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FlimFlam alert

This editorial from the LAt brings up an interesting situation that we’re already in, as the EPA leans toward issuing a ruling on whether greenhouses gases are a danger to public health. If they do, which they are likely to, it will lead directly to some forms of preliminary carbon dioxide regulation. It’s going to be difficult and people are going to be screaming; driving a car is going to get more expensive when everything else already is. But is it the end of the world? That’s an interesting question.

Firmly focused on the downside is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has long argued that a climate-change crackdown would devastate Main Street America, imposing costly permitting requirements on such facilities as schools, hospitals and office buildings. Reacting to news of the pending EPA finding, chamber officials are even claiming that it would undermine President Obama’s economic stimulus package because infrastructure projects to be built with the money would be delayed by reviews of their impact on greenhouse gases.

Not really. The EPA finding would apply only to emissions from vehicles. If the agency does find that they endanger the public, it would add urgency to a process that’s already underway to toughen fuel-efficiency standards. Eventually, it might also lead to regulation of emissions from other sources, particularly power plants. But that’s years away, and onerous rules for schools and offices are unlikely. As for the stimulus money, most or all will be spent by the time the EPA gets around to regulating new construction.

It’s already really expensive to drive a car, only we don’t count all of the negative externalities as costs. These would include, of course, tailpipe emissions but also everything from the human design fiasco that is our highway-connected suburbs to the strips of fast-food joints that line them to the talk radio poison we self-inject sitting in so much traffic everyday. This is to say nothing of the wars and armaments necessary to safeguard said sources of earlier-described dangers to public health. No hyperbole is necessary to see all the ways we could begin to change how we live just by taking their real costs into account – not to mention, as the editorial does, the costs of doing nothing.

So get ready for the rending of garments as the EPA is demonized and carbon pricing construed as the end of civilization as we know it. There’s an irony I will not explain (Mean Joe?). The EPA will be doing its job in accordance with our laws. As the editorial points out, there will be winners and losers in so doing. But, in reference to the above, why shouldn’t we see ourselves as winners in this grand scrum, focusing on the things we will decide to change as positive steps?

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Hughes You Can Use

Krugman is on his game today (who knew a banal term like securitization was Orwell-ifiable?); Obama has been on his game all week. But today I want to turn to another connection, by way of an ongoing conversation around my house and among near associates. Green also means inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears, and our general lack of critical acumen and ability is not unrelated to the tumultuous economic straits in which we presently tread, much less the ecological shoals upon which we are likely to founder.

The Australian art critic Robert Hughes has cut his widest swath using the cudgel of Time magazine, believe it or not. Books and films by and about him are easy to find and you should find and devour them, notably his collection of essays, Nothing if Not Critical. Below is a speech he gave in England in 2004, ostensibly about the Royal Academy, but by implication it is most certainly also a transposition of the ‘royal’ as in We.

Many years ago, when I was still cutting my first pearly fangs as an art critic, one thing used to be taken for granted by me and practically everyone I knew in what is so optimistically termed the “art world”.

That thing was that all Academies were bad, the enemies of progress – and though nobody knew how to define that slippery notion of progress in the arts, we were all in favour of it, that went without saying.

What, you didn’t like progress? You and Sir Alfred Munnings, fella. And the Royal Academy excited our particular scorn. It seemed to stand for everything that was most retrograde and irrelevant. No serious artist could gain anything from having the tarnished letters RA tacked on to their name, so redolent of boardroom portraits, cockle-gatherers at work or sunny views of Ascot.

Now, historically, this was an odd situation. For, as it was originally set up in 1768, the Royal Academy was only one of a number in Europe: unlike those in Paris, Madrid and elsewhere, it was probably the least official, a product of the English genius for structured informality.

Despite its name, it did not get subventions from the monarch. It enjoyed no government support and no guarantees of private patronage. It supported itself with annual shows, from whose sales it took a modest commission. These shows, which started in 1769, were for many years the chief artistic events in London.

Burlington House was not in any real sense the arm of a cultural establishment, as the French Academy was under the iron thumb of Le Brun. It attracted most of the most gifted and advanced artists then working in England. Nobody could say that a society that counted geniuses of the order of John Constable, JMW Turner or Henry Fuseli among its members was an enemy of inspired art. The counter-example always given is William Blake, who resented Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses and his own tastes in painting, which ran towards Rubens and Rembrandt as well as Michelangelo. This created the idea, which many people still hold, that Reynolds hated Blake and was determined to repress him for his visionary genius.

