This Last American Summer

For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark -- Matthew 24:38

I was at a wedding this weekend a couple of hundred miles to my north. Let not the epigraph say anything about the couple I saw married. They are two nice and intelligent people with solid values and good humor. Their wedding was a fairly modest mostly family affair, so much so that there were only three eligible women of suitable age there.

But I unfortunately spent much of the festivities trying not to think, "This all soon will pass away." Since I may wax apocalyptic for the rest of this piece, let me just say that Revelation is a rather flexible work. It presents a world in which divine agency is responsible for a breakdown in basic economic systems, the dominance of great empires, and ecological ruin. I, for one, do not take John of Patmos literally or generally for much of the book. God, as author of nature, need not punish the human race directly for our contempt for the world He has made. Nature does a very good job of punishing us anyway. Instead, God's direct agency in the world lies in arrest of judgment and clemency for us with regard to the forces of nature, the last enemy to be destroyed that will be death. But until the just reign on earth and the entire created order is overturned, the seven seals are sometimes broken and the Four Horsemen roam the earth.

I traveled north and south by train: a surprisingly popular operation in this part of the world. There are signs that it always has been this way, that new ridership due to high gas prices has encouraged slight improvements in efficiency and introduced considerable strain in the system. My train rides (and bus rides) gave me time to contemplate James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency and this Sunday's New York Times , even as many of the conversations around me concerned many of the problems being discussed by Kunstler.

My elders have been trying to tell me for some time that present patterns of human life and consumption, especially in the United States, cannot continue. Alfred Ziegler, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, is the father of modern historical geology, i.e., after the convincing demonstration of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics introduced the final pieces to the puzzle of the origins of coal, oil, and other mineral resources. By piecing together the continents as they grew and changed during the history of the Earth, Ziegler gained access to immense amounts of information about coal, oil, phosphorite, and other mineral deposits and considerable funding from companies interested in those deposits.

Like older colleagues such as M. King Hubbert, Ziegler noticed that the world was highly dependent on the products of both geographically and historically rare ecological and geological circumstances. Coal is the result of the flooding of coastal forests, like the mangrove swamps of the Carolinas and the rather careful refinement of the soggy carbon by burial at depth. It has been known since the middle of the 19th century that it does not occur any earlier than the Silurian Period of Earth's history. Later geologists realized that this was because trees originated then. Strangely enough, ephemerally flooded forests on tectonically active margins are rare indeed. Oil has an even more interesting past. It's mostly the result of algal blooms in coastal upwelling zones burying huge amounts of organic carbon on the ocean floor. Preservation of organic carbon in anoxic environments is usually favored by the same conditions under which hydrogen sulfide precipitates as off the present coast of Namibia or the Black Sea. Here, too, tectonics determines whether the carbon will become oil, natural gas, or fade away into the mantle to be exhaled as carbon dioxide from volcanoes. Let's just say that the conditions under which oil forms are fairly narrow, not unlike the conditions under which shale becomes slate that you can use as roof shingles. But since hydrogen sulfide is involved, oil contains more or less sulfur and sulfur makes it harder to refine oil into gasoline.

So Ziegler bothered to teach me these helpful facts and then gave his last lecture as a professor at the University of Chicago, a sobering lecture on what everyone seems to be talking about except the folks on television and the campaign trail, "peak oil." He reviewed most of the alternative means of getting energy and concluded that nuclear power was a fair medium term solution. He then proceeded to sell his house and purchase a water mill in West Virginia.

Other people have tried to teach me a general principle of geological resources: the least energy-intensive resources are exploited first (since they are cheapest) and so on until the amount of energy required exceeds the desire for the resource. And when your energy source is a non-renewable geological resource, life becomes very bad when the amount of energy needed to get your source of energy comes close to the recovered amount of energy.

David Archer, another of my professors, taught me one final fact of interest: the carbon we combust and emit into the atmosphere adds to the climate system roughly 100,000 times the energy we gained from its combustion through mainly absorption of infrared emission from the surface.

