Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

It has been hard for Americans – lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring – to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately, we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life – not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense – you name it.

The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship.

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. We let our towns and cities rot away and replaced them with suburbia. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and rescale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are.

Food production is going to be an enormous problem. As industrial agriculture fails because of a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will have to grow more food closer to where we live and do it on a smaller scale. This raises difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. Readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational.

The way that commerce is organized in America will not survive. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. Commerce will have to be reorganized at the local scale.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. If we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry is likely to vanish.

The successful regions in the 21st century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a worldwide power shortage.

If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.

Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

Adapted from "The Long Emergency," copyright 2005 by James Howard Kunstler and reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, a division of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

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