There is no truth in this. It is one of the pious legends of modernism, a fiction of holy martyrdom. Blake certainly disliked Reynolds, and wrote a number of fierce epigrams to show it. “When Sir Joshua Reynolds died/All Nature was degraded/The King dropt a tear into the Queen’s ear,/And all his pictures faded.” Blake was not the only genius to be intolerant and slightly paranoid. But in fact the Academy didn’t do so badly by Blake, and he continued to exhibit at it throughout most of his life. And there were a number of issues, such as the need for an art of high spiritual and historical seriousness, on which the two men certainly agreed, though they had different ideas on how to create it.

The myth of Reynolds’ opposition to Blake fitted in nicely with a much later idea of the Academy as enemy of the new: but this really took hold in the first half of the 20th century, during which the Academy elected a series of ever-more conservative presidents, a process that reached a climax of sorts in the late 1940s when Sir Alfred Munnings – a brilliant horse-painter in his better moments but a paranoid blimp of a man – set out to use his presidency as a stick with which to beat Picasso, Matisse and assorted other Frogs, Wops, Huns and other denizens of that despicable place, Abroad.

Since Munnings raucously hated everything that Hitler had just been trying to wipe out as Degenerate Jewish Art, his timing was distinctly off. The Royal Academy, it seemed, had shot itself in the foot so dramatically that it no longer had even the stump of a leg to stand on.

By the time I first came to live in England, and for years thereafter, the obsoleteness of the Royal Academy as a benign factor in the life of contemporary art was simply assumed as a fact. I never heard any of the artists I knew at the end of the 60s mention it, let alone talk about some desire to join it. Nevertheless, one went to its shows, which were sometimes complete eye-openers. I will never forget the impact that the great Bonnard exhibition of 1966 had on me, or more recently, the 1987 show of British art in the 20th century. The chance to see shows like that, I realised, was one reason why I had wanted to leave Australia in the first place.

Anyway, as the years wore on, it began to seem a bit absurd to bear the Academy ill-will for things that happened in Burlington House when you were less than 10-years-old, or even not yet born. The rhetoric of Modernism had tried very hard, desperately hard, to separate itself from the Academic. It was as though the Academy were a kind of Medusa’s head, whose gaze could turn talent to stone. The very term had been made into a dirty word, a word of abuse. But could that be the whole story? Looking back, I do not think so. As we know from Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses, if we take the trouble to read them – which practically no one does – the Royal Academy once had very pronounced views on what constituted the great and the good in art. These views are now so out of currency that no one holds them. The idea that a revived Academy would or could clamp an iron fist of conformity on English painting and sculpture is simply absurd. It did not do that even in the 18th century. But there are quite clear and to me convincing reasons why we need such a revival today. And they have nothing to do with the elaboration of rules and conventions.

First of all, the idea of a democratised institution run by artists is an extremely valuable one. It was valuable in the 18th century and it is still today. And the good it can do for art cannot be replaced by either the commercial dealing system or by the national museums. I don’t want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

An institution like the Royal Academy, precisely because it is not commercial, can be a powerful counterweight to the degrading market hysteria we have seen too much of in recent years. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between, and what else is news? I know, as most of us do in our hearts, that the term “avant-garde” has lost every last vestige of its meaning in a culture where anything and everything goes. Art does not evolve from lower states to higher. The scientific metaphors, like “research” and “experiment”, that were so popular half a century ago, do not apply to art. And when everything is included in the game, there is no game to be ahead of. A string of brush marks on a lace collar in a Velásquez can be as radical as the shark that an Australian caught for a couple of Englishmen some years ago and is now murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames. More radical, actually.

