These days it seems Americans like nothing better than grabbing a big bowl of popcorn and settling in for a little end-of-the-world fantasy. The action-packed but relentlessly bleak zombie series The Walking Dead is a big TV hit, and it has plenty of company on the big screen, too: The Road, The Hunger Games, I Am Legend, Contagion, The Book of Eli — you know the ones.

Now NBC is making its contribution to the genre, Revolution, which follows a band of gorgeous and impeccably rumpled survivors living 15 years after all electricity-powered devices mysteriously went dead. Last week’s premiere episode, helmed by J.J. Abrams and Jon Favreau, drew 11.6 million viewers, the most of any TV drama of the last three years. (The second episode is on tonight.)

It seems that we’re hungry for collapse — but why?

Maybe we’re living out our anxieties from the comfort of our living rooms, as many of these apocalyptic stories are centered on real threats to civilization, like nuclear war, climate change, or pandemics. In a post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-financial-collapse world, we’re pretty anxious. (It doesn’t help that government agencies have sunk money into military training and citizen preparedness for a zombie attack.)

Although Revolution focuses on a breakdown of the electrical grid — albeit in a way that seems highly improbable — it is essentially a familiar peak-oil scenario: Technology and governments crumble, and old-time skills (best case) and violent militias (worst case) rise to replace them.

As an armchair-psychologist-turned-TV-critic, I have to believe this trend is about more than just confronting fears, however. It’s a fantasy that satisfies a skewed yearning for a simpler life. Jobs, house payments, parking tickets, soccer practice, and all the other stuff that packs our lives can feel oppressive — made worse by the technological static around us. What if we just wiped the slate clean with a massive electrical-grid breakdown?

The opening of Revolution lays this sentiment bare, showing the main characters — the Matheson kids — as screen zombies moments before the crash. (Actual zombie movies, incidentally, tap into a different impulse: They appeal to our misanthropic side, as we tire of dealing with our fellow humans in maintaining a civilization. Wouldn’t it be easier — and more fun, like a video game — if we could just shoot our mindless, flesh-eating former neighbors in the head?)

Revolution, with its beautiful cast and charmingly deteriorated settings (ruin porn, anyone?), is the most potent example of the romantic appeal of collapse: For viewers numbed by overconsumption, the show presents an antidote in its austerity. Simple objects, like a Rubik’s cube or a postcard, have value again. And life after the crash is kind of like camping or living as a historical reenactor or urban homesteader. The characters dwell in a slightly worn-out suburban subdivision, raise chickens and sheep out front, go hunting with bitchin’ crossbows, and mix up herbal tinctures by candlelight to cure ailments or poison bandits.

There are many hackneyed elements to Revolution — like the stereotypical computer nerd who was once a bigwig at this “computer thing” called Google. “Now, it’s nothing,” he says.

And these shows never present the less-appealing aspects of this kind of living: You don’t see people pooping in holes, shoveling shit, or simply doing laundry, which was one of the most arduous jobs of the pre-industrial era. You don’t see people clear-cutting forests in their desperation for fuel. You don’t see the agony of childbirth or death by urinary tract infection.

There’s another allure to the collapse fantasy: that our day-to-day activities will have some real importance to our survival, because it doesn’t always feel that way now. Tim Kreider, in a recent commentary in The New York Times, said that we make our lives seem busy as “a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

Making shelter, growing a garden, and preserving food have that back-to-basics appeal — but for most of us, these skills are a lost art. I established a big garden in my yard some years ago, and many passersby look at it with curiosity, point to cabbage or carrots, and say, “That’s an odd plant — what is it?”

Americans have been deskilling for decades. Many of our hands-on jobs — like construction, plumbing, agriculture, car repair, and manufacturing — have either been exported or kicked down to “lower” classes and immigrant labor. Meatpacking, which is how my grandfather made a decent living decades ago, is among the lowliest of occupations today. But a meatpacker like him would be invaluable in the world of Revolution, since most Americans probably have no idea how to slaughter a chicken, never mind something bigger, like a pig or cow.

If the lights went out tomorrow, many of us would have no marketable skills.

Revolution, in its superficiality and romanticism, doesn’t get real about how people make do in that world, and it completely skims past the first 15 years of the blackout without giving much sense of how people adapted — which could have been the most interesting part of the saga. In doing so, the show’s creators passed up a big opportunity to send a message to America’s couch potatoes: Our society certainly rests on a bounty of natural resources, but a civilization’s real sustainability is as much about finding the resources in people.

When it comes to transit, even the best of us have a bad attitude. In my own case, I ride the commuter train because it’s the lesser of evils: Driving to work sucks, and the train sucks a bit less. Among those with stronger environmental devotions, transit can be an obligation: We ride the bus or train because it’s the right thing to do, not because we enjoy it.