Last year, I wondered whether climate change would become disastrous at the same time we hit peak exploitation of resources on the Earth (primarily oil and gas). This year, I'm fairly sure that we'll see resource problems before the summer icepack at the North Pole is mostly gone. Saudi Arabia has hit its peak oil production. I wish I still had my course handout that gave a predicted date for this (based on 2002 numbers). It was either 2012 or 2020. Either estimate seems a lowball.

Responses to these terrifying results of the principles of geophysics vary. Some believe a technical solution is possible. I do, too, as a matter of fact. But I fear the implementation of such a solution is improbable. Moreover, it's going to be very difficult to replace oil as a medium for individualistic energy exploitation.

Kunstler's Long Emergency is somewhat more pessimistic. But he's more than twice my age and might regard me as a wild-eyed dreamer. Kunstler may be some sort of folk hero in coming decades. Like some of the gurus of the resource peak known in the popular media, he has an ideology. It's an interesting one and a quite ancient one in Europeanized America. In architecture, he is clearly the anti-Ayn Rand, rejecting modernist forms in architecture and urging the recovery of forms in harmony with the environment, such as those which allow efficient passive heating and cooling. In systems theory, he praises the value of inefficient systems for sustainability in everything from agriculture (polyculture) to education (highly localized and vocational). He came to this issue through his interest (and dislike, I suspect) of suburbia. And so he's rather glad that the suburbs soon will turn into a slum.

And that is always going to be major weakness of Kunstler's oeuvre or the oeuvre of peak resources folks in general, they are (myself included) generally discontents from the automobile and consumer good obsessed mainstream of American culture. They're very glad it's not long for this world. Some long happily for the extinction of the human species. Kunstler's blog, "Clusterfuck Nation" is suffused with rage. I frankly was surprised how cool The Long Emergency reads. He either has tremendous discipline in print or a good editor.

However, a good editor could not remove Kunstler's virulent hatred of Southerners. Lutherpunk, who Kunstler might regard as an unusual example of the "cracker lumpenproletariat", will boil with rage at a certain part of this book. I don't know what to say except to refer him to the body of scholarship that demonstrates the proximity of many counties in the Southern states to the state of nature in the 19th century. But the contempt and ethnic slurs he reserves for a people who actually might teach him to hunt partridge competently are despicable.

For you see, Kunstler, is a Yankee of the old school, a believer in covenantual and communal rights and responsibilities in the sense as it was understood by the Founding Fathers in the Massachusetts Bay. Paul Revere and John Adams are his ideological forefathers. While he doesn't say it openly, he must regard libertarians as the lowest and most dangerous form of life, especially in times of social crisis. And thus Kunstler longs for a society much like pre-1869 New York or New England, a little pocket of idyllic bliss somewhat isolated from the dieoff of the 5.5 billion excess humans whose deaths he assures us he does not desire. I, too, a Yankee by blood and somewhat by education am interested in such a world, too, though not the last part and also recognize my present profession is unlikely to exist in such a localized world.

Kunstler recently has published a novel about this near future world he envisions, A World Made by Hand in which the protagonist (who some think is modeled in himself) has a surprisingly active and dangerous sex life for a New Englander of the early 19th century. (Read the reviews on Amazon). Clearly, he has not grasped certain aspects of covenantual rights and responsibilities.

My basic conclusion on reading was that Kunstler may despise you and your way of life, but he is telling you much of the truth. Writing in 2003, he predicts much of the mayhem we are currently experiencing in energy and credit such as the return of stagflation. I expect this book may be an excellent guide to the next five years as well.

Reading the New York Times today, I felt like I was reading pharmaceutical advertisements for American society. The Times solicited several opinions on high gas prices. They ranged from paeans to the promise of technology and limited conservation such as Daniel Gross on a coming alternative energy investment bubble (not another freaking bubble) or a discussion of how we can improve the fuel efficiency of our cars by being more courteous drivers. There was one proposal to give us tax credits for not driving our cars. There's a few thinkers on the same lines of Kunstler (transition/suburbs to small city fed by country, the joys of a Maine island vacation) but more moderate (no people dying or breakdown of public order). Tom Friedman encourages the renovation of the Republic rather than obsessive focus on national security.

