Ran 10km today. Best 1000km was 3:41.

Kunstler on: New Zealand
(btw SA beat NZ 21-20 over the weekend)

We often forget, I think, how magical the blandishments of the high-energy life really are. The Digital Earth Conference organizers, led by former NASA and UN scientist Tim Foresman, were extremely kind to me, starting with business-class travel to Auckland. It is magical enough to be able to get to the South Pacific in one day. The last time I went down there, to Australia in the 90s, I sat in economy with the rest of the livestock, where, in a fugue of insomnia, I watched at least five Sandra Bullock movies end-to-end and got off the plane feeling like my brains were pulled out through my nose. But I did get there virtually overnight.

This time, flying NZ Air business class out of the odious LAX, I had my own little slumber pod, kind of a tricked up Pullman berth with a built-in mini home entertainment center. We boarded late in the evening. The crew plied us with every conceivable luxury from steaming towels to roast lamb, fine sauvignon blanc, and mango ice cream. After that, I scrolled through a video library of classic films and settled in with Robert Altman's original 1970 M*A*S*H movie (Donald Southerland, Elliot Gould) on my personal LED screen while snuggled under a duvet in my little trundle bunk. Somewhere over the Pacific, perhaps between the Clipperton Fracture Zone and Pitcairn Island (and with the help of Ambien 10mg) I zonked out. I woke up hours later, feeling pretty alert, with dawn breaking as the crew hosed us down with caffeinated beverages and excellent croissant. An hour later we touched down in Auckland tra-la.

The geography of New Zealand is stunning to an extreme, but Auckland is not a handsome city. What little architectural history it might have possessed had been mostly destroyed in a Post-WWII rampage of modernism and automobile retrofit. The few extant pre-war bungalow nighborhoods are cute (and supernaturally overpriced), but the newer districts of post-war ranch houses show almost as much genius for horrifying banality of design as their American counterparts. That said, the city center was far more active than any comparably-sized US city, full of shops, bistros, and bustling pedestrians, even at night. Imagine a place about the size of Nashville, only with some human life in it.

There was quite a bit of recent waterfront gentrification in the form of condominium blocks, with bistro-lined promenades along the yachting slips, and much of it was admirable in scale and quality. However, like most cities in the "advanced" nations, Auckland seems to overlook the possibility that waterfront property might some day, not far off, have to be used again for maritime trade operations -- with all the gritty infrastructure of wharves, warehouses, and sailors' flophouses implied. Isolated as it is on the map, NZ in particular had better make some provision for this, as global energy scarcities develop, and air freight becomes less and less viable, and they have to get serious about shipping again.

NZ's car dependency is right up there with the champs of the world (US, Canada, and Australia). In fact, the week before I arrived, the government announced that passenger rail service between Auckland and Wellington, the capital city, was about to be discontinued. I will refrain from remarking further how unbelievably dumb that is. Rush hour traffic in and out of Auckland is utter gridlock. After being in the city about a week, and chatting up some of its leading denizens, I would say that their awareness of the global energy situation was close to nil, and this could not be attributed to their geographical isolation. I could only infer that the psychology of previous investment was as entrenched there as it is here in the US, meaning, like us, they cannot face the fact that they have squandered their postwar wealth on the futureless furnishings of easy motoring and it has therefore become impossible for them to entertain the possibility of living otherwise.

But in the spirit of enjoying the twilight of cheap oil, we rented a car to explore the countryside north of Auckland. Motor tourism is pretty much what the place is set up for. Like America, you cannot see the land any other way. What we found in this "Northland" was a spectacular rugged landscape lightly populated by US and European standards, with a climate like Northern California, gorgeous forests studded with giant tree ferns and other weird flora in the Jurrasic Park style, and countless miles of fantastically beautiful seacoast with utterly empty beaches.

More to the point, perhaps, in those places suited for it, we found much more intensive agriculture than, say, the Eastern US. NZ has three million human beings in a land the size of Great Britain (which has about 60 million). Meanwhile, NZ has as many sheep as Britain has people, and quite a few cattle, too. Where sheep and cattle weren't grazing happily, you saw vineyards and sweet potato fields. The small towns of the region were uniformly hideous -- composed solely of industrial sheds at their centers plus the usual surrounding ranch houses. But, there was next to zero highway sprawl as we know it spilling outside of the towns and we are probably too close to a permanent global energy crisis for much to happen there now.

For those of you wondering, I did not go to New Zealand to scope out a bolt-hole for the tough times ahead. I'm determined to stick around the US and watch the show. But NZ has obvious appeal. Imagine California, un-fucked-up.

During the week we were away, almost nothing newsworthy emanated out of the US. I maintain that we're going to see interesting events unfold in the housing and financial markets this fall, and once the Labor Day holiday is behind us, the fun ought to begin.

Images above are Jean Marie Neethling.