It doesn’t have to be that way, argues urban planner Darrin Nordahl. His potent new e-book, Making Transit Fun!, has all the enthusiasm for buses, trains, and bike lanes that its title’s exclamation point implies. Can transit incorporate art? Yes! How about playground equipment? You bet. Even … sex? Oh yeah, baby.

The automobile industry has employed the best designers and marketers (and even Posh Spice) to make driving cars cool, sexy, exhilarating — and piss on transit options like biking. “Here is where we transit advocates need to take a lesson from Corporate America,” Nordahl writes. “You cannot get sufficient numbers of people to buy a product or service if it doesn’t excite them.”

So dig this: In Holland and Berlin, train passengers can whoosh down slides — dubbed the “transfer accelerator” in Holland — to get to their trains faster. (Here’s a great video.) Bus-stop shelters in Japan are shaped like giant fruits. (No need to wait for the official fun-meisters — DIYers have outfitted bus stops with swings and periscopes!) And a marketing campaign in Copenhagen enticed motorists to ride the “love seats” on the city buses, where they might get lucky (the PG version).

“The common denominator in each of these strategies is a single, positive emotion: joy,” Nordahl writes. “Joy helps transit compete against the allure of the automobile.”

Of course, if transit is mismanaged, unsafe, or ineffective — if it doesn’t go where (or when) people need it to go — no amount of joy will make it popular. But if those basics are in place, why couldn’t the best architects, designers, and artists come up with transit options that thrill us, or transit activities that entertain us?

By Edica-sensei

I had two such experiences last September in that bastion of eco-tourism of Portland, Ore. The first was a ride on the aerial tram that runs from the Willamette River to the mountaintop campus of the Oregon Health & Science University. The tram, opened in 2006, cost the city a jaw-dropping $57 million to build, but it was an inspiring ride, with incredible views and lots of passengers who would normally clog traffic on the winding roads up the hill.

The second was a far less expensive, more grassroots project: The Streetcar Mobile Music Fest, an attempt to get people excited about transit by getting various bands and singers to perform on Portland’s streetcars. The idea, borrowed from Seattle, was to make the train a more vibrant experience — not just a way to get around. Singer-songwriter Sara Jackson-Holman boarded my train with a little pink piano and sang longing, haunting songs to us. This video captures the project quite beautifully:

That’s exactly what Nordahl is talking about. Why can’t a city bus look sleek, like a Studebaker? Why can’t the riders look through windows at the sky? Both feats have been accomplished in a blaze-orange bus, complete with skylights, that runs through the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois. Other cities, like Boulder, Colo., have spiced up their buses with splashy colors and XM radio.

By TM Weddle.

Nordahl takes on each of the transit alternatives — trains, buses, bikes, walking — and points out where they could be improved. He offers renderings that re-envision vacant alleys as pleasant, patio-lined walkways. To encourage and enliven biking, he points to various playful designs for bike racks — like David Byrne’s racks in New York City in the shape of a dog, a busty woman, and, on Wall Street, a dollar sign.

In an era of austerity, people might ask whether we can afford high design. Nordahl takes on the question directly: With planning, more designed and aesthetically pleasing options need not cost more — and has great potential payoff. In Portland, a $60-million investment in bike infrastructure — the cost of building one mile of urban highway — has made the city a leading biking destination, which has helped its image as a green, sophisticated, livable town.

And finally, one also has to consider the cost of transit that isn’t used because it sucks. Cities and states pour billions into transit options. With that kind of money, you’d think we would want to make it worth the ride.

In a time when we’ve seen global economic crisis, societal unrest, and ecological deterioration, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) could not have picked a more potent speaker than Wendell Berry for this year’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. In his remarks in Washington, D.C., on Monday, the essayist, novelist, and poet — a Kentuckian long known for his advocacy for family farming, community relationships, and sustainability — delivered a characteristically eloquent yet scathing critique of the industrial economy and its toll on humanity.

“The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment,” Berry told the crowd at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. “At the same time, the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny. Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good.”

The Jefferson Lecture “is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities,” according to the NEH, which sponsors it every year.

Before the speech, Berry wryly commended the NEH’s courage in inviting him without first reading his remarks. At the end of the event, NEH Chair Jim Leach humorously added: “The views of the speaker do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States government.”

Berry’s reputation and strident prose must have promised fireworks: An official with the NEH said that Berry’s lecture was sold out three days after it was announced (although some seats were unclaimed on a cold, rainy night in Washington). Samuel Alito, the conservative Supreme Court justice, was rumored to be there.

Berry’s speech was a discussion of affection and its power to bind people to community. It was also a meditation on place and those who “stick” to it — as caretakers and curators. “In affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy,” Berry said.

The opposite of the “sticker” — in the words of Berry’s mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner — is the “boomer,” whose approach is to “pillage and run.”

