Can't We Have Some GOOD News?

The past several months certainly have not been for the light of heart. Between the housing crisis, the ongoing massive run-up in oil prices, and rising unemployment, economics has duly earned its moniker as "the dismal science." I haven't seen many bell-bottoms yet, and there's still nary a leisure suit to be found in public, but these days are otherwise feeling more and more like the Seventies with each passing suckflationary week.

So is there any good news to be had? The answer is, yes...though some of it you may have to make for yourself.

Good news: the commuter culture is coming to a close. Finally, the utter insanity of spending the equivalent of an entire waking day in an automobile each week going to and from work so you can (among other things) pay for the gas to make the trip is being exposed for all to see. Fathers might actually start arriving home in time to do something other than nuke a microwaveable dinner and tuck their kids in. We might actually (gasp!) get home from a day's work while there's still daylight, at least March through October or so. Families might actually start spending time together again. Family dinners, anyone?

Good news: energy conservation and alternative energy are finally being taken seriously. Even when gas was $1.78 a gallon, deep down inside we all knew it couldn't last. Someday we knew the cheap ride was coming to an end. Yet it was all too expedient for politicians to punt the ball and leave solving the problem to future generations. Now the ball has come to rest. Sure it's painful, but finally the foundation is being laid for America to have an energy source that doesn't enrich people who hate us, doesn't pollute, and that will last forever. That source is likely to be thermonuclear fusion (unless there's a real technological breakthrough and we come up with cold fusion, zero-point energy, or total mass conversion). The technical hurdles to harnessing any of these energy sources are formidable, but even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Despite the malingering of two generations of politicians, that step is now being taken.

Good news: our cities and towns are going to be reinvigorated. As life becomes more local, people will be looking more and more to the communities they live in for entertainment, recreation and economic sustenance. Look for fewer anonymous, cookie-cutter suburbs, and more vibrant city plans that mix residential and commercial development. After virtual extinction during the automobile-driven mid-to-late 20th century, the concept of civic space is experiencing a renaissance. Local forms and venues of entertainment--harvest festivals, farmer's markets, county fairs, carnivals, Christmas festivals, small dance halls, bowling alleys, movie theaters, local attractions, even libraries--the localization of our lives in the next decades will breathe new life into these venerable American traditions. One man who has minced no words about these trends is James Howard Kunstler.

Good news: our food is going to become more nutritious. Why? We'll be growing more of it ourselves and relying less on mass-produced, processed mega-foods. Prices may be zooming at the grocery store, but raising your own fruits and veggies isn't much more expensive than it was ten years ago. Even an apartment balcony can grow a surprising amount of food. Enterprising locals are making money selling tomatoes to local restaurants since salmonella fears have severed conventional supply lines for this ubiquitous food.

If you have a yard, even a small one, growing a garden opens up all kinds of possibilities for not only your own sustenance, but bartering with neighbors for their produce or even other goods and services. Now would also be a good time to plant fruit trees, especially citrus and other tropical fruits, as these take several years to become productive. Even if they have to be grown indoors in pots because you live in a cold climate, they can be nurtured with highly efficient shop lights, and moved outside when danger of frost is past.

Good news: more and more of us will be going to four-day workweeks and telecommuting. With gas costs soaring, the idea of working from home and working a four-day week is gaining increasing acceptance. While some people may chafe at more regulations, as gas goes past $5 a gallon and the need to conserve fossil fuels becomes a matter of national security, we may well see government applying pressure to business to reduce the workweek and shift workers who could work remotely back home, at least one day a week.

The math makes compelling sense: say a city has 100,000 commuters. 50,000 of these could be shifted to a four-day week. 25,000 could also telecommute one day a week. So that's 150,000 commutes a week that don't need to happen (counting to and from work). Figuring from a base of one million commutes a week, that's a 15% reduction in commuter traffic. If each commute burns a gallon of gas, that's 150,000 gallons a week, which translates into a savings of $750,000 a week, or $39 million a year those commuters could save or drop into other parts of the local economy. Those numbers were easy to blow off during prosperous times when gas was cheap, but will become increasingly difficult for policymakers to ignore as gas prices climb.

Good news: our air is going to be getting a little cleaner. As gas prices rise and people drive less and shop less, that translates into fewer car trips, shorter car trips, and fewer truck-miles. People will also have a stronger incentive to retire old, gas-guzzling, high-emission vehicles and replace them with newer, low-emission vehicles. That in turn means less air pollution.

