilience – needs to be placed front and center of development strategies; that emergency preparedness is broadened to include not simply avian flu but looming energy famine - a likely feature of our economy in the near future.

Transition Towns offers a helpful framework for generating consensus and community action on the twin issues of Climate Change and Peak Oil, and helps us to imagine together a society which is “energy-lean, time-rich, less stressful, healthier and happier” (Transition Town Handbook). Anxiety is what you feel when you don’t have a plan, and it can easily drain the energy you need to press ahead with your new life. But beyond the collaborative exercises in imagining a silver lining during energy descent, lies the very hard work of engaging and supporting at the municipal level boards and committees which are already preoccupied with their own daily business. All politics is local and after all of the exciting visions of a sustainable society have been discussed and digested, lies the tedious, often boring, ego-enflaming work of building trust and long-term relationships with each other that will make up the real foundation of sustainable living. Few people now are mentally prepared or spiritually willing to take up this work. Are you willing to do this work?

Personally, beneath all of the reskilling and green job training and solarizing and weatherizing and cooperative financing that is part of the mechanics of sustainability there lies the change of heart that is required to access the personal emotional energy needed to respond to the crisis-opportunities of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

In this long emergency condition which James Kunstler has done so much to help us see, and which the TT movement is helping us to organize around, we will be misled by any attachment to better or worser days. In Kunstler’s novel World Made By Hand the brave reader meets a world which at once horrifies and assuages with a vision of abundance and wholeness which slowly restores itself after violence of systemic economic and social collapse. As I see it, things will be both worse than we can imagine and better than we can imagine.

Is this a paradox? It is a paradox only if one continues to indentify with the modernist dream of a life of complete individual freedom, material affluence and total control over one’s own life. This is not just a modernist fantasy, it is the fantasy of the ego, the same fantasy of life which the great spiritual traditions have been serving to show us a way past for thousands of years. In E. F. Schumacher’s seminal essay, “Buddhist Economics,” in his class book Small is Beautiful, he argues that a sustainable society requires a new understanding of what true wealth is, and he describes this new understanding as the same as the old Buddhist understanding of right livelihood; that true happiness is not the maximizing of material consumption and individual economic freedom, but the clarification and perfection of our own attention, our awareness, our being awake and aware in the world, to others and to ourselves. And if awareness is our goal, then disaster and anything which interferes with our will, which frustrates our actions and challenges our assumptions, is our best friend. Are we ready to confront ourselves in this way?

As Kunstler emphasized, it is misleading to speak of “solutions” to our predicament, more sensible to speak of “intelligent responses.” There is a silver lining, but it will be one which is built slowly, unfolded piece by piece, day by day, year by year, as a community joint endeavor. It will be a process that is often jarring, sometimes traumatizing, and we will slowly be deprived of the many ways that our energy-expensive industrial modernist suburban economy helped us to shut out of mind the larger processes of life. For someone committed to the ideal of endlessly growing material consumption, this change will be a long hellish emergency. For someone seeking a more meaningful life, deeper connections to nature and to community, and committed to the achieving true self-knowledge as their highest goal, the crises we are facing could not be more favorable. They constitute, in fact, a long salvation, and  proof that Universe truly loves and cares for all of its Avatars scoping out things on the material-biological plane.

Justin Good

Many thanks to Mike Harris, President of the Earth Charter of the Lower Valley for all of his vision and energy in putting together this special event.