Dum Spiro Spero and the Rising of the South

Joshua points us to an article by Erik Curren that should warm the hearts of all Southrons -

Perhaps the best-known prophet of peak-oil doom is James Howard Kunstler, who predicts that America will suffer decades of economic hardship and political unrest after peak oil hits. In his 2005 book The Long Emergency, Kunstler writes that "it would be reasonable to wonder whether the United States will continue to exist as a unified entity, and what kind of strife the Long Emergency could ignite region by region."

I spoke about just such a scenario in a recent post.

Kunstler goes on to describe one possible response to this emergency.

The suburban development that has powered the economic engine of the New South for the last 50 years in places like Atlanta will grind to a halt. High-gas prices will make long commutes too expensive; cul-de-sac developments and McMansions will lose their value almost overnight; jobs will evaporate as businesses go bankrupt; and tax attorneys, neurologists and bond traders and their families will find themselves suddenly destitute.

Angry suburbanites - being Southerners, many of them own guns - will join with angry Crackers (Kunstler's word) in riots and rebellions directed at local and federal authorities, who will be increasingly powerless to respond as government starts to break down.

Well Kunstler is from New York for goodness sakes so I will allow him a few errors in his assessment - I shall also correct them here.

First, those people that move to subdivisions have pretty much ceased to be Southrons at all - to be certain many of them were born in the South, they may have a semblance of the dialect, they may even like to hunt and fish but they are not Southern. No real southerner could ever be happy living door-step to door-step with a bunch of other people on a piece of property that just a few years ago was probably prime pasture land.

Don't get me wrong, I know and I am friends with some of those people, but despite some trivial common interests, their very decision to fore-go freedom in exchange for convenience and "things" makes them something other that the heirs to the Southern tradition I live and enjoy.

Kunstler is right however, these people in their consumer driven cul-de-sacs are a potential problem when and if things turn bad. I have expressed my concerns related to the one subdivision within a reasonable distance of my farm in SC. Of course these people may have the numbers but they do not yet own the country side. They have not occupied by greed and consumerism each little town. They are incapable of sustaining themselves for long in bad times - let them eat cake.

Curren sees the flaw in Kunstler's assessment too -

Indeed, might the South, with its small-town and agrarian values, be better off in an energy-starved world where we have to make more of our stuff and grow more of our food close to home than many places in the North that have always relied heavily on trade and manufacturing?

While the twin evils of suburban sprawl and factory farming are indeed huge threats to a sustainable future, they have not yet entirely snuffed out the traditional Southern way of life that, in many aspects, remains a model for a re-localized society elsewhere.

[...]

Perhaps Southern towns will be slower to adopt written peak-oil plans or formal re-localization efforts than places in New England or California. But the flip side of this intellectual conservatism is that the South was also slow to give up the small-town life and vibrant communities that such activist efforts attempt to rebuild.

Like Staunton, hundreds of other towns across the region have embraced (or never abandoned) farmer's markets, revamped their downtowns and nurtured the best of the South's values - family, community and stewardship of the earth.

He continues with a wonderful description of what the South and her people are and are not and concludes with-

If Southerners choose carefully from their diverse heritage - discarding racism, violence and know-nothing jingoism while embracing community, family and stewardship of the land - the rise of Dixie could be a good thing for everybody.

It is really hard to disagree with this conclusion - racism was something I never knew in my part of SC - it was something I encountered first-hand in other parts, but not at home (meaning my community).

Vindice majores aemulamur