Greg’s Note:
At this saloon, Jim Kunstler drinks for free. Kunstler is one of
our favorite writers, and recently he published a novel entitled
World Made by Hand. The book is about the future, and
about living with energy and resource scarcity. So we asked our
Peak Oil correspondent and Outstanding Investments editor
Byron King to review Kunstler’s book. Byron wrote so much that we
had to break the review into two parts. So this is Part I of
Byron’s review. If you’d like to comment, write into
greg@whiskeyandgunpowder.com.
|
World Made by Hand, Part I |
By Byron W. King
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
July 10, 2008
World Made by Hand is a beautifully written novel
about a very difficult time, post-Peak Oil. Some books hit you in
the gut and force you to think; and this is one of them. You may
go where you don’t want to go. But it’s quite a trip.
The book begins innocently enough. Two men are
fishing in a stream near an old railroad bed. They are talking,
enjoying each other’s company. It is “sometime in the
not-too-distant future.” And thus does a story unfold over a
couple of summer months. The only hint that something is amiss
comes when the narrator states that he “couldn’t remember a
lovelier evening before or after our world changed.”
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The world changed? Then the two fishermen gather
their belongings and walk back to town. They are walking, of
course, because there are no motorized vehicles. In this world
there is no oil. But the lack of oil is just the beginning of this
summer’s tale.
Welcome to Union Grove, Where there is
No Oil
No, this is not a story about how the world has
“run out” of oil. In the big scheme of things, the world will
never run out of oil. The Peak Oil concept means a lot of things
to a lot of people. But one thing that Peak Oil does NOT premise
is that the world will “run out” of oil.
The key idea of Peak Oil is that output of crude
oil will reach some maximum level on a global scale. Then world
oil output will decline over time. (We may already be there.)
There will be oil, but not enough to go around in amounts that
people and nations desire. “Not enough” is not the same as “run
out.”
In the future there will be oil — plenty of it,
perhaps — in some parts of the world. And there will be very
little oil, or none, in other parts of the world. And that’s the
problem.
Which gets to the point of James Kunstler’s
marvelous new book. In the “not-too-distant future” you won’t find
oil in the small, upstate town of Union Grove, New York. Union
Grove is an isolated, low-energy hamlet. For Union Grove, the Oil
Age is over. And in this futuristic setting, Kunstler plays out a
prophecy that may be closer than you suspect.
Quite an Apocalypse — And Quite the
Post-Apocalyptic Novel
Kunstler’s novel falls within a genre called
post-apocalyptic literature. The author’s premise is that there
will be an apocalypse. Bad things will befall mankind. Lots of
people will die. And some people will survive. This is the
survivors’ story.
So in a literary sense, World Made by Hand
is similar to some famous Cold War-era novels set in a
post-nuclear-war world, such as
On the Beach or
Level 7. Kunstler is writing fiction about survival
and survivors, describing what might happen.
A fictional world creates a new set of boundaries.
Some things are not plausible in our “real” world. But good
fiction makes possible events and reactions that might not
otherwise occur. Within fiction, some events take on a new form of
logic or plausibility.
But to be convincing, we have to trust the author
or the narrator. With enough trust, we can accept a story based on
the narrator’s perspective. The narrator becomes our eyes and
ears. So the narrator must come across as reliable.
In World Made by Hand, Kunstler’s
narrator “Robert” — a former executive at a software company,
turned carpenter — mixes science and technology with
well-established economic and political trends. You can believe
what is happening in this book because so much of it seems rooted
in what you already know to be so.
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Overall, Kunstler paints a grim picture of the
future. Oil or no, life goes on. It’s like the oil-scarce world of
Mad Max, but without the madness. All of life’s
emotions are still there, but in different proportions than what
we’ve come to expect in our well-energized time. Really, on
occasion life is tender in the future. It’s even sweet. In some
scenes this book tells a story that is funny. Yes, you are allowed
to laugh as you read this book.
