UnderwoodEndofSuburbia

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream

The End of Suburbia was released in 2004, by director Gregory Greene. The premise of this film is basically that the world is running out of oil reserves, and this will adversely affect suburbia. Suburbia in itself is not a very sustainable thing, and so this is one of the areas in America that will be hit the hardest by oil depletion.

The film outlines how suburbia came to be what it is—how it started out as a refuge from the city that only the very wealthy could afford in 1897, then became more accessible in the early 1900’s with the advent of the streetcar suburb. Then in the 1920’s with the mass production of the automobile, the suburbs again changed to be even more accessible to everyone—so long as they had a car. This was interrupted by the Great Depression and WWII, but ultimately, WWII led to the explosive growth of the suburb and created what suburbia is today. This is because when all of the veterans came home, they were promised a nice little house in the suburbs—the new American dream.

However, suburbs were a “false promise.” They were supposed to be ‘country living for everyone,’ but we all know that suburbs are by no means the country. Actually, the suburbs are a combination of the disadvantages of country living with the disadvantages of living in towns/cities, without the real advantages of either. Suburbs are completely automobile dependent, since car companies bought up most American light rail lines and either shut them down, or let them run into disrepair, and the low population density of suburbia won’t support new bus or rail lines. This is going to be a major problem when we run out of oil.

Right now, we are either at the peak of oil production, or just past it, which means that we will be producing less and less oil as time goes on. We are also running low on natural gas. One thing I found really shocking is that only 15% of the natural gas Americans use comes from Canada, but that accounts for about 50% of Canada’s natural gas production. Without oil and natural gas, America will be a very different place. There is no other source of energy that can provide as much energy as we use right now, so we’ll have to cut back the amount of energy we use. There really isn’t an or in that statement, because, well, there is no energy to provide for an or. Either we cut back willingly, or there won’t be energy to use. This is scary because our economic growth has been predicated on energy consumption. One area that especially will be in trouble will be our corporate farming system, because it uses so much oil. Not only does it use oil for tractors and for shipping, but fertilizers are made from natural gas, and pesticides are made from petroleum. In fact, in the US, we consume 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy for every one calorie of food we eat, not including transportation and cooking. This is pretty scary considering we’re running out of oil.

Basically, what we need to do is to go back to our old ways of life, of either living in rural areas or in cities. We need to live in areas where you can walk to the places that you need to go, like we did before automobiles. There is a major movement advocating a return to these walkable communities and re-learning the things about planning these communities that we used to know but lost in the age of suburbanization called New Urbanism (__Bourgeois Utopia: The Rise and Fall of the Suburb__ by Robert Fishman is highly informative on both the evolution of suburbs and reactions against suburbs, though for a shorter explanation of new urbanism try []).

Honestly, I think this film could have been better. Although there was a good amount of facts, a lot of it seemed theoretical, which isn’t really good when you’re trying to convince someone that they need to change their entire way of life. For example, there was a lot of theorizing about the future, but this got a little bit hazy and mixed up with theorizing about New Urbanism, and it was a little hard to tell where the lines were drawn. I’m also not really sure what audience they were addressing, whether it was specifically people who live in the suburbs or some other audience. I found [] more helpful, because it has articles both about oil and about alternative fuels and ‘country livng’ (aka farming). If you really want to explore country living though, and what it takes to live locally, I suggest __Animal, Vegetable, Miracle__ by Barbara Kingsolver, because it proves that a (relatively) average family with enough land to have a big garden can support themselves locally for an entire year, even through the winter, and is much more hopeful than this film.