Most potential replacement-energy sources are ill-suited to our existing machinery, transportation, and lifestyle, [Kunstler] points out. Wind farms are not going to get Target’s merchandise from Beijing to Natick. According to Kunstler, globalization will vanish; commerce and agriculture will become local; people will be forced back into neighborhoods. One day soon the rows of $350,000 houses in Lexington and Weston will stand worthless and empty — tomorrows slums. “It’s a tragic choice” to live in the suburbs, Kunstler says. “Maybe it’s working this decade, but it’s not going to work next decade.”
It’s easy to dismiss this as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the anti–David Brooks variety, a suggestion Kunstler says he hears often. But those who shrug and say that technology will save us — as a room of Google employees did the other day, Kunstler says — are suffering from what he calls “the mainstream delusions” of Jiminy Cricket syndrome (wish for it and it will come true) and the “Las Vegasization of the American mind” (you can get something for nothing).
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