Mort-Gage

I made mention of the "morting" of my mortgage as a consistent argument against the unsustainable nature of the way we live. I argue that if we didn't run up such massive private and public indebtedness, we'd naturally live more sustainably.

We need to import two thirds of our energy...and that percentage is only going to increase with the way my City of Elk Grove (along with how the rest of our nation) intends on expanding. We are pinning our future economic hopes on the timely extraction of Nigerian crude oil or the continued washing of Alberta tar sands. This is because we know that domestic US oil production has declined every year since 1970 and will continue to decline every year going forward for as long as we remain a nation. The US allotment has been used up; no, not entirely, but if we started producing oil in 1880 and it peaked in 1970, we can surmise that by 2075 we'll have used virtually all of it. Perhaps my kids will still be alive then, and most certainly my grand kids will be.

All for what? Suburban sprawl. WalMart's "warehouse on wheels" to enable the importation of cheap shit from Asia. Chilean grapes in February. Duck hunting in December.

The way I see it, we are still borrowing from the future to support our lifestyles. I don't want to argue that we ought to leave anything for follow-on generations -- we are incapable of that regardless. I do want to argue that if we didn't borrow from the future we'd all live better lives than we currently do.

I read an article in the Sacramento News & Review today that suggested that one of our cannabis clubs overlooks the most depressing thoroughfare in Sacramento -- Power Inn Blvd. It indeed is nothing more than an auto-dominant six lane highway, used to shuttle Elk Grovians northwards each day to their jobs in Sacramento and other ancillary cities like Rancho Cordova, and back again in the evenings. We use the single, one time allotment of fossil fuel to solo-commute heroic distances, and in my mind I believe our future generations will look upon this as a complete waste. Today, we decry the actions of men who chopped down the largest Sequioa in Calaveras County, some ninety years ago, yet they didn't think anything of what they were doing. Only in hindsight do we recognize the error of their ways.

Nonetheless, I see us as completely and irrevocably discounting the future to support our current suburban lifestyles without one fucking consideration of the impacts we are making towards our nation's future. We all know we are consuming external energy to support the excessive driving of our Muranos and Lexi and X5s and Land Rovers but because they provide us with such a sense of power and dominance over nature and each other we fail to ever question our use of them. We don't give a damn about the environmental degradation of the Nigerian coastline, so long as we get liberal, regular supplies of cheap gasoline to visit our Bay Area relatives every weekend. Let them Nigerians piss off. They're black and un-American, so fuck 'em, let them eat gruel, they ought to be happy with that.

If we couldn't buy our Altimas and Highlanders on credit, if we couldn't require our future efforts to purchase these vehicles via payments on time, and instead we were forced to develop the money ahead of time to buy these things, and instead we were forced to account for the future reduction in availability of the fuels used to power them, perhaps we'd have a better sense of the sorts of future discounting we've done to allow 95-mile round trip commutes from Elk Grove to jobs in the Bay Area. Perhaps we'd never have built 3,400 sq ft garage majals along the banks of the Consumnes River in the first place...