Good afternoon, beloved —
I figured I'd take this occasion to bring you up to speed on the progress of my next book, now that there's been any solid progress to speak of. You can go ahead and consider this an exclusive glimpse behind the scenes, just for those of you who have supported my work through Patreon.
The first thing I can report is that, after an unusual amount of back and forth, my editor Leo and I finally agreed on a title, and I'm more or less happily reconciled to it. That title is Beyond Hope: Collective Power and Mutual Care in the Long Emergency. It's a tad wordy, maybe the tiiiiiiniest bit academic, but I'd like it very much if the book published by that name is ultimately seen as one of those does-what-it-says-on-the-tin propositions. I also like the double entendre, which allows me to indulge a certain amount of doomerism, while still offering the reader the idea that there are yet productive things that can be done to preserve ourselves against the heavy weather coming, as individuals and communities.
As you may know, especially if your own work involves the naming of things, a good title has a considerable amount of organizing power. Beyond conveying the essence of your project to people who might be interested in learning more about it, it helps you understand what it is that you yourself are trying to say. What's fundamental to your proposition? Can you express it in six or eight or ten words? And once having done so, can you fold that most elegant summary back onto the work itself, so that it can help you sharpen and clarify your arguments? That’s the work a good title does, and I think we got there in the end.
So. What's the relationship between “collective power” and “mutual care,” why do they move us "beyond hope," and what do they have to do with this thing I'm calling the Long Emergency? And for that matter, what even is that? I'll try to answer these questions for you over the next two dispatches.
Let's start with the last of them. In order to address it, I’m going to take us back to the dark days of 2004-2005. In the United States, this was the period just on either side of George W. “W.” “The Pet Goat” Bush’s victory in the 2004 Presidential elections, and things seemed very grim indeed. It just felt like everything implacably awful in the world, from resource depletion and climate change to weaponized fanaticism of both the Islamic and Christian varieties, was converging in one titanic, globally-snowballing, civilization-ending shitberg, and nobody I knew even seemed to be taking notice of it, let alone proposing to do anything about it. It was crazymaking. Even before Katrina, I was so doubtful about the sustained continuity of all the systems that underwrite everyday normality that at one point I asked my dentist if there was any way he could future-proof my mouth. (His answer — that there was really no way he could do so short of pulling all my teeth, and fitting me on the spot for top-and-bottom dentures — brought that particular line of inquiry to an abrupt and immediate halt.)
For me, anyway, the overriding sense of those days was isolation, which was compounded by the neocon right's triumphalism after Howard Dean yeeeeeahh’d himself straight into the dustbin of history and W wiped the floor with the hapless John Kerry in the general. Apart from my long-suffering partner N, and all the supremely generous heads compelled to listen to my presentation “Design for Decline” at the 2005 iteration of Design Engaged in Berlin, there was no one around me who was even prepared to consider picking up what I was putting down. I felt deeply, chillingly alone. And then — at the Strand? Spoonbill & Sugartown? the Borders in front of our Kips Bay apartment complex, before Borders went away? who remembers — I stumbled onto a book by the Rolling Stone editor James Howard Kunstler. It was called The Long Emergency, it announced its central concern as “Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century,” and for the first time in a long while I felt not merely seen but fully understood.
At this point Kunstler still had a decentish reputation on what then passed for the “built environment left,” off the back of his well-received antisprawl jeremiad The Geography of Nowhere, and in any event I wasn’t yet quite as intensely political as I've since become. I pounced on The Long Emergency, and ate it up like the proverbial stack of IHOP pancakes.
What's interesting in looking back on the book now is that it takes Kunstler until the very bottom of page 8 to utter the words “global warming.” What took pride of place in his fears was actually the prospect of fossil-fuel depletion, and the cascading social shocks that were sure to attend disruptions to the supply and price of these energy-dense resources. (You might remember this as the rhetoric of “peak oil.”) And as it turns out, the institutions of late capitalism proved to be a lot more supple and adaptable in dealing with the impending depletion of oil than anyone at the time expected. New oilfields were developed, alongside new extraction techniques like fracking that could realize decent yields from previously uneconomic fields. New exploitation agreements were made, with oil-producing regimes that were previously considered beyond the pale. Peak oil never arrived, certainly not in any of the ways those of us who were most afraid of it expected.
And yet, for all that, The Long Emergency offers a really clear perspective on the ways sectoral crises cascade, combine and compound in a tightly-coupled and sensitively dependent global economy, in a way that I hadn't ever seen articulated before (and have only rarely in the years since). And the book's account remains valuable, because I do believe that disruptions are coming, just like the ones Kunstler described: disruptions to global agriculture, with awful consequences for a human population inflated to unsustainable levels by a Green Revolution predicated on petrochemical bounty, and sure to die back viciously in its evaporation; desertification, the salinization of entire aquifers and the collapse of reliable access to clean water, with the predictable epidemiological sequelae; the cessation of research into new antibiotics, with the large-scale return of lethal microbial disease. Resource wars. Mass refugee flows. The withdrawal of effective state provision, in many places. Outright state failure in others.