Berry described James B. Duke, the founder of the American Tobacco Company, as a boomer who had an impact on the author’s own farming family history: In 1907, Berry’s grandfather sought to sell his tobacco crop in Louisville, so the family could maintain a meager existence on their land in Kentucky. But thanks to prices driven down by the monopolistic American Tobacco Company, his grandfather came home without a dime.

Berry once encountered James B. Duke — in bronze, if not in the flesh — during a visit to Duke University. “On one side of his pedestal is the legend: INDUSTRIALIST. On the other side is another single word: PHILANTHROPIST. The man, thus commemorated, seemed to me terrifyingly ignorant, even terrifyingly innocent, of the connection between his industry and his philanthropy.”

That disconnect is endemic to our era. “That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated,” Berry said. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers.”

The antidote, Berry said, is affection, connection, and a broader definition of education — to study and appreciate practical skills like the arts of “land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking.”

Berry said that we should appreciate the word “economy” for its original meaning of “household management.”

“So I am nominating economy for an equal standing among the arts and humanities,” Berry said. “I mean, not economics, but economy — the making of the human household upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the earth’s many ecosystems and human neighborhoods.

“This is the economy that the most public and influential economists never talk about, the economy that is the primary vocation and responsibility of every one of us.”

Developer Larry Hall has a grand plan for four nuclear-missile silos in Kansas. He’s transforming them into impenetrable, bunker-like “condo” complexes for wealthy survivalists — a haven behind nine-foot-thick concrete walls when the country is reeling from a rampant virus, a terrorist attack, an electrical-grid failure, or maybe just an off-the-charts balmy April. You can get a piece of this paradise for anywhere from $1 million to $2 million, according to news reports about his project. Hall already has four buyers, and prospective clients in NFL players, movie producers, and politicians. And he’s reserving a unit for himself — his personal getaway, some 400 miles from his home in Denver.

It’s subterranean living at its finest, in the ultimate gated community.

America is in an apocalyptic mood, and maybe for good reason: Climate change looms as a major threat, gasoline is pushing $4 a gallon, ecosystems are collapsing, and the country is fractured politically, socially, and economically. Even our most popular entertainment — like The Hunger Games, The Road, or The Walking Dead — is downright gloomy. If you spend any time on sites like Michael Ruppert’s Collapse Network, you’ll find folks talking about setting up “lifeboats” — places with food supplies, water, and arable land to aid survival when the shit hits. Hall’s bunker condos are merely a more drastic form.

Let’s take a grim view and assume for a moment that the world is indeed going to hell in a handbasket. Is Hall’s bunker building the appropriate response? Or is it misguided — even dangerous?

First, there are some basic logistical questions to consider: In a sudden emergency, how would Hall and his clients get to their remote silo condos? (You’d think that the wealthy would be the first targets in that kind of crisis.) The roads would be congested with others trying to run to the hills — and fraught with danger. (The zombie hordes would drag them out of their cars and eat their brains.) Certainly, they are rich enough to afford private helicopters or planes — but they’d still have to get to the airport.

And what about sustaining life down there? The complexes will reportedly come with stockpiles of food and water, indoor farms, pools, movie theaters, libraries, medical centers, and schools. The stories say that the complexes may run on “windmill power,” but wouldn’t the mobs on the surface dismantle those turbines and take them to their own communities? Perhaps Hall has worked out those details. I suspect it has something to do with the barbed-wire fences and “elaborate security system and staff” alluded to in the article.

But more important, we should consider what Hall’s silos represent: His clients — undoubtedly some of the most influential people in their respective communities — are essentially checking out.

Andrew Szasz, a sociologist from the University of California at Santa Cruz, noted this trend in his book Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves. Americans, he observes, increasingly believe that if they buy things like bottled water, duct tape for sealing windows, sunscreen, and organic food, they can insulate themselves from threats in society and the environment. The problem is that this “inverted quarantine” provides a false sense of security, and it doesn’t help people address problems that are best tackled collectively. Slowing climate change, addressing peak oil, equalizing the distribution of wealth, halting the demise of ecosystems, building mass transit, mitigating the downsides of agribusiness, or, hell, just getting clean water out of the tap — all are major challenges that require societal or governmental coordination.

It’s about community, stupid.

“Inverted quarantine is implicitly based on denial of complexity and interdependence,” Szasz writes. “It mistakenly reduces the question of an individual’s well-being to nothing more than the maintenance of the integrity of the individual’s body … What good does it do to encase one’s body in a toxics-free bubble when things are falling apart so completely?”

Unfortunately, this seems to be the way things are going. A kind of hyperindividualism dominates one chunk of the political spectrum, with sympathies in others. So we see a retreat on environmental protections, support for infrastructure, funding for schools and colleges, and other collective actions that have made this country great.

