THE END OF SUBURBIA: FILM REVIEW

Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream

By Lawrence Herzog

[The documentary predicts that, as less oil is pumped from the ground and prices surge upward, property values of suburban homes will plummet.]

[Lawrence Herzog is a freelance writer and photographer from Victoria, B.C. He is a specialist in heritage, traffic safety, tourism, hospitality and profile writing and has authored two community history books. For information on reprints of previously published articles, see www.lawrenceherzog.com.]


One of the films that created the most buzz at November’s Global Visions Film Festival (held November 4-7, 2004 in Edmonton, Alberta) is one that hits close to home, here in Canada’s oil heartland. “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream,” presents a startling portrait of a world where oil and natural gas production is decreasing, prices are increasing and where, without affordable petroleum, the suburbs are doomed to become “the slums of the future.”

Ours is a gluttonous society predicated on cheap, plentiful and dependable fossil fuels. But analysis of world oil reserves (particularly those in the Middle East) raises the specter that production has peaked and, in the years ahead, supply will decline. Some predict the drop will be precipitous and could well plunge the world into chaos. We don’t have a “Plan B” to replace the lost oil production, the documentary notes.

Made by Toronto filmmakers Gregory Greene and Barry Silverthorn, “The End of Suburbia” challenges the notions that the oil won’t run out and we can continue to drive our SUVs and live in far-flung neighborhoods without concern.

SUBURBAN WAY OF LIFE EMBEDDED IN OUR CONSCIOUSNESS

The documentary lays out its arguments provocatively, noting that since World War II, North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia, with its abundant promise of wide open space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too the suburban way of life has become embedded in the North American consciousness.

The idea for the film came to Silverthorn in 2002 as he pondered the cause and effect around the September 11 attacks. “I realized that all the major stories of the time were really symptoms of peak oil. Some experts believe we’ve reached the peak and yet the demand for oil continues to increase, driven by the suburban way of life. Well, the additional supply just isn’t there to be extracted affordably and so that way of life will soon become economically and ecologically impossible to maintain. The world is headed for a major crisis.”

The point is made well in the film by such participants as author and contemporary culture critic James Howard Kunstler, who calls the project of suburbia “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” He submits that America “has squandered its wealth in a living arrangement that has no future.”

WE’RE SLAVES TO PETROLEUM

Our North American dependence on petroleum makes us utterly slave to it. We heat our homes with fossil fuels, we eat food grown and transported with the assistance of fossil fuels, we watch televisions and use computers powered with electricity generated by fossil fuels.

Worldwide, there are now 600 million internal combustion engine vehicles on the roads, and a third of them are operating in the United States. Americans who live in suburbs typically drive 50 to 100 miles round trip each day to get to work, to shop and to play.

North Americans use a highly disproportionate amount of the world’s resources. The United States contains just 4 percent of the world’s population, but gobbles up 25 percent of its oil. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that such massive use of non-renewable resources is just not sustainable.

Canadian cities like Edmonton, formerly a walkable place with a vibrant downtown and compact, self-contained neighborhoods, have been consumed by urban sprawl grown in the backs of cheap oil. As pump prices increase, citizens are reluctant to give up on the dream. The American consumption of oil continues to spiral upward, even though the American production of oil peaked in the early 1970s and increasingly the country is reliant on imported oil.

BLOODY WARS TO CONTROL REMAINING OIL RESERVES

The leaders of the western world, George W. Bush and his ilk, are prepared to fight bloody wars for control of the remaining reserves to prop up and maintain the suburban lifestyle. We need only look at the current war in Iraq for evidence of that; fully 60 percent of the world’s known reserves are clustered around the Persian Gulf.

“It’s in everybody’s interest to maintain the façade that this way of life is normal… and we should continue buying and consuming like there is no tomorrow.” Says author Richard Heinberg. The issue of energy resource depletion has been largely ignored by the mainstream media because, as he puts it, “there’s no upside for them. If they decide to tell the people of North America that in fact we are running out of the very resources that fuel economic growth, does that make anybody’s stock price go up, except for a few tiny niche companies that make solar panels and wind turbines?”
Finding other solutions won’t be easy because we’ve yet to find an energy source as efficient as oil. Hydrogen and ethanol, touted as potential replacements for oil, take more energy to create than they deliver. Hydrogen, after all, isn’t even a form of energy, but a form of energy storage, created with electricity and water. The electricity has to be generated using some form of energy-typically fossil fuels.

“SLUMS OF THE FUTURE”

As less oil is pumped from the ground and prices surge ever upward, driven by the forces of supply and demand, the documentary predicts the property values of suburban homes will plummet. There will be a great scramble to flee what Kunstler calls “the slums of the future.”

The documentary postulates that the answer to the coming oil shortage and the imminent collapse of industrial civilization, at least partly, resides in “new urbanism.” It is the re-establishment of the sorts of elements that comprised great cities in the days before the internal combustion engine. Local retail clusters, walkable neighborhoods, work and living spaces in closer proximity and local energy generation are all ingredients for sustainable urban living for the age after fossil fuels.

The Canadian film has been making the rounds on the festival circuit and has already sold nearly 5,000 copies on DVD and video. Nearly 10 percent of the sales have gone to California, where urban sprawl, air pollution from the state’s millions of vehicles and a fragile electrical energy grid are hot button issues.

The success and popularity of recent documentaries (like “Fahrenheit 9/11”) have opened the door a little wider for alternative media, producer Silverthorn says. “People are not getting what they need from the corporate media, which sadly lacks balance and challenge and we’ve been delighted at the response to our film.”

For more information and to order copies of the documentary, visit www.endofsuburbia.com/. If you’d like to offer your thoughts, please drop me an email at lawrenceherzog (at) hotmail.com. For information on reprints of previously published articles, check out my Web site at www.lawrenceherzog.com.