Kunstler: Doh Hope

Kunstler: It would have been nice, too, if the doltish George W. Bush, when addressing extreme airport congestion in 2003, had considered serious upgrades in normal train service between the many US cities 500 miles or so apart. The idea never entered his walnut brain.

SHOOT: Too many TV and too many distractions have evidently turned vast swathes of us into idiots. Doh.

clipped from kunstler.com To put it bluntly, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is perhaps the only surviving collective intelligence left in the United States that is producing ideas consistent with the reality.  They recognize that our survival depends on down-scaling and re-localization. They recognize the crisis we will soon face in food production, and the desperate need to reactivate the relationship between the way we inhabit the landscape and the way we feed ourselves. They recognize that the solution to the liquid fuels crisis is not cars that can run by other means but on walkable towns and cities connected by public transit. This is exactly what you will not find in the pages of The New York Times or the political corridors of power.  Oh, by the way, the Obama administration contacted one of the leading lights of the New Urbanism in the weeks after the inauguration.  He never heard back from them.  I guess they're not interested.