Suburbanization, Szasz argues, was a form of inverted quarantine, with far-reaching effects. Those who could afford to check out of the cities did so, disinvestment and deterioration followed, and now the plight of cities are a major burden for the country. For his book, Szasz also studied the bomb shelters of the Cold War era — an extreme version of inverted quarantine, much like Hall’s doomsday silos. Concerned scientists of the era argued that bunker-building would “foster a ‘false sense of security’ that would make atomic war seem more acceptable” and would in turn encourage statesmen “to take a hard line in foreign policy, to take larger risks, to go to the brink.”

Of course, in the end, the Cold War bunker builders had to consider what kind of world they would return to, after their two-week food supply ran out: a blackened, poisoned environment. Hall’s silo dwellers might be able to stay underground longer — he says the dry goods would last five years — but they would eventually have to come up. These elites might emerge into a world where the terms of wealth have completely changed — where people value not currency but connections, land, and skills: how to grow food, weave textiles, weld metal, fix engines, make medicines, and so on. And the world would have gone on without the silo dwellers for so long, the surface dwellers might not need — or want — to see their return.

For most of us, it’s a moot topic. I could never afford one of Hall’s condos, and I might not be welcome anyway. Think about what life would be like down there — to be locked up with a bunch of people so rich, so disengaged, and so eccentric that they bought a piece of a nuclear silo to live in, while the world burns.

Frankly, I’d rather throw in my lot with the rest of humanity, still stuck in the real world above.

It was a Tuesday morning when I watched the cyclist — decked out in a green jacket and a bright yellow helmet, and laden with bags — ride into the crosswalk in front of a group of stopped cars, going against the flow of traffic. He was breaking a few laws — but for convenience and self-preservation, I sometimes break them, too. My hometown, Baltimore, is a terrible biking town.

So I felt some sympathy for the guy — that is, until he turned to a woman waiting in her car at the red light, and started yelling: “Hey! Hey! You’re not supposed to be in the crosswalk!”

He glared at her as he went by. In the next lane sat a black luxury car that looked like it had been buffed with a chamois cloth that morning. The driver rolled down his window and said something to the biker. This set the biker off. “Oh, yeah? Maybe I’ll just sit here for a while,” he said, and parked his bike in front of the black car.

As the light turned green, cars behind started honking. “I’ve got every right to be here!” screamed the guy in the yellow helmet after a few more choice words from the driver. “Every right!”

So this is the asshole cyclist I hear friends complain about — maybe the kind of asshole cyclist I have been from time to time. I couldn’t help but wonder: If we’re trying to make life better for cyclists on the streets, isn’t this kind of behavior counterproductive?

The relationship between cyclists and drivers is notoriously tense. A simple Google search will yield scores of articles and videos about fights. A horrific YouTube video shows a driver mowing down dozens of cyclists in a Critical Mass ride in Brazil. But it’s the comments on the video that really get to me: “This is most drivers’ secret fantasy,” says one. There are similar comments in other videos, with a common sentiment apparent in all: Cyclists are uppity, sanctimonious jerks. You know the type.

“I have no doubt that our public perception of us being asshole bikers is a huge challenge to overcome,” says Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists. The morning I talked with him, a friend in Australia had sent him a link to a new public-service ad that shows two men who nearly bump into each other while walking through an office. As set hands pull away the office surroundings, dressing one man as a biker and the other as a driver, their polite apologies devolve into insults directed at lycra wear and sweet old mothers.

“There is something about being behind the wheel of the car and something about being behind the handlebars that changes us somehow,” Clarke says.

The league tries to encourage responsible riding. Seeing cyclists blow stop signs and ride with their hands off the handlebars really irks Clarke. “It doesn’t help our cause to be seen as scofflaws.” At the same time, he says, “I can understand why people behave the way they do on a bike, because the system isn’t set up to help them.”

That’s the understatement of the week. Mia Birk, an urban planner in Portland, Ore., who specializes in bike issues, says most rule-breaking by bicyclists is the result of poor design. The few people willing to brave the streets on bikes “have to be road warrior types because bikeway infrastructure stinks,” she says in an email.

Portland, rated one of the most bike-friendly American cities, has set up all kinds of bike infrastructure, and has launched education and outreach programs for both bikers and drivers. This has resulted in fewer crashes and friendlier behavior between cyclists and drivers in that city. “Sure, there are still jerks out there, but overall, there’s a high level of courtesy relative to less bike-friendly cities,” Birk writes.

Jonathan Maus, who runs the BikePortland blog, agrees that relationships between cyclists and drivers are probably better in Portland than in other places — in part because drivers are used to sharing the road with cyclists, and in part because many drivers are cyclists themselves. At the same time, he says, Portland cyclists feel more entitled. “In a place like Portland there are people that feel pretty strongly [about biking], and they are not about to cede their right to the road,” he said.

