At some point today I was ruminating upon the extraordinary rise and diffusion of first the personal computer and then the internet over the last 20 years and wondering if there might be an equivalent in energy generating technology that could be so universally adopted. If that were so, if we had an energy technology ‘killer ap’, we might have a chance of quickly displacing the ‘killer ap’ of three generations ago – so widely and easily adopted that it transformed society, geography, and now the climate – and making a relatively painless transition to a sustainable energy economy.

But it seems we don’t. Most balanced analyses conclude that no single technology is going to replace the current abundance of cheap fossil fuel that we have come to regard as our birthright. (The tenor of most commentaries on the cost of energy is outrage, though it did occur to me to wonder what right we have to expect energy to be cheap? Except our economy is predicated upon it.). Not only do we need to build the technology and infrastructure to support sustainability but we need to dismantle the technology and infrastructure (and expectations and tax structures) that support unsustainability. It is a massive undertaking, and I suspect that something disastrous will have to happen, not once but repeatedly (how quickly, for instance, has popular awareness of the Asian Tsunami faded), before there is suddenly a ‘war on global warming’ and a ‘war on energy waste’ and the money and will are found for radical restructuring of everything from policy to lifestyle.

I had two glimpses into sustainable possibilities recently, in Amsterdam. Amsterdam itself, at least to a credulous tourist eye, has not surrendered to the automobile; if anything ruled supreme, it was the fleets and fleets of sit-up-and-beg bicycles of a style I hadn’t seen since WWII movies. Bicycle theft is so rampant that everyone ‘dresses down’ in town. Everyone cycles: men in suits, women in skirts, parents with small children perched on their handlebars, large and larger children, not a stitch of lycra or indeed a bicycle helmet to be seen. Every ‘street’ is a canal, with a single lane of parking on either side, a single lane of traffic (both directions), a cycle-pedestrian pavement protected by metal posts, and then the tall, narrow, forward-tilting row houses. There is nowhere for the roads to expand. Morning traffic on those single-lane streets proceeds by delicate negotiation between delivery vans and traffic, with motorists nudging their way towards their destination while the bicycles stream by.

The other was the book I took with me, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge. It’s the third book of his Three California’s trilogy, after the post-apocalyptic The Wild Shore and the dystopic The Gold Coast (which is actually my favourite of the three). Pacific Edge portrays the small, sustainable, intensely local lives of a California community in 2065, sixty-odd years after the work of dismantling the infrastructures supporting the crumbling instutions of the twentieth century began. It’s a blueprint for a sustainable community, with human physical labor supported by a subtly advanced material science. What is not part of the book (because it was not the book that Robinson intended to write, note!) is the long struggle towards its realization.