Trying to save the planet 'is a lot of nonsense'

[JackRiddler]

We must get out of this space and understand that the ecological crisis and the social crisis are two faces of the same disaster.

Rhetorically true but physically false - the social problem is at much smaller scale than the ecological one/s. Sounds like yet another marxist trying to pin his tattered flag to the ecological mast.

I don't understand why you'd ever make such a statement, unless it's because of an ideological aversion.

Broadly speaking the ecological problem (the rapid destruction of the biospheric capacity to sustain life for our species and many others) is a function of the social problem (the relations among humans that determine what our civilization as a whole does). To say the social problem is at "a much smaller scale" seems meaningless, like dismissing the importance of the bullets because cumulatively they weigh only a few ounces, while the dead body full of bullet holes weighs 200 pounds.

[operator kos]

..
IMO, Lovelock's practical pessimism is preferable to Gore's no-lightbulb-left-behindism, which largely lays responsibility at our composter and leaves the Satanic Mills unafflicted by systemic critique.

Jesus FUCKING christ, like they're the only two poles for how to act in the world?! Ever hear of EF Schumacher? Holmgren & Mollison? Vandana Shiva, the Zapatista's, landles peasant movements like the MST, the Peace Brigades, how long have you got? You're cherrypicking your data points Jeff, you naughty naughty man.

Exactly. I can't believe so many people here seem to be stuck in this Hummer vs. Prius spectrum of thought! Choose to live somewhere where you can get around on a bike and public transit. Choose to raise chickens and grow vegetables in your back yard. Choose to organize in your own community to make it sustainable. Get out of the limited discourse which the media has defined.

[Nordic]

Do you really think that people are gonna do anything?

I don't need to think it, i know people who are.

Do you seriously think that in a country where George Bush walks free, and Karl Rove is running around doing book-signings, and the rest of the cabal skates completely free and gets high-paying jobs at universities and think tanks, and nobody cares, in a country where people will shell out 5,000 bucks for a television set, that citizens are suddenly going to get up off their fat asses and do something to "save the planet?"

Interesting that your anger has me saying USians will 'save the planet' - i haven't said anything that stupid in years.
1. the planet doesn't need saving, its not in any particular trouble. Humans and many many other species on the planet are, but we're not the planet.
2. I've never been to the US, never will, have no opinion nor particular interest in how pivotal a role that countrys citizens play in energy descent.
3. Your insistence that 'nobody cares' is unconvincing when there is abundant evidence that plenty of USians do care. The exaggeration makes it sound like you're a little invested in your position, fearful of it being challenged. What would it cost you to be wrong?
4. If you demand 'suddenly' solutions, you will be successful in supplying yourself with disappointment. Its taken millenia to get into this hole, we wont be out by the next ad break.

Please.
Nobody is going to do anything until it's far too late, until they are hungry, cut off, their power shut down, their TV's shut off, the gas stations empty of gas.
No.
Everybody has been warned, the information is out there, we've all known it for decades now, and yet the monster grows, the waste grows, the destruction grows, the population grows.
Lemmings.
People are NOT equipped to deal with this, he's absolutely right.

I'm not equipped to deal with a road accident, so i shouldn't try to get out of a burning wreck? This is childish thinking, merely another form of denial, with the popular subtext - "get yours while you still can". Very sad, but unsurprising.

Meanwhile, those who don't get their life choices predigested by experts are busy building a peaceful, just and sustainable civilisation inside, alongside, anyhowside the shell of the old.

I was using the U.S. as an example, not as "the world of consumerism" in general. The U.S. is the perfect example, since it consumes most of the planet's resources.

I don't know where you live, but I live in Los Angeles, where the hypocrisy and impotence of the "environmental" mindset is staggering. This city will either die a terrible death, or will rape and pillage surrounding areas in an ever-widening radius as it continues to live beyond its means.

