When I was a girl growing up in Southern California, I was horse crazy, absolutely. I saved my allowance to go riding on Sunday afternoons after church. It cost $2.50/hour and of course we always asked for Dusty or Peanuts, the horses that would run. I wished to own a horse of my own, but that never 
happened. I don’t regret that. Being near them and riding them gave me plenty of happiness, by itself.
David Brooks, a smart New York Times columnist I respect a lot, seems to be confusing wishes with horses in his column today. He’s reporting that Americans are restless against limits, and yearn to move to the cities of the West and South. Also, they’d actually prefer suburbs and rural areas over cities. Compactness, density, more bicycling and less driving are not, after all, part of the American dream, Mr. Brooks states a recent Pew Research Center study has found. (That’s just for Amsterdam.)
I think Mr. Brooks’ interpretation is wrong-headed. Mr. Brooks is doing the old-school, inside-the-box thinking that most folks are still doing most of the time. He’s assuming endless resources that give us endless choices. He’s writing as if gas will stay as cheap as it is right now, as if driving 30-60 miles in any given day will always be an option. He’s forgetting that global warming is changing our world even more rapidly than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had found in its initial modeling.
The popular cities of Phoenix, Orlando, Tampa, and San Antonio are only popular because artificially cheap fossil fuels are refrigerating the Sun Belt’s stiflingly hot air most months of the year. Sad to say, when heat waves strike and air conditioning systems break down, the frail elderly tend to die from the heat. Being a snow bird or snow refugee may not be sustainable in even the mid-term future. And the Southwest is only habitable to large human populations due to cheap water being pumped from shrinking aquifers. The aquifers will eventually go dry, at which point environmental refugees will head north, joining the large numbers of refugees fleeing coastal areas that rising sea levels will flood.
I grew up in the West and live in it, and Mr. Brooks is romanticizing it. Most of the West is arid and only easy and pleasant to live in because of inputs — the water and fossil fuels discussed above — that are temporary. Mr. Brooks is lightheartedly reporting on people’s desire to move to the West and the Sun Belt as if wishes were horses. He doesn’t know his horses.
The song Angel From Montgomery ends with “If wishes were horses and lightning desire / This old house would have burnt down a long time ago”. Well, wishes are not horses, but the house, i.e. our current way of life based on cheap oil, is in fact burning down. And writers like David Brooks should be writing in realistic, responsible veins rather than old-school, wishes-based thinking.
photo courtesy of Stuck in Customs
Ms. Wiley,
When I read Dave’s comments I took them as more a reflection of what people reported as wanting rather than on the appropriateness of those desires. For whatever reason I end up seeing a lot of survey data at work on issues like Global Warming and typically people respond that they prefer solutions that involve somebody else taking care of the problem i.e the infamous “let them take care of it”. What Dave appears to be writing about is a similar set of responses, with that same type of self centered focus. Perhaps for many the thinking goes something like this. “I want to live where I want and let somebody else (them) can take care of those pesky climate change, water scarcity and sprawl issues.