But my favorite piece for its sheer vapidity is a piece by Ben Stein in Sunday Business. An piece in Op-Ed observed that the rise in prices has disproportionately hurt the poor. Stein notes this, too, for only 2% of our national income is spent on oil and gasoline, he says. Well, he's wrong first of all. It's closer to 7%. It was 2-2.5% when oil was at $50. He's quoting the March Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, which was reporting on 2007, the year in which oil rose from $75-$150. But anyway, Stein notes the poor are hurting because real income from 1947-1973 rose 40% but only has risen a $1 on ~$670 per week since. Stein makes the sensible suggestion of paying off the national debt, which would strengthen the dollar and make prices a little easier to bear. But since Congress won't do this. He suggests that people buy smaller cars and trucks and focus on educating their children to become doctors, dentists, and lawyers, who magically have the money to spend on fuel. Because really this proposal so beneath his intelligence as to appear almost sarcastic is the only way Stein can excuse the negligence of him and his ilk in allowing his Grand Old Party to be sold to the corporatists, the neoconservatives, and the Religious Right wholesale since the late 1970s. But then again, I think he sold out to them eventually, too.

Our final sign from the Times is that a noticeable decline in adolescent automobile cruising has been observed. Cruising is a phenomenon that only has existed since World War I. The mixture of adolescents with automobiles forever changed the structure of our mores and our national life. Moreover, Kunstler observes our tendency to infantilize adolescents and allow them incredible amounts of leisure time dedicated to consumption as a relief for the mechanized form of education to which we subject them. But apparently the waste of fuel is no longer tolerable.

You see, my friends, we live now during the last American summer, the last summer in which the imagined invincibility of the cultural and economic life of the American people against the constraints of nature and geopolitics will remain unscathed. This is the last summer in which our transportation networks are likely to work as they have since 1980, in which a combination of cheap air travel and automobile travel allows us mobility and flexibility of diet hitherto unknown in the history of the world. The big box store and the commercial airplane are dead, though to borrow from Nietzsche, "but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which their shadow will be shown." Well, if not ages, at least years. The automobile someday will follow. The chemical fertilizer, strong national governments, large-scale armaments, sic transit, sic transit .

I guess I don't know what to do. In the kind of post-oil future the sensible people envision, I do have certain uses. I can decipher tremendous amounts of information about land and its resources, test your soil, suggest where to build mills, and teach many subjects in both the sciences and humanities. I even can build fences, weed gardens, and do some crude carpentry and masonry. I'll likely need to improve some of these skills. But I do like what I do for a living now, despite its dependence on oil and a strong national government. And I do need to finish my thesis research. And I do wonder if I could put together a crash program to make this transition a bit easier and ensure that the world at least was electrified. And perhaps we'll just live with smaller amounts of oil made by cockroaches eating weeds (as bls pointed out to us) and gradually learn to maintain the carrying capacity of the Earth to a few billions to which the world's population hopefully will shrink less violently than many fear.

But in this last American summer, there's one development that won't be worth a sprig of wheat (old Roman expression) in time to come. And it's this business of global Anglican realignment consummated in the final declaration of GAFCON. I'll give the Lambeth Conference a couple of more meetings after this one and any competing organization the same lifetime. Evangelical Anglicans in this country will blend rather quickly with those with whom they have aligned themselves in this country, q.v. Rick Warren. Those in Sydney and Abuja soon will be occupied solely with the problems of Sydney and Abuja. The Anglo-Catholics will swim the Tiber in a world where the Roman Pontiff will seem very far away. And the Episcopal Church will return to its early 19th century institutional structure with bishops involved in day to day clergy training. Seminaries, too, may pass away. But I do warn that a society in crisis often looks for scapegoats and agricultural societies have a particular attitude toward the possible sources of crop failure. My hope is that these years of unpleasantness may make some corner of the world safe for an orthodox gospel in which all people may live lives of moderation and virtue in the Body, where gay and straight are one in Jesus Christ.