There are 20 million people here, and they simply do not care about any of this stuff. They care about their cars, their TV's, their latest remodeling (if they're white and upscale) and they will spend $2 for a pint of water that's supposedly extra-special because it's got vitamins in it. Yes, in a plastic bottle.

There's no way a city like this is going to fundamentally change unless the plug is yanked out of the wall. Chaos and anarchy will ensue.

To me, this city represents the western world. Every other major metropolitan area in the western world is but a smaller and perhaps slightly less wasteful version of this place.

There has been, and there will not be, any reduction, or even a leveling off, of wasteful consumption in this place, unless, like I said, the plug is pulled.

It's nice to think otherwise, but it ain't gonna happen.

We are burning more oil than ever before. We are filling landfills more than ever before. We are leveling entire mountains in order to sift a bit of coal out of them, so we can burn it in order to run all those $5,000 television sets.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to do anything about it. Of course we should. If one is going down in the Titanic, one doesn't chain oneself to a pipe and go down with it, of course not, you try to swim. But you're swimming in 34 degree water in the middle of the night as the ship is going down under your feet.

Try. Try as hard as you can. But if you can find a life-boat, grab it.

[Nordic]

..
IMO, Lovelock's practical pessimism is preferable to Gore's no-lightbulb-left-behindism, which largely lays responsibility at our composter and leaves the Satanic Mills unafflicted by systemic critique.

Jesus FUCKING christ, like they're the only two poles for how to act in the world?! Ever hear of EF Schumacher? Holmgren & Mollison? Vandana Shiva, the Zapatista's, landles peasant movements like the MST, the Peace Brigades, how long have you got? You're cherrypicking your data points Jeff, you naughty naughty man.

Exactly. I can't believe so many people here seem to be stuck in this Hummer vs. Prius spectrum of thought! Choose to live somewhere where you can get around on a bike and public transit. Choose to raise chickens and grow vegetables in your back yard. Choose to organize in your own community to make it sustainable. Get out of the limited discourse which the media has defined.

I don't think anybody is saying don't do those things. In fact, what you're describing is what I would describe as grabbing onto the life-boat and hanging on. How many people can just choose to "live somewhere where you can get around on a bike and public transit."?? How many people can afford to just up and move to wherever they want? I can't. I'm stuck where I'm stuck, desperately trying to pay the overhead every month, I can't afford to move, and I sure can't afford to move to the community of my choice without being either independently wealthy or getting a fantastic new job in such a community, which looks more and more like a pipe dream.

An awful lot of people, no matter how well informed and well intentioned, are gonna go down with the ship.

The math just doesn't work out. Unless we can stretch things out and soften the blow, which I do NOT see happening in this country and culture (I totally agree with Lovelock here), there's gonna be a lot of suffering.

[nathan28]

..
IMO, Lovelock's practical pessimism is preferable to Gore's no-lightbulb-left-behindism, which largely lays responsibility at our composter and leaves the Satanic Mills unafflicted by systemic critique.

Jesus FUCKING christ, like they're the only two poles for how to act in the world?! Ever hear of EF Schumacher? Holmgren & Mollison? Vandana Shiva, the Zapatista's, landles peasant movements like the MST, the Peace Brigades, how long have you got? You're cherrypicking your data points Jeff, you naughty naughty man.

Exactly. I can't believe so many people here seem to be stuck in this Hummer vs. Prius spectrum of thought! Choose to live somewhere where you can get around on a bike and public transit. Choose to raise chickens and grow vegetables in your back yard. Choose to organize in your own community to make it sustainable. Get out of the limited discourse which the media has defined.

Largely, though, those organizations do exist in communities: farm shares, backyard chickens & nearby hog farms, local dairy. Bicycling and public transport are bigger issues but readily available--people would rather butt-scoot their Prius to the farmer's market than--imagine, the horror--either carry an umbrella or ride a bicycle in the rain. But those still happen, and I'm aware of people very, very active in recruiting for those efforts. The problem, though, is that you're still at the altar of "consumer choice", though you do want to get away from it. I suspect as well that there's a conflation of moral sentiment for actual solution. As anarcho-primatavists like to point out, industry, not consumption, is what contributes to the vast bulk of environmental degradation.

