Escape from Suburbia, the follow-up film to The End of Suburbia, premiered tonight at the Bloor Theatre.
Here's some excerpts from Christopher Hume's column in the Toronto Star:
This time around, (director Gregory) Greene and producer Dara Rowland concentrate more on what can be done than on what's wrong.
We know that part of the story by now; simply put, we are reaching the limits of growth and the end of cheap oil, the basis of North American life in the 21st century. The focus on the suburbs comes because they are both the symbol and cause of so much of the trouble we face.
Though car-dependent, wasteful and ugly, the 'burbs are taken for granted, as somehow natural. But as many of the talking heads in Escape argue, they are anything but. Indeed, nothing like them has ever existed before, or will again. They are, literally and figuratively, a dead end.
But Greene has also included several couples who have decided to opt out of the North American Dream, so-called, to live more responsible, meaningful lives.
Greene did do that in his 95-minute film, but he also had much of the same cast of peak oil characters -- Michael C. Ruppert, Matthew Simons, Richard Heinburg, James Kunstler -- from his last film making many the same arguments about peak oil.*
* If you don't know what peak oil means, it's the theory that the Earth has either burned or is about to burn through about half the conventional oil it will ever produce, and that production will then start falling forever, essentially threatening the economic underpinnings of our way of life. I'll deal more with this theory later.
In concentrating more on what can be done, we meet a few people who decide to decamp either a verdant acreage or, in one case, New York City, for what they see as a more sustainable lifestyle.
That more sustainable lifestyle would appear to be a commune. Not many of those left from their halcycon days in the 1960s. Given that the people on them appear to be living pre-industrial lives, I can't see easily selling that lifestyle to the average urban or suburban dweller.
One place where the filmmakers spend some time is O.U.R. Ecovillage (learn more here). Along the way, we are sort-of introduced to the notion of permaculture, which can be summarized as living sustainably.
A large part of the film deals with local food production. In the first film, we heard Kunstler talk the end of what he sarcastically called the "3,000-mile caesar salad." In this film, David Suzuki talks about the madness of shipping Lake Winnipeg whitefish to China for processing so it can be sold here.
We meet gardeners in the Bronx and, most notably, in South Central Los Angeles. There, 350 families produced food on a 14-acre tract. Community organizer Tezozomoc, who formed South Central Farmers, describes it in quite reverential terms.
Last year, the city sold the land back to business and on June 13, 2006, the farmers were evicted and the farm bulldozed, an admittedly sad state of affairs.
While I support the concept of locally produced food and community gardens, the film doesn't say what percentage of their food requirements the garden met for the South Central farmers (these folks were poor, so I suspect it could be substantial).
Nor does it really talk about how self-sustainable a megapolis like Los Angeles can hope to become in terms of food.
Does peak oil mean everyone fleeing cities and going to live communally in the countryside? There's more than eight million people in just in the city of New York. Let's say 500 people makes for a sustainable agricultural community. That means room would have to be found for 16,400 communes. How much land does one commune need to be self-sustainable? Is there that much spare land around? The film doesn't say, although it does have amusing pictures of cows being milked and bucolic ones of contented people sawing on their fiddles after a hard day on the hoe ("Gr-e-e-e-n Acres is the life for me!" :) ).
The filmmakers do visit Willits, Calif., which is running the Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL) project, an attempt to create a locally sustainable economy for the northern California town of 5,000. If it works, maybe another 1,640 Willits-sized towns can be created to accomodate New Yorkers.
Now, one person in the film does make the point that 100 million people live in U.S. suburbs, and that you can't just disperse them.
With lawns that could be converted to gardens and whatnot, the suburbs could be made more sustainable in terms of food, argues the film.
New urbanists have talked about building up population density in suburbs and making them into live-work-walk communities, rather than being a place where you drive an hour (if not more) to get to work and use the car to get milk because there's no shopping within walkable or bikeable distance.
Is new urbanism compatible with more in-situ food production? How close to food sustainability can a more densely-populated suburb get? After watching this film, I must say, "darned if I know."
There is a third film in the works to deal with places that have dealt with severe oil supply shocks (Cuba) or who are trying to get out from under oil's thumb (Sweden).
Maybe that film will talk about vertical farming (I'm very surprised this film didn't).
Escape doesn't talk much about transportation in a post-peak world, other than deriding virtually every alternative source of fuel as being inferior to petroleum -- which is currently true, unfortunately. There's a bit on biodiesel, but little talk of hybrids or fully electric cars.
One good thing the film does do is finally mention climate change in conjunction with peak oil (another film, A Crude Awakening, barely mentioned the former*). The United States uses 25 per cent of the world's petroleum. Any guesses as to what percentage of the world's greenhouse gases it produces?
* After a screening of A Crude Awakening, a Post Carbon Toronto dweeb really didn't want to hear much about the global warming issue during a q-and-a session. Here's a blog posting from that time.
For bonus points, answer this question: Americans comprise what percentage of the world's population?
For no bonus points, given that this is a slam-dunk question, answer this: Can the Earth take everyone living like Americans currently do -- or Canadians, for that matter?
While I accept the fact that oil is a finite resource -- actually, we're running out of cheap energy alternatives of all sorts -- and that we will hit a peak in global production at some point, I do have problems with the notion that an economic collapse awaits us soon after that happens.*
* Barry Silverthorn, who helped make The End of Suburbia, grimly warned everyone at the early 2005 screening I attended in Toronto to get out of debt, because we didn't want to be carrying any when the collapse came in two years. The peak oil-driven collapse hasn't come as of mid-2007, so that's one reason why I suspect these things can't be predicted with any precision. But any day now ... :^)
The peak oil alarmists seem to think that demand will continue to rise as before even if the price rises faster as a result of ever-falling supply. That's not how economics generally works.
As oil gets more expensive, alternatives become acceptable. For example, transit ridership is up in Canada.
In any event, we had $10 oil in the mid-1980s, $18 in 2002 and we have $70 oil now, yet the global economy keeps humming along (granted, we could be walking on economic air like Wile E. Coyote, but hopefully not). This has me suspecting we might be more resilient to energy price rises than some think, but I remain open to counter-arguments.
That being said, we shouldn't be wasting our dwindling petroleum reserves.
The film doesn't note this, but the Model T Ford, 100 years old next year, got 25 miles per U.S. gallon. A typical U.S.-made car today gets 21 miles per U.S. gallon.
Traditional internal combustion engines only utilize about 10 per cent of the energy in a given unit of gasoline. It would seem to me that whatever our petrolem supply challenges, we have significant room for improvement on the consumption/demand side.
Personally, I think climate change is still the bigger, more confirmed threat to humanity (see this). However, by tackling climate change and weaning ourselves off carbon, we'll also indirectly be tackling the peak oil problem and giving ourselves more time to develop an alternative.
My bottom line on the film? It's a middling effort at best. I don't think it was well structured, well-shot or did a good job of answering some key questions. Rent the DVD, don't spend money on a theatre screening.
Some additional resources
The Post Carbon Institute (James Kunstler is associated with it)
Relocalize (associated with the Post Carbon Institute)
Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas
The Oil Drum (Peak Oil true believers)
Reason.com - Peak Oil Panic (a May 2006 counterpoint to peak oil alarmists)
The Guardian - Our blind faith in oil growth could bring the economy crashing down (George Monbiot, May 29, 2007)