FILM / VIDEO

REVIEW IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ON 13 MARCH 2005

RUNNING ON EMPTY by Natalie Canavor

If the cost of energy skyrockets, are the suburbs doomed? Would Long Island, already paying among the highest fuel and electricity rates in the country, become an unsustainably expensive place to live?

A way of thinking that says “yes” is circulating, and has assumed tangible form in an video called “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream.” Made in Toronto by the independent producers Gregory Dunne and Barry Silverthorn, it explores the idea that the world is funning out of cheap petrofuels and predicts the utter ruin of North America’s suburbs- and not in the distant future, but somewhere between 5 and 25 years from now.

The video was screened last month at Molloy College in Rockville Center, under the sponsorship of Long Island Neighborhood Network, an organization that promotes “new urbanism” or “smart growth” philosophy, which favors high-density, mixed–use work-where-you-live downtowns over the classic low density, home-with-a-yard model of suburbia.
The video opens with nostalgic clips of the early days of suburbia- excited young couples holding boxy little model homes, families piling up their shopping carts, neat little back yards- and asserts that the new sprawl pattern, totally dependent on the automobile, became synonymous with the American dream. It also represents, in the words of a featured commentator, James Howard Kunstler, “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. America took all it postwar wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future.

In this view the 21st-century poison is peak oil theory, the idea that the world has reached its maximum oil production or soon will and that we are entering a period when escalating energy costs will make the suburban lifestyle untenable. The case is made by assorted geologists, professors, writers and oil industry pundits, but most notably Mr. Kunstler, a new urbanist whose book “Geography of Nowhere” is a strident criticism of suburbia.
As envisioned by Messrs. Greene and Silverthron, the consequences go way beyond violence a the gas pump to include: unending economic depression, with radical downsizing of everything from manufacturing to education; a slump in food production because of soil degradation, lack of oil-based fertilizers and skyrocketing shipping costs; political upheavals; the election of demagogues; and global conflict as the United States tries by military means to maintain its disproportionate consumption of the world’s oil. The filmmakers see the American suburbs as the slums of the future where people are desperately relearning how to grow their own food.

“ I do see a lot of potential for darkness,” Mr. Kunstler comments. “There’ll be a great scramble to get out of the suburbs, a sort of fight over the table scraps of the 20th century.”
The video’s original footage was shot near Toronto and various areas of the United States, and in fact the suburbs all do look remarkably alike. Mr. Green said in a telephone interview that no shooting was done on Long Island, but that he had heard of Levittown.
Mr. Kunstler, whose ideas form the backbone of “End of Suburbia,” lived in Roslyn for three years as a child beginning in 1954 and visited regularly thereafter,. “Certainly my impressions were shaped there,” he said. “That part of the Island was only beginning to be destroyed and I actually watched the process vividly as the estate that ran behind my backyard was turned into a cul-de-sac subdivision. The experience stayed with me.”
Following the screening was a discussion period. “Is this where we get out the purple Kool-Aid?” asked Eric Alexander, executive director of Vision Long Island.

The audience of about 50 in the auditorium in Rockville Centre, in the heart of what is often described as the first suburb, was enthusiastic, in a shell-shocked sort of way. Since most in attendance had gotten wind of the screening via environmentalists networking channels, they tended to find reinforcement for their own beliefs rather than reason to question the basic premises. There were comments about the need to grow our won food, create new lifestyle models on the Island, fight nimbyism and conserve energy in both large-scale and personal ways.

In the bleak future projected by the film, the only glimpse of hope is new urbanism. This is the philosophy that drives Vision Long Island.