But I have always been suspicious of the effects of speculation in art, and after 30 years in New York I have seen a lot of the damage it can do: the sudden puffing of reputations, the throwing of eggs in the air to admire their short grace of flight, the tyranny of fashion. It is fair that collectors should have influence: some of them really deserve to have it, although these are often the ones who care least about the power trip of wielding it – one thinks of those great benefactors the Sainsburys, for instance. But it is ridiculous that some of them should have the amount of influence they do merely because the tax laws enable them to use museums as megaphones for their own sometimes-debatable taste. Now England is far ahead of the US in such matters. I don’t know of one major American museum that has an artist on its board of trustees, as the Tate, the National Gallery, and others here do. But you should go further. I believe it’s not just desirable but culturally necessary that England should have a great institution through which the opinions of artists about artistic value can be crystallised and seen, there on the wall, unpressured by market politics: and the best existing candidate for such an institution is a revitalised Royal Academy, which always was dedicated to contemporary art.

Part of the Academy’s mission was to teach. It still should be. In that regard, the Academy has to be exemplary: not a kindergarten, but a place that upholds the primacy of difficult and demanding skills that leak from a culture and are lost unless they are incessantly taught to those who want to have them. And those people are always in a minority. Necessarily. Exceptions have to be.

In the 45 years that I’ve been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession. In part it has been caused by the assumption that it’s photography and its cognate media – film and TV – that tell the most truth about the visual.

It’s not true. The camera, if it’s lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing – but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to the object. A good drawing says: “not so fast, buster”. We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game. This was not a problem when the Academy was founded, because in 1769 such media were embryonic or non-existent. A quarter of a millennium later, things are different. But drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal. And that, too, is why we need the Royal Academy: perhaps even more now than 50 or 100 years ago. May it live as long as history allows.

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Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

What if there was a way to provide a limitless and environmentally friendly source for generating electricity? For a time, a handful of chemists around the world thought there was; it was called ‘cold fusion’ and its arrival turned out to be a lesson in how not to release research results.

But since this week is the twentieth anniversary of that premature announcement and the American Chemical Society is holding a national symposium called “New Energy Technology” complete with fresh results from experiments in re-branded cold fusion (now known as low-energy nuclear reactions), it might a good time to look back, even as we struggle forward.

The first report on “cold fusion,” presented in 1989 by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, was a global scientific sensation. Fusion is the energy source of the sun and the stars. Scientists had been striving for years to tap that power on Earth to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Everyone thought that it would require a sophisticated new genre of nuclear reactors able to withstand temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

Pons and Fleishmann, however, claimed achieving nuclear fusion at comparatively “cold” room temperatures — in a simple tabletop laboratory device termed an electrolytic cell.

But other scientists could not reproduce their results, and the whole field of research declined.

Umm… so close, and yet I guess it’s good to know that some chemists haven’t given up on this elusive solution, quite the contrary. I guess when you spend most of your adult lifetime thinking about something wonderful and it just doesn’t work, no matter how logical it seems, I guess you’re powerless to convince yourself to give up on it.

Okay… if you were not made uncomfortable with the direction of that last statement, I politely suggest that you are spending too much time in front of the screen with the blue glow.

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Eco Hustle

New Flagpole column up in all its glory. Sometimes we lose the flavor of the hustle, wrapped up as it is with so many financial, economic, and fiscal amulets. Watching how we behave toward (against, really) the least fortunate is one of the very few, truly reliable indicators of our capacity as humans. It doesn’t matter how much you might try to wind a political hustle philosophy around ‘personal responsibility’, that indicator reveals most of what we need to know, including though hardly limited to a fundamental misunderstanding of those two words.

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Crisis parody

More good examples for new and improved corporate logos, here.

Sometimes ridicule goes a long way, unless the targets (as I’ve come upon recently – and locally) insist on being deliberately obtuse such that the meaning of your critique continues to (magically) escape them. Of course, I accept this failure as none other than my own.

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Have You Seen The Bridge, part XXI

People wonder what is happening. I certainly do, and it’s a natural curiosity. If only we were free to pursue any and everything we wanted, things would be so much better. In more ways than we care to imagine, we remain quite free to do as we please. There are some limits to be acknowledged. But there always were.

This new Gallup poll, via, points up some reluctance to embrace either these limits or to remain free to do as we please, sort of one or the other but not both. It is a squinting sort of acknowledgment where, if you strain or blur yours eyes, everything looks the same. Note the wording of the question:

Even if? That’s quite a hypothetical, knowing what we know. The indulgence to qualify what we might be willing to do in the event that what is going on is actually going on trails off from some deep shallowness, an allowance, a remove, a disconnect, however we want to identify it. The present is not sinking in. Maybe our quintessential optimism had to spring from somewhere – and this abrupt denial of the choices before us, based on the ones we’ve taken off the table, is it.

