Suburban sprawl

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Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century Alex Steffen See book keywords and concepts

The plight of the inner ring has been exacerbated not only by the suburban sprawl, but also by an urban revival. As downtown living has become hip again and its benefits recognizable not just to young professionals, but also to empty nesters, gentrification and new development have driven up housing costs in many American central cities. The result is that areas of concentrated poverty are getting squeezed out into the inner ring, where housing is cheaper.

In the metropolises of the Global North, we face legacies of neglect and pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, aging infrastructures, and suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, in the booming megacities of the Global South, the problems can seem massive and unsolv-able: exploding populations, crippled local governments, poverty, need, and collapsing systems. And with millions and millions of people moving every year from the countryside to the city, all of these difficulties seem even more insurmountable. Appearances, however, can be deceiving.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century James Howard Kunstler See book keywords and concepts

This meant that, if nothing else, the nation could continue the suburban sprawl fiesta that had become the virtual replacement for the old manufacturing economy. It was, in short, another self-reinforcing feedback loop, a self-organizing system shaping the American landscape into a nightmarish diagram of motoring hyper-squalor.

The dirty secret of the American economy in the 1990s was that it was no longer about anything except the creation of suburban sprawl and the furnishing, accessorizing, and financing of it. It resembled the efficiency of cancer. Nothing else really mattered except building suburban houses, trading away the mortgages, selling the multiple cars needed by the inhabitants, upgrading the roads into commercial strip highways with all the necessary shopping infrastructure, and moving vast supplies of merchandise made in China for next to nothing to fill up those houses.

Low density suburban sprawl is the fastest-growing sector of water use in the United States now. Both suburban Atlanta and suburban Denver are virtually tapped out, unable to increase their water supply under any circumstances. Dallas and San Antonio are not far behind. Las Vegas hallucinates its future water supply, and southern California is at the mercy of the Sierra and Rocky Mountain snow-packs, which in recent years have shown alarming declines. Global warming implies that a greater proportion of the annual precipitation in the American west will fall as rain rather than snow.

Clinton, the archetypal yuppie suburbanite, did nothing to prepare the nation for the post-peak era and enjoyed the luxury of ignoring energy issues generally—while the nation outsourced its manufacturing capacity and a "new" economy based on suburban sprawl land development stealthily took its place. George W. Bush, the second President Bush, had the misfortune to be in the White House as the global peak event neared and the oil markets began to wobble.

If he had any reservations about the economy becoming hostage to the creation of suburban sprawl, he never voiced them. Like a lot of Sunbelters, he might have viewed sprawl as good to live in and good for business. Nor did he raise any alarms about the approaching global oil peak. He must have received intelligence briefings about it, even while the U.S. Geological Survey issued inflated estimates on total world reserves.

Food Fight Kelly Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen See book keywords and concepts

These social and economic factors, such as suburban sprawl and more widespread use of energy-saving devices, are a mounting presence even in developing countries. Encouraging the population by exhortation is likely to help to some extent but must be combined with innovation in changing the environment. It must be easy for people to act in a healthy manner, so times, places, and incentives for people to be physically active must be engineered into daily life. TELEVISION, MOVIES, CELEBRITIES, AND THE SEDUCTION OF CHILDREN The commercial exploitation of children . . . is particularly egregious.

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century James Howard Kunstler See book keywords and concepts

This persistent failure or weakness pretty much negates the value of our ability to see what's coming. If anything in the turbulence of the Long Emergency, rather than technologic progress, we are more likely to see a lot of technologic regress—the loss of information, ability, and confidence. The coming crisis over oil and natural gas will be bad enough where American food production is concerned, and would in itself be enough to pose a grave threat to society.

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