Brings to mind a certain episode of Portlandia …

But Maus has a fundamental objection to the entire conversation about “asshole bikers”: He doesn’t see cyclists as a separate group — in fact, he doesn’t even like the word “cyclist.” He just sees people on the road — polite people along with jerks. The whole notion of cyclists as a special group of people only helps to marginalize people who ride bikes, he says. It frames the argument for the haters.

“The reality is that even in a fantasy world where you could get everyone to behave perfectly, you would still have another barrier thrown up at you,” Maus saus, “because it’s not about how bikers are acting. It’s a basic cultural bias that prevents America from embracing biking.”

I was thinking about Maus’ words the other day when I saw a guy in a blue shirt and red tie on a bike, stopped at a red light. He waited, even though there was no traffic coming in either direction. When the light turned green and the cyclist slowly picked up speed, a guy in a black Saturn behind him gunned his engine impatiently, then nearly clipped the cyclist’s back wheel as he sped around.

The cyclist caught up with the driver at the next light, pulled up along the driver’s window, and calmly had a few words with him. Then the driver sped off.

I waved down the cyclist and learned that his name was Andrew Waldman. He has been commuting by bike for two years, and has had some close calls in that time — particularly when he’s broken traffic laws, so he has decided to follow the rules. “I don’t make it home that much faster if I run stoplights,” he said.

As for his encounter that day with the driver, Waldman said he had tried to explain that the law allowed a cyclist to take up a lane on the road. “He wasn’t interested in listening to me at all,” Waldman said. “I was pretty upset, but I kept my cool … If you’re calm, someone might see your side. If you lay into people, you’re going to be the one on the defensive eventually.”

And then, who’s the asshole again?

This story is excerpted from a longer piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Researchers can have revelatory moments in remarkable places — the African savannah, an ancient library, or the ruins of a lost civilization. But Richard J. Jackson’s epiphany occurred in 1999 in a banal American landscape: a dismal stretch of the car-choked Buford Highway, near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.

Jackson, who was then the head of the National Center for Environmental Health at the CDC, was rushing to get to a meeting where leading epidemiologists would discuss the major health threats of the 21st century. On the side of the road he saw an elderly woman walking, bent with a load of shopping bags. It was a blisteringly hot day, and there was little hope that she would find public transportation. 

At that moment, Jackson says, “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America.”

His center had already been dealing with problems that he suspected had origins in the built environment — asthma caused by particulates from cars and trucks, lead poisoning from contaminated houses and soil, and obesity, heart conditions, and depression exacerbated by lack of access to fresh food, stressful living conditions, long commutes, and isolating, car-oriented communities.

Treatments could come in the form of pills, inhalers, and insulin shots, but real solutions had bigger implications. “More and more, I came to the conclusion that this is about how we build the world that we live in,” he says.

Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’ School of Public Health, has since become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.

In 2001, while still at the CDC, Jackson was a coauthor of an article published by Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse that contended that poorly planned built environments had adverse effects on air quality, physical activity, and public safety, among other things. Not everyone has embraced his message. The National Association of Home Builders responded that the article had flimsy scientific foundations, and a dozen members of Congress wrote to the CDC, calling for Jackson’s head. (Jackson left the CDC in 2004, after the Bush administration appointed new members to his advisory committee who had anti-regulatory backgrounds or ties to energy or chemical industries.)

Jackson acknowledged that his assertions were based more on intuition than research, but he pushed ahead, following up with a book-length treatment called Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities, written with Howard Frumkin, now the dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, and Lawrence Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia. Since then, many studies have come out linking urban design to health, confirming some of the assertions Jackson and other early researchers had made.

Jackson recently released another scholarly book, an edited collection called Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Wealth, Well-Being, and Sustainability. He is also the host of a four-part miniseries called “Designing Healthy Communities,” which will air on public television starting this week in some markets. (Find a listing here.)

The work of Jackson and researchers with similar interests has been pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-grabbing headline: “Suburbia Makes You Fat.” But his focus in Designing Healthy Communities is actually broader than that, with as much emphasis on our need for social connection and beauty as on our need for physical activity.

The series features efforts near Denver and Atlanta to redevelop old rail lines and abandoned malls into walking paths and mixed-use areas. The Italian-American town of Roseto, Pa. — with its strong social ties, backyard gardens, and walkable streets — is held up as a lost “Shangri-La,” a community that had virtually no heart disease in the middle of the 20th century (but has since come to resemble the rest of the nation).

Having begun his medical career in pediatrics, Jackson is particularly worried about the effects that bad design and polluted environments might have on children, who suffer from spiking rates of obesity and asthma. “I think that in many ways our generation is guilty of generational child abuse,” he says at the opening of one segment.