It brings to mind a conversation with a friend last night, a painter on his way back to his studio in Kansas. He had been in New England and related a dinner conversation there where people, otherwise sympathetic to environmental causes, were lamenting the prospect of wind turbines proposed for the Nantucket Sound. It would ruin their views, he said in disbelief, adding that the sentiment ran much the same in the Flint Hills, where similar proposals were being greeted with similar opposition, based on the same reluctance to deform the spectacular views of rolling hills with those God-awful renewable energy sources.

I personally have a deep affinity for magnificent vistas. Should we wait until they become directly encroached upon by burning coal for power to have a clearer choice, to make a choice that wouldn’t have been so bad after all? The choice doesn’t seem so clear at this point. There’s a time gap in which, one suspects, a belief in the power to return to just before the tipping point prevails. If and when we sufficiently win ourselves over on the wisdom of making the right decisions (and it’s not inevitable), we’ll go back and do just that.

I appreciate this kind of reporting, even if it confirms what we already know, that describes, in fact, the engine which has transported us to this point in the first place. But, in terms of the twin fantasies of time travel and an ability to reconcile ourselves with needed measures, we need to figure out a way to get there from here.

Photograph: Natural Bridge, La Prele Canyon. Converse County, Wyoming, 1870. courtesy USGS

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When Dashing was an Adjective

And until it is again. Someone reminded me of how many times per day we get into our cars to complete singular errands, multiple trips out and back; performed so quickly, even with great frequency, these trips have an implied efficiency about them – and what our ability to perform them says about us. All the while, we directly refer to these efforts as ‘running’ out. Without unpacking the load of obvious parallels, this is perhaps a semantic point we can leave until later.

But, the fact remains: we are wedded to an ability to make invisible and necessary an extremely wasteful method of performing necessary tasks.

With ‘taking longer’ identified as the real enemy, with a number of very explicit exceptions of course, we set about to shorten everything, supposedly whittling the fat down to essentials. Now we are not just running out quickly, but getting it all done (even if it takes multiple trips), introducing an, again supposed, tertiary efficiency to our moving about. All the while adding to copious amounts of wasted effort, time and brain power, creating unneeded effluents and emissions and depleting the resources much of our running around would be meant, in a more excellent world, to conserve.

Today’s question: will we be able to take any advantage of the many devices and methods we have contrived to save us time before the ability to power, control and organize them runs out*? We are approaching a point of diminishing returns that may begin to appear strikingly similar to what we are actually doing – as this happens, will we lose the ability to make distinctions between the two? If we begin not be able to recognize the certain things that are happening (as we warn ourselves against these, citing worst case scenarios that may already be underway), then what?

*As a clarification, I’m not talking about any end times fainting-couch hysterics, but merely the banal impossibilities inferred by an ill-matching task/skill set like… trying to use technology to fall in love.

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Mmm… Bread as Metaphor

In honor of our local bakery, Big City Bread, beginning as of yesterday to offer fresh baguettes every afternoon (as opposed to the morning and letting them sit or running out by the time people like Mrs. Green come by to get one right before dinner), a digression on the staff of life. Woven through with his own ecclesiastical rhythm, these are the words of the inestimable Bill Moyers. Delivered as the baccalaureate at Hamilton College in 2006, the following excerpts are from his essay, Pass the Bread, which is also the final essay in his excellent book, Moyers On Democracy.

So I have been thinking seriously about what I might say to you in this Baccalaureate service. Frankly, I’m not sure anyone from my generation should be saying anything to your generation except, “We’re sorry. We’re really sorry for the mess you’re inheriting. We are sorry for the war in Iraq. For the huge debts you will have to pay for without getting a new social infrastructure in return. We’re sorry for the polarized country. The corporate scandals. The corrupt politics. Our imperiled democracy. We’re sorry for the sprawl and our addiction to oil and for all those toxins in the environment. Sorry about all this, class of 2006. Good luck cleaning it up.”

