Meanwhile, just outside Concord, Mass.

As a preliminary note, I would say that what I have always prized in the writing of Henry David Thoreau was his prescient description of the perils of specialization.  I think many people believe that Thoreau was something of a reclusive crank who chose to live in the woods his entire life in a kind of Arcadian fantasy, a belief given some impetus by the essay "Thoreau," a marvel of condescension and incomprehension written by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that windy and ultimately useless "philosopher" of the kind Thoreau himself derided.  Thoreau's reductive experiment was to determine the "essential facts" of existence," and he managed to isolate the basic human prerequisite in one simple phrase: maintaining vital heat.  That is the sum and substance of all necessary human activity.  Clothes and shelter protect the outer man from the elements, and eating food fuels the inner furnace.  That's it.  Thoreau concluded that a "philosopher" who could not describe a better and more efficient way of maintaining vital heat was of no practical use, and one can search in vain through Emerson's hortatory screeds about "self-reliance" and the rest to find anything approaching such essential guidance.

So Thoreau spent 26 months at Walden Pond on acreage owned by the Emerson clan and answered his own question, then wrote the book which made him immortal.  The longest chapter was called "Economy," and it detailed, to the penny, how much he spent and how much he earned during his sojourn.  He reckoned that about six weeks of work a year was necessary to ensure basic survival.  Naturally, as societies evolved his quaint ideas were seen as completely impractical and even silly.  Our modern, high-tech existences are regarded, in the main, as infinitely preferable to his sylvan subsistence.  Nevertheless, Thoreau argued that the essential requirement of the Industrial Revolution, wage earning through narrow specialization, was ultimately an unsatisfactory way to live. His ideas, of course, had no chance, and we live now in the "organic society" in which specialization has reached its apotheosis.  The economic system itself has become organized at higher and higher levels of scale, through monopolies and the crowding out of individually-owned endeavours.  Here is James Howard Kunstler in his blog yesterday ("Clusterf*ck Nation"):

My own starting point for this is the belief that in the years just ahead any sociopolitical entity organized at the giant scale will flounder -- this includes everything from the federal government to global corporations to factory farms to centralized high schools to national retail chains. So even expecting Mr. Obama's government to act effectively may be asking too much in a situation that will require mostly local action.

Or Mike Whitney, writing about misery in general:

The problem is the way that the system has been reworked to serve the interests of the investor class at the expense of working people. As Wall Street has tightened its grip on the political parties, more of the nation's wealth has gone to a smaller percentage of the population while the chasm between rich and poor has grown wider and wider. The United States now has the worst income and wealth disparity since 1929 and a whopping 75 percent of the labor force has seen a drop in their living standard since 1973. The average American has no savings and a pile of bills he is less and less able to pay. Apart from the ethical questions this raises, there is the purely practical matter of how a consumer-driven economy (GDP is 70% consumer spending in US) can maintain long-term growth when wages do not keep pace with productivity. It's simply impossible. The only way the economy can grow is if wages are augmented with personal debt; and that is exactly what has happened. The fake prosperity of the Bush and Clinton years can all be attributed to the unprecedented and destabilizing expansion of personal debt. Wages have been stagnate throughout."

Rather interesting to read these laments in light of the warnings posted long ago by the Genius of Concord. Kunstler is perhaps more Thoreauvian than he realizes; he's aware that we're trying to solve the problem of maintaining vital heat with a "solution more complicated than the problem itself." 

Indeed, we've arrived now, in America, where the scale of basic activities (factory farming based on government-sponsored corn surpluses, Wal-Mart as our largest employer, 70% of GDP based on buying stuff made elsewhere, and most of that from giant retail chains) is beyond individual control, for the most part, and where most Americans are helpless to fend for themselves once the "organic society" collapses.The "solutions," at this point, are simply beyond the average person's ability to affect the outcome at all.  This comes about, of course, because the great majority (that "mass of men living lives of quiet desperation") have been cut off, both cognitively and functionally, from the fundamental sustaining processes of life: namely, how to get and maintain your own vital heat from Planet Earth by dint of your own interaction with the soil, air and water.

The organic society is collapsing, of course, and along with it the essential livability of the planet, which has been wracked by pollution, ocean acidification and global warming.  Maintaining the opulent (and highly concentrated) wealth of the society, as it is presently configured and savagely defended by those in power, depended on such callous disregard for the environment.  All of those ammonium nitrates washing down the Mississippi River and creating that vast dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico resulted from the "green revolution," the ability to grow monocultures of corn and soybeans in the Midwest using fossil fuel based inputs which replaced the natural fertilization of soil from crop rotation and farm animals.  All that corn provided feed for former grass-eating ruminants like cows, which instead have been force-fed a cereal to which their rumens are not adapted, leading to sickness which must be controlled by massive inputs of antibiotics, which have led to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria strains.  The superabundance of corn led to the proliferation of high fructose corn syrup as the sweetener and taste enhancer of choice, leading to an epidemic of obesity, Type II diabetes and heart disease.  The elimination of natural modes of transportation, like walking and biking, or fuel-efficient means of transportation like passenger rail, was necessary for (and the result of the manipulation by) the big automakers, who then proceeded to design the most inefficient, overweight and CO2 belching vehicles possible, adding to the gaseous load of the troposphere.

So we have become the tools of our tools, as Thoreau warned.  Maybe it's just a phase in human development, however.  Maybe high-tech breakthroughs like solar power at the individual level, sustainable farming (though hardly anything new, just rediscovered), and efficient mass transportation will make their necessary comebacks, along with other vital heat-maintaining technology which can be scaled at the human level.  The question is how we can break through to such solutions when the vested interests, including the federal government, seem trapped in the illusion that restoring the "consumer economy" and the specialization regime of crap jobs in the service industries is the best way out of the accelerating decline.

Maybe Barack can put away the Lincoln biographies for a little while, stop worrying so much about what's going to happen in Baghdad in 2011, and take another look at what that guy living in rural Massachusetts about 170 years ago was writing about.  He hasn't been wrong yet.