Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

12 reMeMberING the Space age
is home to some 33 million people, roughly the population of the entire United
States at the time of the Civil War. Cities everywhere used to serve as a check
on population growth because their infectious diseases killed people faster than
others were born. but in the last few decades this has changed and cities are no
longer demographic black holes, but instead hothouses of further growth.
this is, to put it mildly, a bizarre transformation. It is less conspicuous in
the United States, where half the population was urban by about 1920, than
in asia and Latin america, where things happened later and faster. In national
terms, the fastest large-scale urbanizations in world history were those of the
Soviet Union in the 1930s (while building socialism) and China since 1980
(while dismantling it). the urbanization of our species surely carries tremendous
signifcance in ways not yet fully apparent. We have built new environments
and new habitats while simultaneously populating them and leaving behind the
milieux that formed us and our institutions.
one of the reasons that cities could grow as they did and do is the radical
changes in energy use witnessed in our times. before the era of fossil fuels,
cities in temperate latitudes, say North China or europe, needed to command
an area of forest some 50 to 200 times their own spatial size to meet their fuel
wood needs. 18 this, together with limits to agricultural efciency, constrained
urban growth. Fossil fuels broke this constraint, and helped break the ones on
agricultural efciency. Since 1957, global energy use has almost tripled, largely
as a result of the globalization of oil use. oil was a small part of the energy mix
outside of North america until the 1950s. What China and India are doing
now in terms of deepening energy and oil appetites, was done by Western
europe and Japan on a smaller scale from the mid-1950s to the 1970s. 19
again, as with urbanization, the signifcance of fossil fuels since the 1950s
is less conspicuous in the american context than elsewhere because they became
important in the United States earlier. but in global terms, it is only after the
1950s, with the opening of the so-called elephant felds in Saudi arabia, and
then those in Western Siberia, that cheap energy became routine. With cheap
oil, automobiles became the normal accoutrements of middle-class and, in richer
countries, working-class life. Furthermore, transportation of goods around the
world became far more practical, leading to ever more complex divisions of labor
and levels of specialization that enabled larger and larger numbers of people to
live lives of ease instead of near-universal grim and grinding toil. 20
18. Vaclav Smil, Energies, (Cambridge Ma: MIt press, 1999), p. 118.
19. Useful histories of energy include Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (boulder, Co:Westview
press, 1994); alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humankind’s Unappeasable Appetite
for Energy (New York, NY: Cambridge University press, 2006).
20. this is explained for europe in Christian pfster, Das 1950er Syndrom: Das Weg in die
Konsumgesellschaft (bern, Switzerland: paul haupt Verlag, 1995).