Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.

Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.

Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)

In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us.