…

Of course that’s not the only scenario. You can Google your way to a lot of optimistic possibilities. For one, the digital revolution that will transform how we do business and live our lives, including active intelligent wireless devices that in just a short time could link every aspect of our physical world and even human brains, creating hundreds of thousands of small-scale business opportunities. There are medical breakthroughs that will conquer many ills and extend longevity. Economic changes will lift hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty in the next 25 years, dwarfing anything that’s come along in the previous 100 years. These are possible scenarios, too. But I’m a journalist, not a prophet. I can’t say which of these scenarios will prove true. You won’t be bored, that’s for sure. I just wish I were going to be around to see what you do with the peril and the promise.

Since I won’t be around, I want to take this opportunity to say a thing or two that have nothing to do with my professional work as a journalist. What I have to say today is very personal. Here it is:

If the world confuses you a little, it confuses me a lot. When I graduated fifty years ago I thought I had the answers. But life is where you get your answers questioned, and the odds are that you can look forward to being even more perplexed fifty years from now than you are at this very moment. If your parents level with you, truly speak their hearts, I suspect they would tell you life confuses them, too, and that it rarely turns out the way you thought it would.

I find I am alternatively afraid, cantankerous, bewildered, often hostile, sometimes gracious, and battered by a hundred new sensations every day. I can be filled with a pessimism as gloomy as the depth of the middle ages, yet deep within me I’m possessed of a hope that simply won’t quit. A friend on Wall Street said one day that he was optimistic about the market, and I asked him, “Then why do you look so worried?” He replied, “Because I’m not sure my optimism is justified.” Neither am I. So I vacillate between the determination to act, to change things, and the desire to retreat into the snuggeries of self, family and friends.

I wonder if any of us in this great, disputatious, over-analyzed, over-televised and under-tenderized country know what the deuce we’re talking about, myself included. All my illusions are up for grabs, and I find myself re-assessing many of the assumptions that served me comfortable much of my life.

…

The hardest struggle of all is to reconcile life’s polar realities. I love books, Beethoven, and chocolate brownies. Yet how do I justify my pleasure in these in a world where millions are illiterate, the music never plays, and children go hungry through the night? How do I live sanely in a world so unsafe for so many?

I don’t know what they taught you here at Hamilton about all this, but I trust you are not leaving here without thinking about how you will respond to the dissonance in our culture, the rivalry between beauty and bestiality in the world, and the conflicts in your own soul. All of us have to choose sides on this journey. But the question is not so much who we are going to fight against as it is which side of our own nature will we nurture: The side that can grow weary and even cynical and believe that everything is futile, or the side that for all the vulgarity, brutality, and cruelty, yearns to affirm, connect and signify. Albert Camus got it right: There is beauty in the world as well as humiliation, “And we have to strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful…in the presence of one or the other.

That’s really what brings me here this afternoon. I did put myself in your place, and asked what I’d want a stranger from another generation to tell me if I had to sit through his speech. Well, I’d want to hear the truth: The truth is, life’s a tough act, the world’s a hard place, and along the way you will meet a fair share of fools, knaves and clowns–even act the fool yourself from time to time when your guard is down or you’ve had too much wine. I’d like to be told that I will experience separation, loss and betrayal, that I’ll wonder at times where have all the flowers gone.

I would want to be told that while life includes a lot of luck, life is more than luck. It is sacrifice, study, and work; appointments kept, deadlines met, promises honored. I’d like to be told that it’s okay to love your country right or wrong, but it’s not right to be silent when your country is wrong. And I would like to be encouraged not to give up on the American experience. To remember that the same culture which produced the Ku Klux Klan, Tom DeLay and Abu Ghraib, also brought forth the Peace Corps, Martin Luther King and Hamilton College.

…

Let me tell you one of my favorite stories. I read it a long time ago and it’s stayed with me. There was a man named Shalom Aleicheim. He was one of the accursed of the Earth. Every misfortune imaginable befell him. He lost his wife, his children neglected him, his house burned down, his job disappeared–everything he touched turned to dust. Yet through all this Shalom kept returning good for evil everywhere he could until he died. When the angels heard he was arriving at Heaven’s gate, they hurried down to greet him. Even the Lord was there, so great was this man’s fame for goodness. It was the custom in Heaven that every newcomer was interrogated by the prosecuting angel, to assure that all trespasses on Earth had been atoned. But when Shalom reached those gates, the prosecuting angel arose, and for the first time in the memory of Heaven, said, “There are no charges.” Then the angel for the defense arose and rehearsed all the hardships this man had endured and recounted how in all the difficult circumstances of his life he had remained true to himself and returned good for evil.

