Notable exceptions aside, many of our species’ greatest travesties owe their genesis to good intentions.

The road to hell, and what not.

Suburbia – more specifically urban sprawl – represents one of America’s greatest unintended failures.

Walkable cities

Two family members live in a mid-sized European city close to the city center. Although I’ve neither been there nor inquired about the rent, I’ll wager that the apartment is both small and pricey compared to the average American suburban tract home.

However, there’s one key difference: six different bakeries lie within walking distance. SIX!

And with the bakeries come every other sort of small merchandiser.

You don’t need a vehicle to subsist.

In America – even in relatively contained Lubbock – that does not exist. Even here, roofs stretch to the horizon. Land is plentiful in West Texas (and a neighborhood near you), so we grow horizontally rather than vertically.

We insist on everything cheaper, so nothing is local, and everything stretches farther away into an even bigger Big Box.

Sustainability

The trouble is that suburbia is among the least sustainable endeavors undertaken by this species.

Remove cheap energy (i.e., oil), and suburbia transforms to a ghost town.

As a lark, I walked to the nearest grocery store – a Wal-Mart.

This sojourn drips with sick irony, as Wal-Mart burned out our city centers like economic napalm.

In the name of a cheaper toaster, your small to mid-sized town no longer has an economic center.

I digress.

Suburban hiking

No sidewalk makes the entire trip to Wal-Mart. So one contends with either vehicular traffic, or on this particular day, the muddy remnants of a winter snowstorm. Not exactly a pleasant shopping trip.

This is also the nearest place to catch public transit. Hence, should I decide to park the vehicle in lieu of mass transit, this would be the daily commute.

Rain, infrequent snow, or omnipresent wind included.

It’s my fault that I live in suburbia. Its siren’s song lured my family like so much of America. Now we’re trapped, and energy prices are poised to resume their northward climb.

So we’ll cling to our faux-country homes at the far fringes of our gutted cities that are anything but walkable – woefully prepared for a world post cheap oil.

But that’s a story and a photo for another day.

However, when I saw James Howard Kunstler on The Colbert Report (it could have been The Daily Show) several months ago, I was intrigued by his book, World Made by Hand.

It’s a fictional portrayal of life after oil. And the potential wars that follow falling off of Hubbert’s Peak.

It was a great book, and I highly recommend it. I’ve now ordered The Long Emergency, the nonfiction book Kunstler wrote about the topic before World Made by Hand.

In the meantime, however, I may have to visit my father for some wordworking lessons. Somehow the World Made by Hand seems far more likely than I ever imagined.