Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens.
Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as 'consumers.' OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings.
One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing.
The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.
History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.
Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.
Neurologically, people have a need to feel oriented, to know where they are, not just in terms of a compass and not just in terms of geography, but in terms of their culture and history. To be informed about where they're coming from and to have some glimpse towards a hopeful future.
The quality of life of European cities and towns of almost any size make life in America look not just like a joke, but a sick joke, a horror movie. But I'd rather stay involved and do what I can to make this a better place than move to the south of France and enjoy the good life.
Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we've known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very, very high.
I do all I can to maintain good health. I eat mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say. I get a lot of exercise. I lead a purposeful daily life. I stay current with the dentist. I made the formative decision of where to live over thirty years ago when I settled in a 'main street' small town in upstate New York.
The faltering of our suburban living arrangement is probably certain. The response of suburbanites is not. Will they elect maniacs who promise to make America just like it was in 1997? Will there be a desperate attempt to sustain the unsustainable by authoritarian measures? Will the institutions of order and justice fail in the process?
Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year.
History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!
As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.
I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core.
If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it.
It's self-evident that we are going to have permanent problems with oil and gasoline and the prime resources that are needed to run the American suburbs. And we're just not going to be able to run them. You know, it's just unfortunate, it's tragic, but it's the truth.
I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the future.
I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a 'time out' from technological progress as we know it.
Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information.