When the angel was finished, the Lord said, “Not since Job himself have we heard of a life such as this one.” And then, turning to Shalom, he said, “Ask, and it shall be given to you.”

The old man raised his eyes and said, “Well, if I could start every day with a hot buttered roll…” And at that the Lord and all the angels wept, at the preciousness of what he was asking for, at the beauty of simple things : a buttered roll, a clean bed, a beautiful summer day, someone to love and be loved by. These supply joy and meaning on this earthly journey.

So I brought this with me. It’s an ordinary breakfast roll, perhaps one like Shalom asked for. I brought it because it drives home the last thing I want to say to you. Bread is the great re-enforcer of the reality principle. Bread is life. But if you’re like me you have a thousand and more times repeated the ordinary experience of eating bread without a thought for the process that brings it to your table. The reality is physical: I need this bread to live. But the reality is also social: I need others to provide the bread. I depend for bread on hundreds of people I don’t know and will never meet. If they fail me, I go hungry. If I offer them nothing of value in exchange for their loaf, I betray them. The people who grow the wheat, process and store the grain, and transport it from farm to city; who bake it, package it, and market it–these people and I are bound together in an intricate reciprocal bargain. We exchange value.

This reciprocity sustains us. If you doubt it, look around you. Hamilton College was raised here by people before your time, people you’ll never know, who were nonetheless thinking of you before you were born. You have received what they built and bequeathed, and in your time you will give something back. That’s the deal. On and on it goes, from generation to generation.

Civilization sustains and supports us. The core of its value is bread. But bread is its great metaphor. All my life I’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and I’ve never prayed, “Give me this day my daily bread.” It is always, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers. And because we and strangers have to agree on the difference between a horse thief and a horse trader, the distinction is ethical. Without it, a society becomes a war against all, and a market for the wolves becomes a slaughter for the lambs. My generation hasn’t done the best job at honoring this ethical bargain, and our failure explains the mess we’re handing over to you. You may be our last chance to get it right. So good luck, Godspeed, enjoy these last few hours together, and don’t forget to pass the bread.

Thanks, Amy.

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And it begins

Rob from GPB wanted me to say something about the death of the suburbs, and I did. And I delicately touch on this in the column regularly (there is no delicate way to say it). And now, enter the Washington Post.

As housing prices have plummeted and credit has shriveled, more residents of the District and Washington’s inner suburban counties have chosen to stay put, all but ending the steady exodus to the region’s less expensive, outer suburbs that characterized most of this decade, according to Census Bureau estimates released today.

“I looked at these numbers and said, ‘Wow!’ ” said William H. Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution who analyzed the figures. “This is a more drastic change in U.S. migration patterns than we’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

Indeed not, Mr. Frey. I’ll venture to say it will increasingly become much less of a novel comment to say that suburbs/exurbs are dying and have no future. There was a great euphemism in an LAT article recently: phased abandonment. It’s good that we’ll get beyond this polite boundary and get to what comes next. What comes next for these locales remains to be determined, but probably will have much to do with quiet and farming, and sometimes both, together.

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And it begins

Rob from GPB wanted me to say something about the death of the suburbs, and I did. And I delicately touch on this in the column regularly (there is no delicate way to say it). And now, enter the Washington Post.

As housing prices have plummeted and credit has shriveled, more residents of the District and Washington’s inner suburban counties have chosen to stay put, all but ending the steady exodus to the region’s less expensive, outer suburbs that characterized most of this decade, according to Census Bureau estimates released today.

“I looked at these numbers and said, ‘Wow!’ ” said William H. Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution who analyzed the figures. “This is a more drastic change in U.S. migration patterns than we’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

Indeed not, Mr. Frey. I’ll venture to say it will increasingly become much less of a novel comment to say that suburbs/exurbs are dying and have no future. There was a great euphemism in an LAT article recently: phased abandonment. It’s good that we’ll get beyond this polite boundary and get to what comes next. What comes next for these locales remains to be determined, but probably will have much to do with quiet and farming, and sometimes both, together.