The Grim Part
Let’s discuss the grim part. What sort of
apocalypse occurs? Well, Kunstler never just hits you in the face
with it. Like a grand master, he plays his cards subtly. Kunstler
offers you only enough information at any point for you to feel
the chill winds of a terrible disaster.
In one exchange of dialogue between the narrator
and a young man, the youngster grits his teeth and shakes his head
at the current plight all around him. And then the young man
refers bitterly to the older fellow being part of “the generation
that wrecked the world.” What happened, you wonder? Don’t worry.
You’ll find out.
Throughout the book, Kunstler tosses out clues.
For example, Kunstler spells out how in the past, worldwide demand
for oil far outstripped the available supply. So prices for oil
began to skyrocket. People became desperate and did desperate
things. Sound familiar?
Kunstler makes passing reference to a war in the
Middle East. But Kunstler never goes into detail. He doesn’t have
to, really. The details are not critical to this story line. But
you learn that during the war, things got out of hand. There was
immense loss of life, and most of an American army never came
home.
On this last point, Kunstler is not just
economical in his use of words. Indeed, he’s downright
parsimonious. But with just a quick bit of dialogue, Kunstler puts
a chill into your spine if not the fear of God in your heart. With
a fraction of a sentence, it’s as if you are reading
The Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides describes the
loss of the Athenian army in Sicily. “Everything was destroyed,”
wrote Thucydides, “and few out of many returned home. Such were
the events.”
Kunstler mentions in passing two horrific acts of
terrorism. The bad guys (guess who?) managed to set off two
nuclear weapons on U.S. soil, obliterating Los Angeles and
Washington, DC. Within a short time national commerce broke down.
Communications disintegrated. The economy crashed. The capital
city of the U.S. moved to Minneapolis. Any semblance of control by
a central government just vanished.
But post-disintegration, the U.S. did not become
some sort of Libertarian Eden. It was certainly not a place that
Dr. Ron Paul would recognize. Indeed, if nothing else the nation
could have used some public health control.
There is just a single, short sentence in
Kunstler’s novel that refers to a pandemic of “Mexican flu.”
Uh-oh. This one disease apparently spread like wildfire and killed
off scores of millions of people in the U.S. alone.
For those readers of an Earth First-sort of bent,
if not the “deep environmentalists” out there, it’s your wish come
true. Finally, a population crash. Whew! It’s as if you died and
went to heaven. Except in Kunstler’s book it may well have been a
large number of the environmentalists who died and went to heaven.
They sure don’t live in Union Grove.
Within Kunstler’s deft narrative, things in
post-Peak Oil America just fell apart. The center did not hold.
Food supplies dwindled. The power grid broke down. Health care
stopped functioning. Roads and highways quickly become impassable
due to lack of maintenance, as well as marauding bandits. People
starved. Population centers contracted, most in a catastrophic
fashion.
And then there were ethnic and racial tensions —
small-scale civil war, really. People migrated from one marginally
inhabitable part of North America to another. Along the way they
stole and fought over whatever booty they could loot and snatch.
In World Made by Hand, Kunstler answers
the question posed by Rodney King in 1992 during the Los Angeles
riots. “Can’t we all just get along?” Well, no. Not in an
unraveling land of rapidly diminishing resources. It’s the same
continent, but a different world.
There is a profoundly discouraging message
embedded here. For almost everyone in this post-apocalyptic
future, life in the U.S. has become, as the saying goes, “a
bitch.” And you know what happens next.
Until we meet again…
Byron W. King
P.S.: I’ll return shortly with
part two of this review. But until then, if you haven’t taken the
time to really consider the effects of Peak Oil and how we’ll soon
be reaching the realities painted in Kunstler’s book, you’d better
start. We’re right now seeing how our lack of oil is impacting our
daily lives. The only problem is, we still have a long way to go
before it’s all over. Cheap oil may well be a thing of the past.
Click here to read more about this situation…
