The "Green" community, the enviro people, are preoccupied with running all the cars differently. Our techno-grandiosity has us gibbering about high-speed rail - which we don't have the capital for anymore - but nobody is interested in repairing the existing rail system, which would be far less costly and hugely beneficial for us. In short, we are acting cluelessly. And life is tragic. The clueless usually suffer.

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.

People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.

Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

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

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.