The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

I had the peculiar duty yesterday of giving my spiel on town planning to officers of the Environmental Protection Agency at their sprawling (literally) new regional headquarters located in the so-called Research Triangle Park, a stupendous suburban wasteland between the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The complex of buildings, opened in 2000, sits at the end of a half-mile-long driveway -- but of course !-- in a wooded pod amongst scores of other mega-gigantic corporate and governmental pods deployed about the Triangle. It's supposed to be a "green" building. Yeah, right. This is the kind of inane, delusional self-propaganda we Americans seem to specialize in lately as we slide into a catastrophic post-cheap-oil clusterfuck. The buildings are, in fact, massive steel and glass energy consuming machines. You can hear the HVAC humming from the parking lot (and make no mistake as our President likes to say, there's plenty of parking). Most bizarre of all, though, is that the cutting edge architect actually deployed four colossal smokestack towers on the top of the main building so that it looks literally like the HMS Titanic.

It is also painfully obvious that the vast and expensive landscaping job surrounding the hulking complex, which includes an artificial lake, is an attempt to compensate for the complex's essential destructiveness by "naturing up" it's surroundings.

The federal employees within are probably all dedicated and conscientious people, and no doubt some of them appreciate the peril that our suburban fiasco has placed us in. But their main task, one way or another, amounts to bean-counting -- how many carbon particles per-cubic-foot of air. . . how many benzene parts-per-million of water -- and they can keep on doing that until global warming swamps all the harbor towns of the world before they arrive at the recognition that the suburban way of life is killing our country.

The reason for me giving my spiel to this group was ostensibly to inform them that we (all of us) had better start preparing to live differently in the years ahead, and to offer a framework for understanding what goes into the design and assembly of a sustainable and rewarding urban ecology. Ironically, almost every conversation I joined during my visit, over dinner and then lunch the next day, was a litany of complaint about the traffic that must be endured by those who live in the area. But it was clearly just the background noise of daily life for all concerned, as if it were something extrinsic to all the other things they do.

It's not possible to visit the Raleigh / Durham Research Triangle Park without coming away with intense pangs of hopelessness about our national predicament.