My friend from afar. My friend with a distant vision.

In ancient times, an individual who had achieved the ultimate goal was immortal. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written in the 22nd Century B.C., documented the goal--the struggle to live on through the ages. Greek mythic heroes, Achilles and Agamemnon, for example, had one chance of survival: they hoped that the stories of their deeds would be passed on by the next generation through oral traditions, and eventually in literary works. A parallel can be drawn to today’s heroes and to one of my friends. Recognition in contemporary society doesn’t begin with an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show or by impacts on the national or international level, because people at the local level are the first to applaud ideas before they spread like wildfire. I’m convinced this is where all the roots of immortality reach out and attach to mycorrhiza, their fungal symbiotic partner in nutrients and my friend thinks so too. This is why he wrote The Long Emergency in 2005--to effect change at a decentralized level. I have recently latched onto this man of the initials JHK. I’ve latched onto his root canal and damn it, it’s a sweet tooth. I feel connected. I want to become a farmer. I want to produce something as ethically as I can--something that’s as essential to the human condition as food certainly is. Tomatoes are in our past, in our current predicament and if they’re not available in five minutes there’s no telling what they’ll throw in La Tomatina Tomato Fight in Bunyol or at the Missoula farmer’s market. These are my concerns. I want to continue the tradition of sophisticated and intimate knowledge of land and its importance to all living (breathing or not) things. For all of these reasons, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine who’s given me such a new perspective about planning for the future as well as the ability to expand my vision of a self-sufficient society. Give it up for the tomato lover, James Howard Kunstler.

Kunstler is no nostalgic cowboy. I’m almost certain he doesn’t sit at home on Sunday evenings listening to 1950s Woody Guthrie tracks, a happening so apropos for many Western writers. Instead he’s apt to write an eyesore of the month, a blog about certain inadequacies in local culture that magnify broader issues. October’s eyesore is a comment about this household. “Behold the Ghost of Halloween Future! The rural byways of America are littered with little raised ranches and "Cape Cod" specials from that strange moment in American history when the working classes were well-paid and enjoyed limitless supplies of cheap gasoline and heating oil.
Farmers sold off little out-parcels of road frontage here, there, and everywhere, and the rural landscape became semi-suburbanized, even in the faraway backwaters. People thought nothing of a 100-mile-a-day commute when gas was 38 cents a gallon. Now, history is sweeping away this mode of existence. These things will not occupy the landscape very long. Eventually, they will be stripped of even their marginally useful components until nothing is left but the foundations. This one has been decrepitating only a few years.”

He speaks of the precipitous events that got us to where we are, but more importantly, of the future I believe our “nationally recognized” leaders cannot begin to imagine. A time when our resources are so scarce that transportation, education, foodsheds will require drastic transformation. Science fiction writing has a way of eerily predicting the future (e.g. 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and I, Robot). Kunstler continues this tradition, but somehow it seems so naturally nonfictional.

He writes about education so forthrightly. “Our centralized school districts, utterly dependent on the countless daily trips of fleets of yellow buses and oppressive property taxes, have poor prospects for carrying on successfully in an energy-scarce economy… Colleges will cease to be a mass-consumer activity, and may only be available to social elites--if it continues to exist at all” (Kunstler, 4). Knowledge will be in the hands of “new, small, neighborhood schools” or mothers and pas of home schools.

My friend and I realize that American mobility ushers in a caricature of freedom. The American driver is on a leash just as the immobile person. The only difference is that they are bound to an unrenewable resource, the car insurance companies and the licenses. It’s hard to believe that James Howard Kunstler, a man who grew up in the big apple, could resent our current transportation system, let alone see past it to a day when we’re free. We will also come to resent the “happy motoring” utopia of transport whether it is our SYSCO-driven food or our personal modes by airplane and coche. He writes, “The interstate highways themselves will require more resources to maintain than we will be able to muster. For many of us, the twenty-first century will be less about incessant mobility than about staying where we are.”

My friend is not a farmer and admitted in his Boilerplate Bio that “He has no formal training in architecture or the related design fields.” Expert he is not. He and I share a bond, however--we’re idea-men. Until we meet each other in person to brainstorm, I will feed (lovingly put) off his ideas, experiencing the comfort in not knowing where his ideas begin and mine end. I can especially identify with this 60-year old man’s ideas of “rebuilding networks of local economic independence.” He writes, again in Making Other Arrangements, “In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial “inputs,” and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now.”

To most Americans, Kunstler may seem like the ultimate fatalist--an Orwellian anti-christ of sorts--fortelling the end of the American lifestyle as we know it in rather absolute terms. Personally I have a penchant for his argument and I believe he is the one we have been waiting for--not McCain, Obama, or even Ralph Nader--because James Howard Kunstler packs an oddly hopeful platform. CNN spouts doomsday material everyday. My friend’s vision of the future is different. His is a much needed extension of cable news--a matter of fact style that adds a cheery aftertaste. For me, the only consequence of reading Making Other Arrangements was a newfound opportunity. Other people will go through the five stages of grief just as I did before they can readily identify with his prophecies. They’ll exhibit denial, anger, bargaining, depression and billions of other Freudian defense mechanisms. But when they read more, they’ll get it.
“I’m not a hope dispenser to passive consumers of hope. We need to be out there actively fixing our civilization reforming the way we do our farming and our commerce and our schooling and our trade. Building our cities and designing our homes and our buildings and all the things that are necessary to be part of a civilization. We're gonna have to put a lot more thought and a lot more work into that. As we do that, I'm serenely convinced that we will become a much more hopeful people.”

I believe when people identify with these predictions, they will become inherently obsessed with their role in this new system. What will that be? What can I do? They’ll go about asking these sorts of questions in an effort to pave an avenue by which they can restore the damage that’s been done to local economies, local sense of place/environment, and local equity. They will reclaim their communities. My friend harvested a dream that lay deep in my existence. I want to farm diverse crops for the people near me and raise chickens, whether I end up in rural Montana or in a urban setting. Want a better illustration that my friend is not as the Albany Times Union called him--a fiddler of the apocalypse one jig at a time?

Just read more of his absolutely simple wisdom. By acknowledging the ‘tougher road’ ahead, he is not campaigning for re-election or any other short term diatribe. People will dig this. “Here’s the plain truth, folks: Hope is not a consumer product. You have to generate your own hope. You do that by demonstrating to yourself that you are brave enough to face reality and competent enough to deal with the circumstances that it presents. How we will manage to uphold a decent society in the face of extraordinary change will depend on our creativity, our generosity, and our kindness, and I am confident that we can find these resources within our own hearts, and collectively in our communities” (Kunstler, 5). Or put in terms of one 1999 film, my friend has acknowledged the existence of the Matrix (a continuation of business as usual) but advocates reality instead. To belabor the film metaphor, Kunstler can be likened to Morpheus who says, “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” My friend’s vision is the red pill, the pill we must immortalize.

Photo credit:kunstler.com