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“Sprawling From Grace” played at the Starz Green Room at the DNC August 23rd-25th!  It was exciting to be a part of the national discourse.  We met a lot of interesting and influential people from the worlds of politics, media and film.  Hopefully we were able to bring some attention to the increasingly important issue of sprawl as it relates to our energy crisis.

Although we hear many politicos stumping on the need for “renewable energy, alternative energy, green energy, drilling” and what have you, we haven’t heard enough about the proper and sustainable applications of this energy.  It is our hope that we communicated the pressing need for a real change in the way we look at the problem.  A paradigm shift away from struggling to support the sprawling infrastructure we’ve built upon cheap oil, to a sustainable, new urban landscape based on these new forms of energy.

Imagine the first scene of a movie. It is an aerial shot of a gated community filled with huge 4,000 plus square foot homes on cul-de-sacs.  The camera pans down to the gate and instead of seeing the uniformed guard you expected to see at the gate; gang bangers stand sentinel. Huge piles of trash litter the streets and are scavenged by street children on closer inspections you can see the homes are   falling apart.  Windows are shattered, sewage seeps into yards and rats infest the area.  The latest Sci-fi blockbuster? No, a vision of the future.

As the price of a gallon of gas soars and heating oil sky rockets fewer and fewer people will choose to make long commutes or attempt to heat enormous homes. Suburban flight is on its way.  Just as those who could fled our cities after World War II,  leaving the poor to take over urban mansions and cut them up into cold water flats , everyone who can afford to will soon run from our suburbs leaving the poor to cut up our McMansions and fend for themselves in subdivisions where access to goods and services will be less and less available.   

Michael T. Klare, the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, is one of the world’s leading experts on resource conflict.  In an interview with Barry Zellen on the Center for Contemporary Conflicts web site www.cccnps.mil Klare stated:

“What strikes me about all this is that we are seeing the emergence of a new world power configuration in which the possession of energy and other key resources is the principal indicator of national strength, rather than the possession of military arsenals, as was the case in the Cold War era and in prior centuries.

Russia, once the defeated has-been of the post-Cold War era, has acquired new prominence because of its abundance of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium; the United States, the supposed victor of the Cold War, has been found to suffer from significant vulnerabilities because of its deep dependency on imported petroleum.

The more we look into the future, I believe, the more a nation’s relative standing in the world will be determined by such criteria …”

But those resources are all finite no matter where they are located.   As Thomas L. Friedman proposes in his new book “Hot, Flat and crowded” the countries that stay ahead in the green innovations technology race are the ones which will succeed in the new world order.

The United States must make this our number one priory. It is necessary for our nation’s security both economic and military.

The decline of the world’s ability to produce oil and gas combined with an increasing global demand for oil is leading us towards an epic world crisis.  We cannot hide our heads in the sand and hope that it will all go away.  Unless we act now we face a grim future.

Petroleum is an integral part of our lives.  Our global economy is based on it.  Our current industrial agricultural system cannot exist without it.  Petroleum is the base for our fertilizer and our pesticides. It fuels the equipment used to harvest our crops and the transportation systems we depend on to move crops to our tables.

The world’s carrying capacity is based on an abundance of oil. When the cost of oil becomes so prohibitive that industrial agriculture is no longer sustainable many people will go hungry and eventually starve.