But living up to Jackson’s ideals is not easy, given the current car-dependency of the American landscape. Even Jackson’s own living situation is a conundrum. He works in Los Angeles, but his wife and children live and work in the Bay Area, and he travels up to them twice a month. He and his wife are looking for a home near Berkeley, but they are finding the search difficult.

“Homes that are in attractive, walkable areas, where you can meet your life needs without getting into a car, are selling at an absolute premium,” he says. “If I wanted to live in a car-dependent area with a great big house, those would be quite affordable.”

David Orr.Photo: Lisa DeJong

Environmental studies professor David Orr has set out to turn the aging rust belt town of Oberlin, Ohio, into a laboratory for sustainability. In the process, he has drawn interest from unlikely places: Experts from the military and in national security see the Oberlin Project as a compelling plan to focus on vulnerabilities in the nation’s food, energy, and socioeconomic systems. They and others, including leaders of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington research group, see it as a model that communities across the country could follow.

One of Orr’s most vocal advocates is Col. Mark “Puck” Mykleby of the U.S. Marines, who just retired as special strategic assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Over the summer, Mykleby received national attention for a paper he wrote with another military strategist, Capt. Wayne Porter of the Navy, which argued that America’s future lay not with its robust military force but with strategies for sustainable energy and agriculture, fair social policies, and a strong educational system.

Earlier this year, Mykleby and Orr were in Washington, D.C., meeting with agencies, think tanks, and foundations, and the professor and the wiry Marine made an unusual couple. But as they sat together in the bar of a stylish hotel on F Street, it made sense — especially as Mykleby started talking about the power of campus communities and his doubts that solutions would flow out of the nation’s capital.

“The structures here, the organizations here, are all about trying to control the uncontrollable and about placating Americans,” Mykleby said, his voice rising with frustration. “We need to have an adult conversation with Americans about the problem: We have a lot of work to do, and we better stare it straight in the eye and frickin’ get it on.”

Mark Mykleby.Photo: Kris Krüg for PopTechWhen the Oberlin Project was just getting started, Orr invited city council members to sit down with Mykleby at the Feve, Oberlin’s watering hole, for a kind of scared-straight session. Decked out in his military ribbons, the military strategist talked about the country’s vulnerabilities to so-called black-swan events, unanticipated threats from outside and in.

In some ways, the Oberlin Project resembles the Transition Towns of England — a new movement to relocalize food production, goods, and services (and even create local currencies) in response to worries about “peak oil” — the inevitable decline in oil supplies — and the breakdowns in social, economic, and other systems that peak oil will entail. Richard Heinberg, a journalist who has written several sobering books about peak oil, depleting resources, and, most recently, the flaccid economy, sees the Oberlin Project as “the most important thing we could be doing right now.”

“David has painted the project in glowing, positive terms — as something inviting, as something preferable to what we have now,” Heinberg says. “But from my perspective, it’s an insurance policy against the economic contraction that we are likely to see in future years.”

Patrick C. Doherty, a national-security expert at the New America Foundation, doesn’t consider himself a “doomer,” a label applied to Heinberg and some of his colleagues. But he does think the nation needs a new way of organizing itself. He is working with Orr and Mykleby on a “national sustainable communities coalition” that will attempt to replicate the Oberlin Project in other parts of the country — possibly around military bases that are striving for sustainability.

In the 20th century, says Doherty, the United States coordinated its political and economic power to meet great global challenges, in what was called “grand strategy.” We did it in World War II in orienting the nation’s industrial base to ramp up and outperform the Axis powers. And we did it again in economically and politically outperforming and outlasting the Soviets in the cold war.

Patrick Doherty.Photo: New America FoundationDoherty and his colleagues believe that the nation needs grand strategy once again to meet a new global challenge. “We think that the core global challenge is global unsustainability,” he says — a convergence of major problems, including a persistent middle-class recession, ecological systems in decline, a vast population of the world’s poorest people cut out of the global economy, and a core infrastructure susceptible to shock and disruption.

Part of the nation’s grand strategy in the cold war was to build suburbia, to satisfy a major housing demand and stoke the economic engine. But those suburban communities are now both unsustainable and undesirable, Doherty says. Research shows that the majority of both retiring baby boomers and up-and-coming millennials want to live in walkable, affordable communities, rich with amenities and connected to mass transit.

In short, it’s called “smart growth” — and it’s the way many college towns are already designed and oriented. In fact, Doherty points out, college towns (including, even recently, Oberlin) have been the sites of new retirement communities, because that older generation wants to live close to institutions of higher education and the cultures they foster.

Top-down policy can drive this new grand strategy, he says, but given the political climate and the doubts people have about the effectiveness of government, it may have to start with small efforts like the Oberlin Project. Either way, he says, higher-education institutions would be “essential” to pulling it off.

