How Is America Going To End?

**jams** · August-04-09, 07:29 PM

From today's piece:

Buffalo and Detroit and Cleveland are today's equivalent of old West ghost towns. They are empty husks that have been strip-mined and abandoned, relics of America's manufacturing age. But when the country melts down, we'll remember that these Great Lakes cities were settled in America's early days for a reason. The five Great Lakes hold 21 percent of the world's fresh surface water—an H2O supply that will come in handy in drier times. As for Buffalo's winning characteristics, Shibley notes that "you've got agricultural land around our perimeter, you have the power from the water and [Niagara] Falls, and you have the industrial infrastructure to die for, the roads and railroads." And even with all of those enticements, there's still plenty of primo waterfront land available for purchase. As he points out one inviting tract, Shibley shouts: "Come home, we're ready to go!"

In Hot America, Buffalo won't necessarily transform into a balmy paradise. Climate change will make extreme weather more extreme, so it's possible the city's brutal winters will become even less pleasant. But if large swaths of the country run out of water and are covered by swirling sands, the occasional blizzard doesn't sound so bad. It's no accident that apocalypticist James Howard Kunstler, who writes extensively about America's devolution in the post-petroleum age, resides in upstate New York. I "picked the place I live in for a reason," he writes in The Long Emergency. "[W]e are surrounded by excellent farmland here and I think my little corner of upstate New York may remain generally civilized."