Imagine Life After Wal*Mart

By The Long Emergency had some funny moments.
Brother Job is a very funny character -- half the things that come out of his
mouth are hilarious. A lot of the dialogue is funny, even in the places where
there's a lot at stake. I don't know, maybe it's too subtle. In college I was a
theater student, and I was very caught up in Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.
Beckett was always chagrined that the critics didn't regard Waiting for
Godot as a laugh riot, but it is -- it's a form of vaudeville.
MN: This novel is set in small-town America, and some of the characters
are escaping from greater chaos in and around cities. You've written a lot
about the unsustainability of suburbs. But do you see a future for urban life?
JHK: I see it differently from many commentators, who just assume that
cities are going to get bigger and that people will flee the suburbs for the
cities. I think we're going to see something completely different -- I think
we'll see a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people leaving rural places
and small towns for big cities and metroplexes.
I think that the big cities of America
-- Houston, Atlanta,
Dallas, Washington,
D.C., Boston --
these places have attained a scale that is simply not suited for the energy
diet of the future, and in my opinion they are going to contract substantially,
even while they densify at their centers and around their waterfronts, if they
have them.
If there is a huge demographic movement -- and I think there will be -- out
of suburbia, eventually it will resolve into people moving into smaller towns,
smaller cities, that are scaled appropriately to our energy diet -- and to
places that exist in a meaningful relationship with productive land. We're
simply going to have to do agriculture differently, no question about it, and
the places where this is impossible, like Tucson
and Las Vegas,
are really going to dry up and blow away. In the Northeast, where I live, many
of the small towns and cities have about reached their nadir -- but they have
many virtues that are going to become apparent in the years ahead, not least
that they have a relationship with water, both for navigation and for drinking.
MN: Are you making changes in your own life to prepare for what you see
coming?
JHK: The short answer is yes, I am, but not in any kind of peculiar way.
I've been gardening for decades, so that's not new for me, though I might do it
in a somewhat different way in the future. I don't work for "da man,"
so I don't have to escape a cubicle. I've had experience writing books in every
method from scribbling in a notebook to composing on a Mac, so I'm confident I
could continue to communicate one way or another. I've even put out a local
newsletter at times over the past 10 years, so I have experience running a kind
of local news bureau.
Most of all, I have a pretty rich and deep social network where I live. I've
noticed that American life, for many people, is shockingly lonely. It certainly
seems no wonder that people take so much Prozac and Xanax -- the American way
of life seems to have become one of the greatest anxiety and depression
generators in the history of the world.
MN: What effect do you hope to have on your readers? It doesn't sound
like you want them to fight to head off this future.
JHK: I'm really rather worried that we're going to squander our remaining
resources on a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. I'm inclined to think
that we might be better off yielding to some of these realities that are going
to assert themselves, whether we like it or not. That's why I get so annoyed
when I go to environmental conferences and the only thing people talk about is
how they're going to run cars on chicken fat or French fried potato oil. To me,
maintaining the happy motoring system is a waste of our resources, and hugely
destructive anyway. I want people to be prepared to accept the changes that
really are unavoidable.