Life Imitating Art

Yet though some banks were full, too many were now closed in a city
Effete and wrecked, worn out by the uncertainty of world wars.
Dear Columbia so long had been a hot, high-rolling gambler.
There were jealous protesters on the streets and fingering of knives
Always, but there is so much bomb-throwing and unpleasantness ‘fore
One’s backers become nervous and the gruff warblers at the table
Look for arms and their advantage, so though she was victorious.
The diplomats dick’ring peace at Turin to one thesis agreed:
This lady, e’er torn between professor and queen, would live within
Her means. Accounting for some variance in the balance of trade
Wrote reddening balance sheets on Houstonian eyes and drove mouths
To strange oscillations: Vitus’s Dance (?), non-verbal stutt’ring.
Around this time, I suspect you and yours slipped out in confusion
Of budgets and values and what the taxpayers could take these days."

Written c. 2003

Messy Blessing

One fine day at the end of May, a Rev. Mr. Cowell and a Rev. Mr. Lord registered a civil partnership in England. They then went to St. Bartholemew's in London and entered into something approximating fratrimony before friends and relatives (a good sampling of the liberal clerical establishment of the Church of England) with a Rev. Mr. Dudley as officiant. I say something approximating fratrimony, because the service was a cut and paste of the kind all too common in ILEOS, except you have to give someone credit for cutting and pasting the 1662 Marriage Service. Only this kind of high-handedness could make the first commenter on the liturgy at Peter Ould's site accuse them not just of deconstructing marriage but salvation. Yes, you read that right. This debate is not just about sex now, it's about God and the Church.

There's a lot to say about this. For instance, this isn't likely the first of these to take place. And there's endless speculation to be had about whether the celebrants intended the publicity just before GAFCON in a Lambeth summer. But I've decided to focus on the possible Chiquita aspect of the Holy Spirit of this. This theology states that the Holy Spirit occasionally likes to do things that are just plain silly in order to convince us of the foolishness of our ways. It's an idea at least as old as Erasmus and maybe as old as St. Paul. But the name derives from Chiquita banana for reasons I really can't explain.

For you see, I think the Rev. Mr. Dudley may have committed a liturgical and doctrinal abuse of such serious gravity that he probably could be prosecuted in the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved. The bishops on this high tribunal are so comically condign as to see the hand of God in their selection for such a case. We have Bishop Wright of Durham, Lord Harries of Pentegrath (who as Bishop of Oxford tried to appoint Jeffrey Johns as his suffragan), and Lord Hope of Thornes (former Archbishop of Canterbury and a lifelong celibate who has described his sexual orientation as a "grey area.") Their senior jurist colleagues would be a member of one of England's most prominent legal families (the Haverses), Elizabeth, Lady Butler-Sloss, and Lord Justice Mummery (Sir John Mummery). The presence of the latter on the panel mainly describes the kind of circus such a trial would be. Veni Creator Spiritus.

Would An Act of Parliament Be Required to Make Appointment of the ABC a more Communionwide Process

Kevin Montgomery asks this question in Comments to the Episcopal Cafe Lead this morning.

The answer is not necessarily so. At present, the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed by the Crown upon recommendation of a commission drawn from appropriate members of the Church of England, a procedure completely within the bounds of the Act of Restraint of Annates (1534) and the legislation it replaced such as King John's, "That Elections in the Whole of England Be Free." As long as none of the members are not in Communion with Rome, I know of no statute that would forbid foreigners from sitting on such a commission. To ensure this procedure had legal force (that a certain number of foreigners of a certain type had to be appointed), I believe a Measure of Synod would be required, which through joint resolution of Parliament confirming the same has equivalent force to an Act. As far as I can tell, removing the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Crown to another organ also could be enacted by Measure.