The Rust Belt, Orr believes, is an ideal laboratory for this experiment. It has an abundance of resources that will be even more valuable in the future, including water and prime farmland. “It’s not going to have to get a whole lot hotter in Texas before we see Texans coming up here,” Orr says.

And institutions of higher learning should lead the charge, he believes. “What colleges and universities can do, it seems to me, is serve as genuine anchor institutions,” Orr says. “Intellectual leadership is going to be really important for moving forward in an era that is going to be radically different.”

Environmental Studies professor David OrrPhoto: Lisa DeJong

Oberlin, Ohio — This northern Ohio college town is barely a blip on a map, far away from national centers of power. And yet people here are working on a plan that could make it a model for fundamentally reshaping the American economy and its society.

The architect of the plan is David W. Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. More than a decade ago, he helped inspire a “green building” trend when he dreamed up the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, which remains one of the greenest college buildings in the country. Now he wants to expand that vision to Oberlin and its surrounding area. The Oberlin Project, as it’s called, joins town and college to create a resilient community for a post-fossil-fuel era.

In 2007, Orr was planning to leave Oberlin College, with some bitterness. After the Lewis Center was complete, he felt the college had squandered opportunities to build green and retain a leadership position in sustainability. Marvin Krislov, a former general counsel at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, became president that year, and he asked Orr what might keep him on campus.

What Orr came back with — and what Oberlin’s city government and the college’s administrators and Board of Trustees eventually supported — was the Oberlin Project. A “green arts district” would catalyze a green redevelopment of the city and surrounding area as a whole. The outdated Oberlin Inn would be replaced by a new hotel, bars and restaurants, a conference center, student residences, facilities for the college’s arts programs, and a sustainable-design center. Those facilities would employ local craftsmen and use local products in their construction, kick-starting a local wood-products industry.

Photo: Scott CarlsonThe college dining services and restaurants would get their food from a 20,000-acre greenbelt in the region — Orr is working with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to identify a patchwork of Ohio farms that might be willing to give up some commodity crops to grow more vegetables for the city. Students from the local vocational school, which has a top-notch culinary program, would work in the conference center and restaurants. All the sewage would run through a Living Machine — a system that uses plants and microbes to clean wastewater.

The project unfurls from there, with details changing as Orr makes new deals and dreams up bigger plans. Most recently, he said that the Great Lakes Brewing Company, in Cleveland, had stepped forward with an interest in setting up a brewpub in the green arts district. Orr scrapped his plans for setting up a Living Machine in town. Instead, he said, why not build a sewage digester at the town’s wastewater-treatment plant to produce methane for electricity?

“Every time I have a wild idea, I go down to City Hall and talk to [the city manager] Eric Norenberg and find Marvin Krislov and figure out how we can do it,” Orr says.

His challenge always lies in strategizing ways to sell the project, so he works it from different angles: If he is talking to fellow academics, he plays up the new facilities and the educational opportunities. If he is talking to an Oberlin business owner, he discusses the buzz and drawing visitors to the city.

Observers say one of the project’s main risks is that it could be perceived as an effete, academic endeavor. Andy McDowell, a field director with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy who is helping Orr establish the greenbelt, doesn’t mention climate neutrality or use the term “greenbelt” when talking to conservative farmers outside Oberlin. They are already skeptical of the intellectuals’ ideas in town.

“It has to focus on economic stability, growing our local economies, and food security,” McDowell says. “Those are the kinds of things that are going to resonate once it gets beyond this bubble.”

Kenneth Sloane, president of the city council, who counts himself as a friend of Orr’s, says that Oberlin suffers from community-school tensions as much as any college town, but that on the streets, people are generally positive about Orr’s ideas. “People here are embracing the project because they hope it will be an economic generator,” he says. “If doom and gloom hit the international economy, if we have developed a local network of industry and farming that is sustainable, we could be self-sufficient.”

No doubt Orr faces significant hurdles. The project may evolve over decades, and at a time when money is tight and philanthropy is a tough game, an early estimate pegs the project’s cost at about $140-million — with $55 million just to complete the first phase. (So far the professor has raised $9 million toward his lofty goal. He predicts that most of the money will come from private investment, philanthropy, tax credits, and bonds.) And it’s fair to wonder whether the plan can maintain its momentum, particularly without Orr, who at 67 may not see the project to its end.

Still, Krislov, Oberlin’s president, says the project could pay off — and not just by making the college more attractive to prospective students. “It shows that an aging town in the Rust Belt can in essence reinvent itself, drawing on its strengths in education and the arts, with a commitment to sustainability,” Krislov says. To make things even more interesting, he says, “We are not doing this in a new city, a new area, or a growth area, but in an area that is experiencing decline.”

Next: Why the Oberlin Project is getting support from military brass.

