The Long Emergency Ahead

When Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast two weeks ago, a lot of the delusions cherished by the American public about the kind of nation we are becoming were washed away. The inhabitants of a region nearly the size of Italy now face real hardship and the loss of all their presumed entitlements to a way of life that is supposed to be non-negotiable. The weather has negotiated for them, and everyone else in the nation is feeling the effects at the gas pumps that rule our lives.

People often ask me why we are getting such poor leadership on the issues that comprise the Long Emergency, as I have called the difficulties advanced civilizations face in the decades ahead. Specifically, why haven't President Bush or the leaders of the Democratic opposition uttered a word about our extreme car dependency?

The answer, I think has to do with the nature of our economy. The dirty secret of the American economy for at least a decade now is that it has come to be based on the creation of suburban sprawl and the activities associated with it -- the building of cul-de-sac McMansions, highway retail pods, car sales, real estate sales, the creation of false liquidity in the form of easy mortgages and the deployment of that debt into tradable instruments. The sprawl-building industry comprises over 40 percent of what we do in this country. If you subtract it from the U.S. economy, there isn't much left besides hair cutting and open heart surgery.

Our leaders don't have the courage to tell us that we can't continue to live this way, because too many jobs, incomes, and votes would have to go with it. They may not have the courage to even face the facts themselves. They may be hostages -- like most other Americans -- to the belief that a drive-in society is the only conceivable way to live, or the best, or simply normative.

The suburban project, which has preoccupied us since the end of the Second World War, can be seen now in light of the gathering global energy predicament as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Having put so much of our post-war wealth into this massive infrastructure for daily living, we are captives of it, subject to a corrosive psychology of previous investment, which does not permit us to imagine letting go of this way of life, or even reforming it.

Vice-President Dick Cheney's declaration that this way of life is "not negotiable" is a prime symptom of this collective psychology. With the city of New Orleans now being drained, proposals for rebuilding it are flying around the noosphere. Daniel Libeskind, the cutting-edge starchitect whose proposal for turning the former World Trade Center site into the set for a German expressionist movie won the hearts and minds of New York City planning officials, has proposed that New Orleans should be rebuilt into a Jazz theme park. Apart from the fatuousness of this idea, I'd have to simply wonder at the economic assumption that cheap airfares and motor tourism will remain at the heart of any region's economy in an energy-scarce future

More sensible proposals will be made by the New Urbanists, leading proponents for walkable neighborhoods and compact development -- which is, in fact, consistent with the original template for most of the neighborhoods ruined by floods. This means sticking to an interconnected street-and-block system, normal urban building lots, and a menu of building types consistent with the history and scale of the place. This is really not a tough assignment to either understand or execute, but if the so-called production home builders come on to the scene, they may wreak a new kind of havoc with their mostly suburban standards and practices.

Of course, any rebuilding would depend on a major engineering effort to raise the ground level in these neighborhoods. That, in turn, depends on whether whole neighborhoods are deemed to be "scrape offs," since such a project could not be done in piecemeal fashion. Finally, we would be faced with the economic paradox that new construction tends not to fall into the "affordable housing" category, and those displaced might not be able to acquire new houses to replace the ones they lost in the places where they stood. It's too early to tell what will become of New Orleans' downtown core of skyscrapers and megastructures.