Systemic change will still be necessary, and it's delusional to pretend that otherwise. I ride a bicycle because even though I hate it, it's the right thing to do, but that's because I'm operating on some bizarre hodgepodge of personal intuition, categorical imperative and sentiment of solidarity, which I can't expect to apply generally--especially not that last bit, which, frankly, is just a left-over bit of class identity that has been irrelevant for more than a decade and has nothing to do with my current social standing, not here in America. I rarely buy much of anything besides food, much of which is local, and utility services. But regardless, I'm not going to kid myself.

Let me try another way: CAFE standards on cars--i.e., Federal-level regulation--had a bigger impact on vehicle MPG, visible with the change to permit exemptions for "light trucks"--than the current hybrid/green mania does, and that was with technology a quarter of a century older than today's. This recent ruling on strip-mining, to prevent filling as a means to curtail strip-mining, is another example of the power of top-down change, and arguably, the necessity. Because even if you living in hippie paradise, drinking raw goat milk from your neighbor's farm and using solar-powered scooters, someone's still mining tungsten and gold and tearing the tops off mountains.

IOW: rhetoric is the precursor to action, so it's best to have one's in line and thought-out.

[82_28]

I was using the U.S. as an example, not as "the world of consumerism" in general. The U.S. is the perfect example, since it consumes most of the planet's resources.

I don't know where you live, but I live in Los Angeles, where the hypocrisy and impotence of the "environmental" mindset is staggering. This city will either die a terrible death, or will rape and pillage surrounding areas in an ever-widening radius as it continues to live beyond its means.

There are 20 million people here, and they simply do not care about any of this stuff. They care about their cars, their TV's, their latest remodeling (if they're white and upscale) and they will spend $2 for a pint of water that's supposedly extra-special because it's got vitamins in it. Yes, in a plastic bottle.

There's no way a city like this is going to fundamentally change unless the plug is yanked out of the wall. Chaos and anarchy will ensue.

To me, this city represents the western world. Every other major metropolitan area in the western world is but a smaller and perhaps slightly less wasteful version of this place.

There has been, and there will not be, any reduction, or even a leveling off, of wasteful consumption in this place, unless, like I said, the plug is pulled.

It's nice to think otherwise, but it ain't gonna happen.

We are burning more oil than ever before. We are filling landfills more than ever before. We are leveling entire mountains in order to sift a bit of coal out of them, so we can burn it in order to run all those $5,000 television sets.

I'm not saying we shouldn't try to do anything about it. Of course we should. If one is going down in the Titanic, one doesn't chain oneself to a pipe and go down with it, of course not, you try to swim. But you're swimming in 34 degree water in the middle of the night as the ship is going down under your feet.

Try. Try as hard as you can. But if you can find a life-boat, grab it.

Yes, this is exactly why I've always had a strange, hard to put a finger on, intrinsic fear of the LA basin and it's sprawling meaningless hinterlands. Just too big. No way in and no way out, save the useless freeways in a time of total chaos. Just visiting there, the times that I have, I have always felt such an unease. Now, I am a bit of a city boy, but there is something about cities, bounded by water, which you cannot see the end of from a high vista, that just do not seem sustainable. But, sustainable in another way is what I mean. There is just something too vast, too complex, the under-girdings too forgotten about, the air too gray. The two biggest cities I have lived in are Denver and Seattle -- while each sprawling in their own ways -- offer an easily walked to wilderness should the time arise and the weather permit, whether in emergency or just because you want to. LA is motherfucking weird and I honestly do not know how anybody can live there at this point.