A couple of years ago, while I was reporting on a redevelopment plan in Buffalo, N.Y., I met up with Robert Shibley, an architecture professor who had long been interested in a renaissance for his once-great Rust Belt town. Buffalo, along with cities like Utica, Syracuse, and Rochester, had the sort of wonderful, old architecture and infrastructure you can find across upstate New York. We agreed that it was a shame to watch these places crumble in abandonment.

But Shibley foresaw a glorious future. With ample freshwater (including the nearby Great Lakes), rich agricultural land, and a cool climate, upstate New York was well positioned in a hot, thirsty, and oil-starved future. It was almost a Manifest Destiny. “It is our ecological responsibility to grow here,” he said.

Catherine Tumber would have agreed. Her excellent new book, Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World, finds potential in many busted and booming-again cities in the Northeast and Midwest, cities like Flint, Mich.; Muncie, Ind.; Peoria, Ill.; and Youngstown, Ohio. She could have swept south and also included Hagerstown, Md.; York, Pa.; and maybe even Richmond, Va.; and Greensboro, N.C., and still stuck to her thesis. Even my hometown of Baltimore — which might be larger but has so far avoided unchecked sprawl — may fit into Tumber’s vision. These places, she writes, are both big enough and small enough to manage a coming societal transition, in which people may have to live on constrained oil supplies and rely more on local networks for food and other goods.

Tumber’s thinking goes against the grain of urban thinkers who contend that cities will organize themselves into giant “megaregions,” sprawling into one another, often along interstates. (In this future, my hometown would be one node in a megalopolis that includes New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.) Megaregion futurism has its champions among pundits and policymakers: Richard Florida shuns smaller cities in the hinterlands with his theory of the “creative class” — society’s Alphas, who allegedly seek out cosmopolitan cities. Barack Obama’s $50 billion high-speed rail plan — which, for hefty ticket prices, would connect megaregions like Miami-Tampa, San Francisco-San Diego, and the Northeast Corridor — likewise ignores smaller cities, which would benefit from investment in regular old rail.

The megaregion concept is a product of globalization, which values ruthless efficiency and specialization, with most of the benefits going to elites. But Tumber believes that globalization is a historical anomaly, not necessarily a new world order. “Globalization relies on cheap, long-distance transportation and industrial food production, both highly dependent on finite reserves of oil, whose bounty is already belied by spiking fuel prices and mounting alarm about climate change,” she writes. Or, as put by James Howard Kunstler, the peak-oil prophet (whom Tumber cites here and there in her book): “The world is about to become a larger place again.”

So how do these small cities, long derided as provincial and irrelevant, prepare for the future that Tumber sees coming? She focuses on several broad topics: controlling sprawl and redeveloping the suburban fringe, developing agriculture in and around the city, reviving small-scale manufacturing, and redesigning economic networks and school systems. All of these topics involve interlocking policy conundrums that may be more easily navigated in small cities, where relationships are closer and bureaucracy less entangling.

Two of Tumber’s six chapters are devoted to agriculture. And these sections of the book represent much of the way Tumber dissects her book’s topics: She makes an efficient survey of the history and current thinking around urban and suburban agriculture, but she focuses on places and colorful characters that illustrate the challenges, which mainly lie in policy changes.

In this section, it’s Henry Brockman, who owns a 24-acre farm in Illinois, 20 miles between Peoria and Normal. In what seems like a win for the globalist view, he sells his sustainably cultivated produce way up in the wealthy north-Chicago suburb of Evanston. Why doesn’t he sell in Peoria? Although the demand is there, the markets there allow vendors to buy vegetables wholesale and resell them, which drives away local growers. Policy changes informed by consumer demand could fix this, Tumber says. In fact, a relatively small number of farms like his could feed all of Illinois. And someday, they may need to: Most domestically produced food is shipped from California, but Tumber points out that 86 percent of California farmland is targeted for development — and it is threatened by the trends of climate change.

Baltimore, where I live, already has a vibrant farmers market network, and a number of groups are working on recultivating vacant parts of the city. Perhaps the biggest challenges here are the school systems, the reskilling of an industrial workforce, and the support of local businesses. The good news on that front, Tumber argues, is that localism, which started in the 1970s mainly as a countercultural movement, now represents a broader group of people who see globalism’s fragility and its attacks on small businesses.

Given the popularity of the Tea Party, which claims, at least, to look out for the little guy, localism could expand its reach even further. Tumber points to C. Wright Mills, a sociologist who, following World War II, concluded that small- to medium-sized cities were the best places for small-business entrepreneurs, and that because of that culture, these places in turn supported a more democratic environment, with people that supported civic enterprises like libraries and arts institutions. (By contrast, the corporatist, globalist track supported disinvestment.) The modern localist movement, Tumber writes, “is little understood and well worth recovering,” as it “could appeal to both liberals and conservatives during our own era of economic upheaval and political crisis.”