I wrote extensively about The End of Suburbia in January (here's my blog posting). Christopher Hume, the Toronto Star's architecture columnist, has also written about it today in advance of its screening at 10 p.m. Wednesday on Vision TV.

An excerpt:

(The argument) is simple: suburbia couldn't exist without cars, and people couldn't afford to drive those cars without endless cheap gas. As they also make clear, the amount of oil pumped out of the ground is expected to peak sometime between now and 2010 at the latest. After that, every gallon of gas grows more and more expensive, rendering auto-based sprawl obsolete.

"The whole suburban project can be summarized pretty succinctly as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," explains author James Howard Kunstler. "America took all its post-war wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future."

What makes the situation even harder to understand is our unwillingness to face up to it while it's still possible. This cultural, intellectual and economic inertia can be seen right here in Ontario where the debate about the greenbelt has only just started. To his credit, Premier Dalton McGuinty has adopted a greenbelt plan, but the development industry and — God help us — some farmers will do everything they can to stop it. Groups such as the Fraser Institute and various home builders' associations parade their experts, mostly American, who for a fee explain people actually enjoy commuting, that sprawl is good and global warming isn't happening.

If only. The truth is we will have to learn how to make do with much less. As Kunstler points out, the days where the ingredients of a Caesar salad travel 4,800 kilometres to your table are over, whether we realize it or not. Those farmers busy railing against McGuinty's perfectly sensible, desperately needed scheme to stop sprawl will soon find themselves part of an agricultural system based on proximity to local markets. Future growth based on oil and natural gas is not possible, Simmons warns. Those holding their breath for hydrogen fuel should get serious; it's not going to happen. Instead, we'd rather carry on building suburbs destined to become the slums of tomorrow, McMansions that will be obsolete long before the mortgage has been paid off.

Though there's some discussion on the show about the New Urbanism, a movement that seeks to reform urban planning, it's unlikely to be the answer.