Cataclysmic opportunity, or just cataclysm?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said "I have a dream," not "I have a nightmare." Tell me why my life is going to be better in a world where we are dealing with climate change. Solitaire Townsend offered that thought as one of four people presenting at the opening public forum for the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association BuildingEnergy08 conference last night. Solitaire is an "environmental evangelist" who provides advice to companies and others who are communicating about sustainability. She gave some advice on communicating environmental messages to different types of people – the Heathers, Marthas, and Joyces of the world. Don't bother talking to Martha about recycling, she says. Talk to people she respects, like her minister, PTA head, or the Queen. Solitaire recommends getting the Heathers, her term for conspicuous consumers, on board by giving them a sticker to put in the window of their energy-efficient home, and their favorite celebrities' homes. I first met Chris Martenson, an economic analyst from Massachusetts and another speaker last night, a few years ago at our local natural-building group in Brattleboro, where he shared his predictions of economic doom/prosperity (depending on how you look at it) in a series of living-room chats. Last night Chris, who has downscaled his family's consumption significantly, presented three core beliefs:

• Massive change in our energy, environment and economy is upon us. These have a common cause. (Chris presents these changes as exponential functions, putting us on the vertical portion of the classic "hockey stick" graph.) Says Chris, "The money supply is designed to expand exponentially, yet we live on a spherical planet."
• The pace of change could overwhelm the ability of our social and political institutions to adapt and respond.
• We have the power to make changes now to adapt to the future.

James Howard Kunstler shines as an ill-tempered critic who doesn't mess around appealing to the Marthas and Heathers – he seemed to say on the panel last night that a major environmental and economic convulsion is coming our way, and that we can either choose to embrace it, or we can be convulsed by it. In his remarks Jim gave little doubt about which thinks it will be: "We're living in the land of make-believe," he says. Jim doesn't mince words when it comes to self-satisfied Prius drivers: "The only thing we're discussing is how are we going to run the cars by other means," he says about the current state of environmental discourse. (For more on smug emissions, South Park is second to none.) I first heard Jim's message in March 1990, when he wrote, as the cover story for the New York Times Magazine, an obituary for the small town in upstate New York in which I grew up and was at the time a teenager. Jim also lived in Schuylerville at the time and in his article "Schuylerville Stands Still," he wrote this:

"When the mills shut down it was almost like doomsday around here," Tom Wood [the town historian] said. "Then the oil crunch hit at the same time. Gas prices went way up. People couldn't commute further to work. They had to get help from Social Services. Maybe that was the beginning of some of our problems." For all practical purposes Schuylerville, and towns like it, have become colonial outposts of another America. The idea of the self-sustaining small-town economy, still so potent in our national mythology, is grimly contradicted by the vacant shopfronts and decomposing facades along Broadway, as the main street is called.

Since then I have seen Jim talk about how small towns like Schuylerville and larger depressed cities like Schenectady, New York, are poised for a post-suburban sustainability boom, in the world that he and Chris both foresee. How will that happen? Jim made this prognostication last night:

It's about what circumstances will require you to do. There are people who think we are going to technologize our way out of these problems, and there are people who think that we are going to organize our way out of these problems. Both of those are a form of hubris. We're going to have to self-organize. You're going to see emerging behavior. We're such control freaks, and a lot of this is not something we're going to control.

What does he mean? You tell me. The fourth speaker last night was Linda Gunter, from Beyond Nuclear in Maryland. Linda spoke against nuclear power, linking it to nuclear weapons and many other issues. Time requires me to leave it at that and ask you to visit her website.