rain barrels and the end of the world

Over the last few months, it's become increasingly clear to me that talking about Durham's "sustainability" is at best an overly-hopeful fiction; what we really need to be talking about is Durham's declinability. There's no "solution" for the problems we are facing globally - peak oil is real, global warming is real, and standing around patting ourselves on the back for using fluorescent light bulbs or buying a Prius just doesn't cut it anymore. For all of Duke's awards for campus "sustainability," how many of you actually believe for an instant that those measures will be enough to allow them to continue with business as usual if there's no water available in the city system for anything except human survival, or gas is only available a few days a week, and then for $10/gallon?

There are lots of different predictions as to how long we have before, say, the Greenland ice sheet melts and inundates New York (not to mention the Outer Banks), or oil hits $500/barrel. However, there's always an infrastructure lag: buildings take a long time to build, transportation systems take a long time to implement or upgrade, money collected by government takes years to be allocated and more years to be spent, something with which Durham seems to be even worse at than many other cities (for a little discussion on this, see Election Dissection over at Mr. Dependable's place). So, we here in the Bull City may be on the verge of discovering the very hard way just how much we should have started doing five or ten years ago. Not to mention the extreme lack of foresight embodied by the failure of our various "leaders" to implement TTA light rail.

Infrastructure and resource allocation failure is serious business, as anyone running a water-dependent business in Atlanta right now can tell you. If sufficiently large or long-term, they will cascade into economic and social failure. Again, to pick on Atlanta: what exactly do you think will happen if six more months pass without any significant rain in the central Georgia watershed? How many businesses will fail, how many people will out-migrate? And how many of them would end up here in the Triangle, in turn increasing our water use?

The very local questions before us now would seem to be: what sort of place will Durham become as the impacts of these global issues start hitting with a vengeance? Will we put a moratorium on new developments that don't implement net-zero green building principles? What social programs will we lose so that more money can go to public transportation? Will people come together in neighborhoods and communities, set up tool swaps, start practicing permaculture, create rideshares? Or will we instead see property crimes shoot upward, distrust spread and violence become the norm?

I don't have any answers to these questions, for Durham or for anywhere. I think we all need to work as hard as possible to create the type of community we want, while still being aware that there are lots of people who won't want to do or change anything until forced to by necessity. The further ahead of the curve you are, the more you might look like a target, unfortunately. When everyone needs water, the person with ten rain barrels may have a hard time keeping all of them for himself. Given that, there's strong value in community-based solutions. If people share their rain barrels with the whole neighborhood, then everyone will have incentive to make sure they are used well (and aren't stolen!).

So, in the coming weeks, I may (or may not) talk about these things:
- the redevelopment of downtown as a post-peak urban core,
- farmland protection, food availability, and farmers' markets,
- what a successful post-peak neighborhood might look like,
- bicycling, public transit, and RTP,
- the hiring of a "Sustainability Coordinator" for Durham.

Feel free to suggest other topics.