"Los Angeles Is Burning"

Somewhere high in the desert near a curtain of a blue
St. Anne's skirts are billowing
But down here in the city of the lime lights
The fans of santa ana are withering
And you can’t deny that living is easy
If you never look behind the scenery
It's showtime for dry climes
And bedlam is dreaming of rain

When the hills of los angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And los angeles is burning

This is not a test
Of the emergency broadcast system
Where malibu fires and radio towers
Conspire to dance again
And I cannot believe the media Mecca
They're only trying to peddle reality,
Catch it on prime time, story at nine
The whole world is going insane

When the hills of los angeles are burning
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And los angeles is burning

A placard reads
"the end of days"
Jacaranda boughs are bending in the haze

More a question than a curse
How could hell be any worse?

The flames are stunning
The cameras running
So take warning

When the hills of los angeles are burnin
Palm trees are candles in the murder wind
So many lives are on the breeze
Even the stars are ill at ease
And los angeles is burning

[nathan28]

What is it with you misanthropic anti-urbanists? Did you know that NYC--surrounded by water! what, is the GW bridge going to collapse when oil hits $4/gallon, or something?--is more energy-efficient than most of California, including Green Yuppie Lifestyle HQ, San Francisco? Cities are ten millennia old.

And that "THE SHTF ONOZ BETTER RUN!" nonsense is just that. In New Orleans people banded together for their own sake--anarchic self-organization, mutual self-defense and all that--almost immediately. See the Washington City Paper. It was when the police dispersed via force, and packed them into the Superdome that it got bad. You know for a fact you won't make it alone, and you better sure as shit find a neighbor when you bug out to the wilderness. Hell, even Robinson Crusoe needed to do that.

[82_28]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_la ... ut_history

I don't think anybody is being misanthropic here, Nate. It's the sprawl, it's the waste, it's the depersonalization, it's the needless complexity, it's the consumerism, it's the bankruptcy of the said vast complex statehoods, it's the over use of resources for needless and repetitive tasks. It's also the costs and responsibility (that I certainly don't have) of maintaining all this. It's where we are in history and on planet Earth. Things aren't going so good. We really should all have a RI meetup at Spago, Beverley Hills and hash this out. I'll be arriving via Alaskan at LAX around 9PM, I have my towncar lined up and should be there, depending upon traffic, sometime 'round 10:30 or 11. Happy hour should be great though. Can anybody give me a ride back to the W though so I can get a bit of a swim in? Thanks!

http://www.gadling.com/2010/04/02/the-w ... ts-pool/?d

[JackRiddler]

If sprawl is such a problem then New York City is a solution. I'm sure the per capita energy consumption there is atrocious, but because of waste and overconsumption, certainly not because of population density which allows far greater efficiencies. As for the other problems you describe - depersonalization, complexity, consumerism, governments going bankrupt, these are also not related to population density and just as prevalent in the automotive depersonalized land of strip malls. New York has more face-to-face interaction with people with names than most places I've seen. Most of the ideas and social movements we're talking about as positive spring up in places where people gather, not on some pastoral utopia.

[82_28]

If sprawl is such a problem then New York City is a solution. I'm sure the per capita energy consumption there is atrocious, but because of waste and overconsumption, certainly not because of population density which allows far greater efficiencies. As for the other problems you describe - depersonalization, complexity, consumerism, governments going bankrupt, these are also not related to population density and just as prevalent in the automotive depersonalized land of strip malls. New York has more face-to-face interaction with people with names than most places I've seen. Most of the ideas and social movements we're talking about as positive spring up in places where people gather, not on some pastoral utopia.

Well, note I did not bring up NYC. I am aware of the stories and studies about how New Yorkers have less of a "carbon footprint" than most. I was talking about LA specifically RE Nordic's take. I didn't make myself clear. Apologies.

Yes, there is much more face to face contact in NYC outside of places of employment, places of worship, in-groups and whatnot. NYC relies much more and an even more complex and concentrated system than an LA, but the close proximity to others in that city necessitates that the much smaller "mile for mile" infrastructure be taken care of -- which is impossible in a place like LA or Phoenix where places that get forgotten about, simply get forgotten about and become Kunstler's worst nightmare. As everyone knows, cars are not needed in a NYC, in fact they are a detriment to life there. But this is in the design of the city or lack of design therein. It is a true testament to human ingenuity to have so many layers of complex activity. An LA, a Phoenix, a Denver do not have the "luxury" of being so chaotically close knit.

