Salvaging the Industrial Wreck

The furnishings of hydrocarbon-based industrialization are not suitable for the post-hydrocarbon world. Hardly a square mile of traditional human habitation has escaped the blanket of the industrial "modern" model over what is now called the historic. The built environment that is home to nearly half the world's people bears no resemblance to the sustainable pre-industrial model. The industrial city in its late stages is a disastrously overgrown mess. If the historic city is a well-defined single cell, the industrial megalopolis is a cancerous clump. Yet suburban sprawl, highways and conurbation aren't simply going to disappear. These acres of monoculture zones and asphalt will be with us for a very long time. Given the physical arrangement we have and with limited prospects for physically altering it, how can we expect to retrofit its use to a lower energy environment? I don't envision wise government-directed programs. Rather people will make personal changes to their immediate surroundings and property when they have no other choice. Will intense gardening feed the people of suburbia? Will active solar, wind and water generated electricity continue to allow mass commuting by rail? Will jobs and trade relocalize as it becomes too expensive to commute? Will local economies redevolop as globalization and corporatism contract and local production and commerce become needed?

I used to imagine that at the very worst, peak oil would mean the death of car culture and that we'd simply see a return of intraurban and interurban fixed path transit. Whatever parts of suburbia and exurbia couldn't be retrofitted for efficient use of rail might be abandoned or regain use as farmland. What I saw was a fracturing of the overwrought metroplex back to the humble metropolis; the world would look like it did in the early parts of the industrial saga. I now view this notion as quaint and naively optimistic. On the slide down Hubbert's Curve all the sorts of changes I used to imagine will indeed become the norm, but only as a stopgap toward even lower levels of energy use. The last stages of terminal industrialization will be the most vulnerable to the increasing costs and scarcity of energy so the exurban and then suburban modes of living can be expected to collapse first. But as we move inexorably toward solar sustenance, even the young industrial metropolis--like New York 1931 or Paris 1889--won't be possible. Of course even a simple somewhat rocky descent to pre-industrial modes of existence may be hoping for too much. As Matt Savinar has written "we won't simply go back to 1750." Rather, we could be in for civilization freefall ending with a few million humans huddled into wherever the tropical zones may lie after the effects of global warming are in full swing, hunting and gathering and spending their spare time painting stick figures on the rocky walls of their caves.