Written and
Directed by Gregory Greene
At the closing
of the documentary film, The End of Suburbia, author James Howard
Kunstler offers some final thoughts on the future of America: “Irony was the ethos of the late twentieth century,”
he says,
“but as we move into the twenty-first century,
we’re going to discover that irony is a luxury we can’t afford anymore. Our lives are going to depend on whether we
have an environment that . . . can actually support the project of civilization. We’re not going to be able to sit back and
make fun of it and enjoy it ironically. That part of our history is over. It’s time to get serious.”
Of course, if
our energy-depleted future unfolds as Kunslter and the other subjects of the
film predict, the result will be ironic—though more in the manner of
Greek tragedy than of the Simpsons.
Nontheless,
Kunslter’s point is well taken. As he
points out in the film, even many people who live in the suburbs these days
find it easy to mock them—which itself says something about what we have all
been conditioned to accept from our physical environments and culture, and
which makes the film’s final scene, a 1950s film clip celebrating consumerism
and suburban life, especially jarring. Directly juxtaposed with Kunslter’s comment, and coming after much
similar footage, the intended message of yet another campy scene is on a first
take unclear. Does Kunstler’s point
indict the film? Or does the film
indict its viewers?
It is easy,
after all, to watch a film like The End of Suburbia—especially the first
half, which makes liberal use of earnest 1950s film clips to lay out the
history of the suburbs—with mild, perhaps even affectionate amusement. Today we pretend to be removed from that
bygone era—more sophisticated, more knowing, but we have been trained to look
back with at least some nostalgia at that time of lost innocence.
What the old
footage really illustrates, though, is that suburbia itself is the product of
the immense, top-down conformity of the era in which it was started, and
inasmuch as we perpetuate that model today, we are still living in the
1950s. The fact that our physical
environments have failed almost entirely to evolve beyond the sterile conformism
of that time would seem itself to be a sign of a serious cultural
stagnation. No matter how hip or
liberated we pretend to be, we still live someplace, and the kind of
place that is matters—energy issues aside.
Most of the
narration in the first half of The End of Suburbia comes from interviews
with Kunstler (our most famous and most caustic suburban critic) and Peter
Calthorpe (who is, with Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, one of the
three most influential New Urbanist neighborhood planners), with some other
commentary Richard Heinberg and others.
In the second
half of the film, The End of Suburbia delves into the facts of peak oil
and how energy depletion will soon bring our current way of life to an
end. Casting the suburbs as both
villain and soon-to-be victim in the peak oil grand narrative may seem like an
obvious choice for anyone who has been introduced to the subject through the
work of Kunstler; but there are certainly other ways to approach it.
In fact, other
than Kunstler, none of the energy commentators in the movie (Deffeyes,
Campbell, Ruppert, Heinberg, Simmons, Darley, Klare, Bakhtiari—to the
director’s credit, almost all the famous peak oil experts make appearances) is
particularly focused on the issue of suburbia per se, though most would
probably agree that the suburban project as it stands is doomed. None of their comments will surprise anyone
who is already versed in the issue of energy depletion; but The End of
Suburbia does an excellent job of making the concise, powerful case for
peak oil. To have that case presented
not by one but by many experts, including petroleum geologists and an energy
investment banker, gives weight to the film. It is hard to visually dramatize the threat of energy depletion, but
Green manages to do it.
If there is
one weakness in the film it is that Green presents no peak oil skeptics—even to
refute them. Many people who watch the
film will therefore come away unconvinced, clinging to the common (if
fallacious) arguments that the market and high technology will save us.
One also
occasionally gets the impression that Green is quoting his experts selectively
to emphasize his own point: not just
that we about to hit an energy crisis, but that that crisis is best understood
in the context of the suburbs. It is a
point somewhat undermined by his own experts; Calthorpe, for instance, while eminently knowledgeable about the history
of suburban development, comes off as less than convinced about the
significance of peak oil, saying at one point that there are many reasons to
retool the suburbs in addition to energy depletion and that we shouldn’t just
focus on one. Kunstler—long an advocate
of New Urbanism—is pessimistic about the feasibility of rebuilding our society
in time.
In another way
though, Green’s choice to focus on suburbia is a bold one. The connection between the design of human
habitats and the use of energy may not be the only frame for the peak oil
story, but it is one of the most convincing. Figuring out how to make use of oil and gas has allowed our civilization
to do things in the last hundred years that would have been be utterly
unimaginable to previous generations. Explaining in the starkest terms how those things (particularly the car
culture and the affluence it created) are threatened is perhaps the best way to
make the point that energy depletion is more than just a serious issue, it is a
crisis. That we squandered our fossil
fuel inheritance building a shallow culture of consumerism and cheap sprawl is
almost beside the point now. The
question now is, how do we learn to live without it?
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