In other words, I was not intimating that cities are "bad". As I said, I am "somewhat of a city person". I've never lived in the country or mountains or forests or wherever. I was just saying and making the observation that LA happens to be, IMO, a particularly bad cesspool, that when tragedy strikes, I think it will be worse off that most other places, mainly due to the reliance upon cars that need to travel fairly vast distances in order to escape on roads that may or may not exist, nor the fuel to get the vehicle from point a to point b. Are there holes in my logic? Absolutely! But, I don't think that many holes.

Memoirs of a Suburban Pioneer Child
by James Howard Kunstler

One September day in 1954 my father and mother and I drove twenty miles east out of New York City in our Studebaker on the Northern State Parkway to meet the movers at our new house "in the country," as my mother would refer forever to any place where you cannot walk out your front door and hail a taxi. Until that time Long Island had been one of the most beautiful places in the United States, and our house was one small reason it would not remain that way much longer.
It was in a "development" called Northwood outside Roslyn Village. The name had only a casual relation to geography. Indeed it was north of many things -- the parkway, the land of Dixie, the Tropic of Capricorn -- but the wood part was spurious since the tract was erected on old hayfields, and among the spanking new houses hardly a tree stood over ten feet tall. The houses, with a few exceptions, were identical boxy split-levels, clad in asphalt shingles of inoffensive pastel colors, but with two eye-like windows above a gaping garage door that gave the facades an unfortunate look of slack-jawed cretinism.
Our house was one of the few exceptions, but not much better: a ranch clad in natural cedar shingles. It had a front porch too narrow to put furniture on and shutters that didn't close or conform to the dimensions of the windows. It sported no other decorative elaborations beside an iron carriage lamp on the front lawn that was intended to evoke ye olde post road days, or something like that. What it lacked in exterior grandeur, it made up in comfort inside. The three bedrooms were ample. We had baths galore for a family of three, a kitchen loaded with electric wonders, wall-to-wall carpeting throughout, and a real fireplace in the living room. The place cost about $25,000.
Our quarter-acre lot lay at the edge of the development. Behind our treeless back yard stood what appeared to my eyes to be an endless forest like the wilderness where Davey Crockett slew bears. In fact it was the 480 acre estate of Clarence Hungerford Mackay, president and major stockholder of the Postal Telegraph Cable Company -- the precursor of Western Union. Mackay was long gone by then, his heirs and assigns scattered to the winds, and "Harbor Hill," as the property had been called, was in a sad state of dereliction.
A lacework of gravel carriage drives overgrown by dogwood and rhododendron criss-crossed the property. At its heart stood the old mansion. I don't recall its exact style -- Shingle? Queen Anne? Railroad Romanesque? But it was much larger than any Northwood house. Juvenile delinquents had lit fires inside, and not necessarily in the many fireplaces. Yet for its shattered glass, musty odors, and bird droppings, the mansion projected tremendous charm and mystery. Even in ruin, it felt much more authentic than our own snug carpeted tract houses, and I know we regarded it as a sort of sacred place, as palpably a place apart from our familiar world. We certainly spent a lot of time there.
This was the age before malls, and even highway strips were then still a relative rarity. My little cohorts and I spent a lot of time in Roslyn Village, about a mile by bike from Northwood. Roslyn had candy stores, a movie theater, the wonderful Bryant Library, and a splendid park with duck ponds and mill-races -- a marvelously exciting place to play. Even at eight years old, we understood very clearly that the village was a different kind of organism than our housing development, and a far superior one, too. The boring sterility of Northwood was obvious to us.
There was also quite a bit of real countryside left in the vicinity. The horse farms, estates, and narrow dirt roads of Muttontown were easily reachable by bike a little east of Glen Cove Road, and just as we understood the difference between a real town and a housing tract, we also learned to recognize that suburbia was not really the country either -- despite what my mother said. I doubt that there is a single idea that has since become more deeply lost to our culture than the distinction between the town and the country. Three generations of suburban sprawl have obliterated it from our national psychology. We have become a cartoon nation and suburbia is our cartoon version of life in the country.
One week in the spring of 1956, the bulldozers appeared in the great woods behind our house. Soon they had dug a storm sump the size of Lake Ronkonkoma back there, a big ocher gash surrounded by chain-link fencing. In the months that followed, the trees crashed down, the ruined mansion was demolished, new tract houses went up, and Clarence Hungerford Mackay's 480 acres was turned into another development called -- what else? -- Country Estates!
A year later, my parents landed in divorce court, and I moved back into Manhattan with my mom, where I spent, not altogether unhappily, the remainder of my childhood.

