(2004) With the help of host Barry Zwicker, Canadian documentary director/writer Gregory Greene presents a cast of Cassandras predicting "oil depletion and the collapse of the American dream."

Once homes became available to the masses in the suburbs after WWII, public transportation by electric streetcars was eliminated by a conspiracy of GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil, making commuters dependent on the private car. "Living by the automobile," mass-motoring Americans filled their new residences with babies and stuff. But these "dormitories on cul-de-sacs" - packaged, sold, and highly subsidized - were "false promises" that spread into sprawl. This "new system of habitation," based on cheap, abundant energy from fossil fuels was "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," says social critic and proponent of the "New Urbanism" James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere.

In the mid-1950s M. King Hubbert predicted peak oil would occur in the US between 1965-70 followed by a global peak in the mid-1990s. Once we've entered the "arc of decline," our hydrocarbon economies can no longer grow. Even following a power blackout in Canada in mid-August 2003 that affected 57 million people, energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, who had been an advisor to Vice President Cheney, says: "People didn't get it."

The consequences of peak oil will require everyone to "downscale everything we do," says Kunstler. Recessions will multiply until, remarks journalist and educator Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World: "We never get out of the recession." Obviously transportation will be adversely affected, but also food production, since industrial farms are dependent on natural gas and petroleum for fertilizers and pesticides.

Also featured in another documentary, Collapse (2009), Michael C. Ruppert, who for the past 30 years has been an investigative journalist, self-publishing his From the Wilderness newsletter in which, among other stories, he's foreseen the near-future global apocalypse, expects "small lifeboats" of energy production will keep local economies afloat. Michael Klare, a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, worries about resulting "stress on the political system" as a threat to democratic institutions. The wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq, have been "blood for oil."

Kunstler adds that major media have been incredibly irresponsible at ignoring the evidence and in not communicating the truth to the public. But then "reality is bad for business," says Heinberg: fantasy sells. No combination of alternative fuels can rescue our current way of life; we need to change our lifestyle.

One promising suggestion is the New Urbanism of town planning and architectural design in which we "relearn from the past" good practices for living closer together, such as urban designer Peter Calthorpe has done with the 4700-acre Stapleton Project in Denver. I would have liked to have seen more ideas for transforming cities into greener living environments, such as architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle Bill McDonough's call for turning cities into rooftop farms and nutrient factories that recycle sewage. "Will we learn to dream of something better?" asks Zwicker.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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