America, The Unsustainable

This is the fourth and final part of an on-going series this week: The U.S. Expiration Date.

If the United States were a garden or a field, it would not be a healthy plot of dirt. America is like a 1930s dryland farm in the Oklahoma panhandle. Back then, unknowing farmers recklessly stripped the land down, turning it into massive fields of dirt deserts. This is how the 1930’s Dust Bowl came to exist. Farmers plowed deeply and extensively into the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains. They did not give back to the ground, and they failed to prevent wind erosion.

Deeply-rooted native grasses that normally trapped water into the soil, even during periods of drought and high wind, were recklessly plowed up without a concern or a thought. Newly mass-produced gas tractors and combine harvesters tore into the ground, ripped up the soil, and turned it into dust that would coalesce into huge “black blizzards” that choked cities across America as far as New York City. When the unknowing Okies saw that their farming methods were ineffectual and unprofitable, they moved out to California to pick fruit, leaving behind a ruined landscape.

Such is the manner of our American population and its migration. In a certain sense, the proletariat masses scrape open the land wherever they go, bringing it to ruin, and then roam to a new patch of earth. Residents, businesses, and industries move together, going from one place to another, planting forests of roads, parking lots, and prefab box stores. When the community is compromised in one form or another, the people move somewhere else, leaving a blighted ruin in their wake.

As seen by their migration patterns on this continent, Americans have been shown to not take a stand for their scrap of real estate. Though there are exceptions, for the most part, Americans do not invest back into the turf they live on. Instead, they move where the jobs are, or they “white flight” themselves into the suburbs, or the government injects minorities or immigrants into a community in order to socially engineer a city, thus causing more people to flee. Citizens are pushed into different neighborhoods like cattle.

Americans are not tied to the earth, as Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he pictured a rural America ruled by aristocrats. In fact, judging from these migration patterns, it could be said that America is now “the land of the oppressed and the home of the passive.” The people do not work to build their communities. Rather, they are prisoners in their own homes, and the neighbor who lives a hundred feet away is a complete stranger. Neighborhoods are not populated by people who have like interests or hold anything in common. Instead, individuals are living in their private dwellings, pursuing their various vices or hobbies, ignorant to the world outside their door. And if some sort of local pressure arises, these individuals or their children will simply move somewhere else.

*Wrath of Gnon: “Good urbanism. Kamakura, Japan. Continually inhabited since 8000 B.C.” (See also this.)*

Certainly, we do not treat our communities the way the Japanese do. With only a handful of islands, the Japanese have maximized the use of space in their domain, and they’ve invested in their communities. Japan is not a land of vast reserves of coal, oil, or uranium. So how is it that their nation is one of the wealthiest in the world? The answer to that question is the one resource they do have: a strong labor force.

The people of Japan are their own resource. The Japanese do not take their land or their communities for granted. They do not move from place to place, as we Americans do, ruining one spot and tearing into a brand new one. They put more into the land than they take out. As a result, the land and the people are one. They are a nation in the truest sense. While we Americans, on the other hand, are hardly a nation at all, but an empire of individuals and some tribes who are held together by force.

Did our colonist forefathers not bring with them any enduring wisdom from the urban planners of Europe? No. They hated Europe. They divorced themselves from their roots. They did not want to be “men of the West.” Like Okie farmers who fled for California after ruining the high plains, the English colonists abandoned all pretenses of the Christendom that spawned them. Like the modern American whites who were driven from the cities, Jefferson and his ilk scurried away from the problems of a sophisticated Europe with a wealth of history and experience.

American forefathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, scorned the communities of the Old Country. European urban dwellers were “sores on a body.” They threw out the books, laughed, and said to themselves that “we’ve got a republic now.” Caution was thrown to the wind, and the distant future was not a concern for the glorious American forefathers who died long ago, achieved political apotheosis, and left us behind after their “ascension.”

Thomas Jefferson, American Founder, third U.S. President, once stated:

I think that our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural: and this will be as long as there are vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another as in the large cities of Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.

We have reached that point. We are no longer chiefly agricultural. We are running low on useable vacant lands. We are piled up upon one another. We have become corrupt. So what did Thomas Jefferson have in mind for us now? What did our founders have planned for us? Now that we are a vast network of powerlines, asphalt roads, internet cables, railroads, shipping lanes, flight paths, commercial and residential zones–now that we are all of these things, what is Jefferson’s plan for us? What did he have in mind?

Did Jefferson and his friends expect such an empire to be governed in the same tranquil fashion as a former colony? Is the quaint, local fashion of a democratic republic sufficient for hundreds of millions of people in a land of many different tribes from all corners of the earth? Are the expectations of Jefferson and the Founders enough to govern what the United States has become?

The answer is obvious to an honest man.