http://www.kunstler.com/mags_LIchild.html

[JackRiddler]

Right, well if we're going to distinguish among cities, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Dubai come to mind immediately as the biggest disasters, and in all these cases one factor is dominant: WATER.

[Nordic]

Right, well if we're going to distinguish among cities, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Dubai come to mind immediately as the biggest disasters, and in all these cases one factor is dominant: WATER.

Yeah, pretty stupid damn places to build huge cities.

Why anyone lives in Las Vegas is beyond me.

Of course people say that about Los Angeles, and yet I'm here. Why? Well, for the work of course. It is, absolutely, the ONLY reason to live here. If there's no work, there's no reason to be here whatsoever (and there hasn't been hardly any the last year and a half). Yet 99% of the people who live here don't work in the film/entertainment industry (which, is the "work" I'm talking about) and yet ... they're still here. Why? It's home and it's all they know.

The entire Southwest is pretty much at the mercy of a well-lubricated economic system. If it goes awry, these places turn to deadly, foodless dustbowls right away.

Maybe that's what's fueled my rather dark perspective on this whole subject, because all the cities around here, and this one especially, are almost 100% artificially sustained.

The only state in the country that seems to be thinking ahead and doing anything useful is Oregon (of course). If I could find a job in Oregon I'd move there.

[Joe Hillshoist]

What is it with you misanthropic anti-urbanists? Did you know that NYC--surrounded by water! what, is the GW bridge going to collapse when oil hits $4/gallon, or something?--is more energy-efficient than most of California, including Green Yuppie Lifestyle HQ, San Francisco? Cities are ten millennia old.

And that "THE SHTF ONOZ BETTER RUN!" nonsense is just that. In New Orleans people banded together for their own sake--anarchic self-organization, mutual self-defense and all that--almost immediately. See the Washington City Paper. It was when the police dispersed via force, and packed them into the Superdome that it got bad. You know for a fact you won't make it alone, and you better sure as shit find a neighbor when you bug out to the wilderness. Hell, even Robinson Crusoe needed to do that.

Not living incities is hundreds of millenia old.

[Uncle $cam]

Excellent comments guys, however, I have two words in summery: Murray Bookchin.
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy.
http://endofcapitalism.com/2009/08/08/r ... hierarchy/

Bookchin's synthesis of ecology, anthropology and political theory traces our conflicting legacies of hierarchy and freedom from the first emergence of human culture to today's globalized capitalism, constantly pointing the way to a sane, sustainable ecological future.

Decades old, but the tools he gives us is still as of yet, untapped. As are any of his other works.

Capitalism be damned...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ecology

[Iamwhomiam]

82,

I've often enjoyed reading Kunstler's rants, but this one is a bit too colored with inaccurate details, though I'm sure they are unintentionally. After all, he was a young boy who only lived in Roslyn for less than two years.