Good news: we're going to be getting into better shape. The bicycle, often arrogantly dismissed outside of college campuses as the means of transport of paupers over the past couple decades, is coming back into style. Look for more bicycles to be made, and for cities and towns to increasingly take bicycle and pedestrian traffic into account when planning cities and making changes to existing plans. Once the public feels the numerous benefits of physical exercise, look for bicycling to nearby attractions to become an outing and leisure activity in its own right.

Good news: home improvement, home decorating and home design will be growth industries. We're going to be spending less time getting away from home, and more time enjoying our homes. Thus, home will once again be the hearth, the focus of familial activities. The drive to make the home a place to live rather than spend the year commuting away from it and the summer vacationing away from it will strengthen over the next decade. Saturday afternoon barbecues and Christmas dinners will return. Everything from exotic plants to softer furniture to PlayStation 3s will be in demand as more nights and weekends are spent "in."

Good news: normal people will be able to own homes again. After two decades of housing prices absurdly inflated by cheap commutes and easy credit, pricing is on its way back down to Earth. The housing bubble still has quite a ways--at least another year or so--to deflate, with rising gas prices, layoffs and more foreclosures on the way. Even renters will see some relief, as homeowners "on the margins" of foreclosure rent out rooms and their second homes that they can't unload at anything close to the rate they paid for them, thereby increasing the supply of rentals and decreasing the price.

Good news: political reform will come sooner rather than later. I think we'll see changes across the board, but the area I'm thinking of is how we treat the poor. America has become polarized into two camps. The first camp, often referred to as "conservatives," believes the poor are poor because they want to be, and that sharing resources is bad because that will just encourage poor people to be lazy. The fact that many of these poor are in fact working seems to matter little to people on this side of the issue. The second camp, often referred to as "liberals," believes that is we take money from somewhere, create a bureaucracy, and hand out money from on high, the poor's predicament will be resolved. The dismal record of inefficiency most social welfare programs have doesn't factor in to these folks' calculations.

The 20th century showed us neither scorning nor subsidizing the poor seemed to work too well. The coming decline will force us to look beyond these ossified notions, because there are going to be too many poor people to just ignore, and the government, already hip-deep in debt, isn't going to be in a position to offer much more aid than it already does. I don't claim to know exactly what solution will be arrived at. Given that the political Establishment seems to be without a clue as to the kind of world we're headed for, my educated guess is that this new approach will be communal, bottom-up, grass-roots driven, and do an end run around conservative and liberal politicians alike. By 2012, I predict the American two-party duopoly is going to come under unprecedented pressure to do something it's quite unaccustomed to: stop posturing and start delivering results.

Good news: we're going to be slowing down. Cheap oil and easy credit energized our lives and helped us move faster, but somehow we just never got ahead. We couldn't ever get where we were going quite fast enough. If we moved a little quicker, the clock just seemed to speed up a bit, and we ended up just as far behind. But if we have fewer places to go and less ability to get there, it stands to reason we'll be racing the clock less, and stopping to enjoy life a little more.

The unchallenged control the clock holds over us Americans is actually a fairly recent invention. For 99% of the human race's history, the time of day was "sunrise," "morning," "noon," "afternoon," and "gonna be dark soon." I'm not seeing us return to that level, but I do believe the pace of life is going to shift to a lower gear as we focus less on where we "have to" be, and more on where we are.

Good news: the concept of community is going to undergo a revival. As our lives become more local, and we focus on where we are, we're going to begin to notice (as our elders did a couple generations ago) the people we share that locality with: also known as neighbors. The block party is going to come back into vogue, as is the park where kids used to play kick-the-can, trick-or-treating on Halloween, and so forth. This represents another downshift in political culture, as the nation and state, strapped for resources, recede into the background and the community and town become more important...as they once were.

Good news: spirituality is going to experience a revival as well. It's a truism noted throughout human history: during prosperous times, people turn from the spiritual to the physical, and when times get hard, people look for spiritual answers to the questions of life. (In the interest of being nonpartisan and unbiased, I'm not going to speculate here which specific spiritual traditions and faiths will enjoy growth--at this point in time, it's too early to tell anyway.) Likely it will vary widely by location and culture, because during the era of cheap, global travel, we imported quite a few faiths and traditions, and America has developed some of its own.

All of this isn't to say that we're not going to be having some trying times ahead. We're headed for turbulence the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1930s. That old Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times," is definitely coming to fruition. Our nation may not survive, if things go badly and (more importantly) if we react badly. We could see America splinter into regions a la Jericho, if too many people opt for a "last man standing" war over dwindling oil and resources. But it doesn't have to be that way, if we keep our wits about us and see the positive in the changes that are to come.