"A Radical Time to Be Alive"

[ret5hd]

http://www.fwweekly.com/content.asp?article=7071

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The wide-open lanes of I-30 and other major highways could shrink as traffic lessens, with some of the excess pavement even being fashioned into huge gardens, Ferrell predicted. He also suggested that Fort Worth residents might go years without traveling to Austin or Houston — or flying anywhere, unless they are well-heeled executives or family members traveling in response to life-or-death crises. Airline travel may well become an out-of-reach luxury for Americans, as the cost of a domestic round-trip ticket (currently well under a week’s worth of pay for the typical Tarrant County resident) increases to several month’s worth of pay by 2058.

If air travel once more becomes the reserve of the well-to-do, dumpster diving might no longer be the territory of the homeless and desperate. That last prediction’s to be expected from Ferrell, who chronicled dumpster diving and criticized Americans’ consumption culture in his book Empire of Scrounge. And some of Texans’ most treasured possessions, their SUVs, may come to be looked on as just another kind of dumpster to explore for salvageable parts, he said, their once-prized skeletons tossed aside or used as mini-greenhouses to grow local food (because food shipped or flown from elsewhere will become too expensive).

The revolution in thinking will lead to a shake-up in social status, too, Ferrell predicts. The do-it-yourself localism espoused in today’s organic food stores and in publications like Mother Jones and The Utne Reader — that is, growing your own food or buying it from nearby farmers — will go mainstream. Community gardens, craft work, and locally owned stores will replace the strip malls of today’s far-flung suburbs. Bicycle mechanics, master gardeners, handymen and women, and even dumpster divers will rise in social status as their skills become more valuable, Ferrell said, whereas shopping sprees at North Park will be something your mother or grandmother did. Unless you live in the Park Cities or Westover Hills, of course, in which case you’ll probably have a wall separating you from the rabble.

Nearly all the trendy suburban enclaves of today (think Colleyville and Keller) will lose their value, the TCU professor said. Real estate values have already dropped more dramatically in outer-ring suburbs throughout the U.S. relative to core cities in large part due to the explosion in gas costs, according to recent housing data published by the Wall Street Journal.
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