My family was one of the first families to have settled on Long Island in the 1640s and on the North Shore at the head of Hempstead Harbor they founded Roslyn, though that was not what it was called back then. They owned an immense amount of land that spanned the island from its south shore to its north shore and included most of what is now Nassau County some of Queens and a portion of Suffolk County.

I know Roslyn as well as anyone does. I lived there in the early '70s before moving upstate in 1974. I still have relatives living on Long Island, but after 350 years, I was the last of my line to line to live in Roslyn. I sold my family's home to the Roslyn Preservation Society in 1999 when it became apparent that neither of my children were going to move back to the island. I could no longer find any comfort on Long Island, though it does have the best surf on the east coast, so I contacted someone I knew who would be interested in buying my home and sold it to the Society with the understanding that it would be opened for public tours twice a year. My home was a simple home, not a mansion by any stretch of the imagination.

Roslyn is 17 miles from Manhattan. If you read Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or saw the movie you will understand why this area was called the Gold Coast. If you haven't, it was called this because of the profusion of gigantic estates with mansions that would rival those of European royalty, but these were owned by Robber Barons and other rich industrialists.

Harbor Hill, Mackay's (correctly pronounced Mack-E) estate house, was designed by Stanford White, (one of my favorite architects, though an abhorrent individual) and was built in 1902 on 688 acres of land on the highest hill in Nassau County at a cost of nearly $800K. (about $16m today) And that cost didn't include art, furnishings, outbuildings landscaping, or the architect's commission.

The house was torn down (dynamited) in 1947, seven years before Kunstler moved from NYC to LI. So, if he was wandering around the estate when he was a kid, Kunstler wasn't seeing the Mackay Mansion, but rather was playing about a guest cottage or some other out-building, as all great estates had aside from the main house several out-buildings, and guest houses so large that most of us would consider them mansions. Just take a look at his carriage house and I think you'll see what I mean. (2nd pic down)

(A bit of RI trivia: White's last project was building Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower.

My property bordered the estate of Childs Frick, son of Henry Clay Frick, who bought the property for his son as a wedding present from poet William Cullen Bryant, which had been a portion of Cedarmere. My house and Frick's are located on the hill to the north of Harbor Hill, directly under "Wheatley" on this map from 1897. The Frick estate is now the Nassau County Fine Arts Museum.

Kunstler's childhood home, which was built on land that was once part of Mackay's estate, at $24K in 1954 was a very expensive home in a very exclusive North Shore neighborhood. Levitt houses (the 1st Levittown) were then selling for between $4600 to $7400. My father was a builder and the home he built for us on the south shore was priced at $18k in 1954. Today my childhood home would sell in excess of $1.5m. Kunstlers would bring at least $2.5m.

Today Kunstler lives in Saratoga Springs, a summer retreat for many of the worlds wealthy, but usually they're in town only in August, to buy or sell horses at the Fasig-Tipton yearling auction and to race their horses at the track that is host to America's oldest stakes race, The Travers.

Long Island has been over-built and an unsustainable population bears being poisoned by pollution from NYC's coal-fired power plants, the island's waste incinerators emissions and automobile exhaust. The smog is often as bad as LA's and if you ever travel to the top of the Empire State Building, be sure to go on a windy day, because if you go on a perfectly calm and clear day and look out to the east over the length of Long Island all you will be able to see is a soot filled sickly yellow sky.

If you ever have a chance to visit Roslyn be sure to visit the park everyone calls the Roslyn duckpond. It is really a very beautiful park with spring fed ponds, and home to New York's first paper mill with an operating water wheel. Main Street has an abundance of 18th and 19 century homes, more than any other town on Long Island.

All in all, Roslyn is a lovely village with a rich history, but you've got to be rich if you plan on living there.

We all must do whatever we can to help restore the damage we all have done to the Earth. There are things that can be done, though most of us may not see the results of our good work. We must respect what sustains us as much that which gives us life.

I will write more on what we can do, what we must do, within the next 4 or 5 days. Crazy busy trying to guide policy towards a sustainable future...