My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things.

I do not believe we will get to Ray Kurzweil's proposed "singularity" in which human minds meld with machines to produce, in effect, synthetic human evolution. Our basic problems with maintaining the electric grid argue against that fantasy.

The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.

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.

A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.

In my view, suburbia in general has very poor prospects. I think it will only become devalued and probably more dangerous. It's chief characteristic was that it represented a living arrangement with no future - and that future is now here.