Kunstler has his hobbyhorses. He never misses an opportunity to heap vituperation on sprawl, the suburbs, architectural Modernism — on much of post-1945 American material culture, in fact — and while a decent chunk of this scorn is surely deserved, a whole lot of it is just spleen-venting from a position of smug superiority. He's a far better analyst of patterns in social and physical mobility and urban development than he is of geopolitics or, god forbid, the Islamic ummah. And when he discourses freely on, e.g., “life in the disintegrating postcolonial pseudo nations of AIDS-stricken Africa,” you just want to crawl into a hole, and hope to blue heaven nobody tagged you reading this book. At these cringe-inducing, often patently racist moments, what you want more than anything else is for Kunstler to simply quit while he’s behind.
For all of that, though, the book’s core framing remains a productive one. The trouble with Kunstler isn’t that he got things wrong. The trouble is that he is, at bottom, a misanthrope, and can’t quite manage to suppress the underlying sense of vengeful glee that bubbles up through his most detailed accounts of collective suffering: we have been foolish, abject, squalid, worst of all tasteless, and now we shall reap the whirlwind, while clever Jim Kunstler laughs at our plight from the cozy shelter of his off-grid Berkshires fastness. The Long Emergency, for all that it affects to offer its readers a bracing dose of tough love, is in the end a snide and nasty book, not even redeemed by the considerable power and beauty of its final words.
Why invoke the work of such an unsavory figure? There are two reasons that I can see.
The first is that no other writer I am aware of depicted the interlocking, combinatorial effects of the thermodynamic contradictions in the foundation of our planetary civilization so early or so comprehensively, and his account of these circumstances permanently reframed the way I see them. For all that we often want to support people whose politics and general sense of the right and good we share through our citational practices and so on, it seems like both intellectual dishonesty and sheer churlishness to not confess the original inspiration of the framing I’m offering to you in my own book.
The second reason is more important. One of the messages of my book is that amidst the heavy manners I see headed our way, the imperative of survival with dignity and progressive values intact commends to us both a certain intellectual opportunism — a promiscuous, magpie quality to our gleanings — and a high value placed on acts of careful repair. We should get into the habit, that is, of taking up anything that works, or even seems like it might, dusting it off, cleaning it of rust and grime, and setting it back into useful service. Consider my embrace of The Long Emergency, then, one of a few ways in which I try to walk the talk, and my invocation of the title at this point in time a pointed attempt to preserve everything useful about Kunstler's offering, while scouring away its meanspiritedness, the ugly parochialism of its politics and its other sour qualities.
In the next dispatch, I'll get into those other questions about mutual care and collective power, and what they might have to do with all of this. For now, I'll conclude by asking you, in turn, the question I ask everyone I meet these days. It proceeds from the recognition that getting to publish a book with Verso is an enormous privilege, and affords the writer one hell of a platform from which they can speak to people around the world. Since, as you know, I believe that one of the whole points of gaining a platform like that is to share it, I'd like to use the book to shed a little shine on projects, initiatives and communities that could benefit from that kind of attention: the bottom-up, self-organized, community-based counterinstitutions that will sustain us, as the state increasingly withdraws from social provision just about everywhere. So my question to you is: which initiatives of this sort are you aware of that you think I might not be? Could be a neighborhood legal clinic, a bike-repair collective, a participatory architecture practice, a group developing a district-scale microgrid for distributed power, a particularly innovative urban farm, a community land trust that's doing great things — anything of the sort, anywhere on Earth. Drop me a line, let me know about them, even make an introduction, and if it seems like some quality about their case will help me illustrate one of the broader points I'm trying to make, I'll do my damndest to get them into the book.
§ At the moment I'm reading my way through an ungodly mass of references for the book, from recent material like For Health Autonomy and The Right To Maim to 1975's groovy Neighborhood Power; listening to a succession of amazing bands that have been through town in rapid succession, including Nadja, Bismuth and mighty THOU; and somewhat inevitably watching the new season of Westworld, which has evidently given up on even trying to make the slightest bit of sense, but which gives me in compensation Thandiwe Newton and Aaron Paul in Jazz Age finery, bantering for all they're worth (mostly her), and more thought to UI, urban and architectural considerations in the details of production design than any small-screen science fiction I can remember.
Until next dispatch: please do remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 119 of Sunday, 17 July 2022, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