Carter Doctrine (1980): “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force…”

Anyone who’s heard my schpeel on suburbs knows that I despise suburbia with a passion. But with America on a relative economic decline compared to much of the world, there are strong reasons why (besides personal preference) we need to repopulate our cities and curb our energy consumption.

I watched the documentary “The End of Suburbia,” which is to some extent an alarmist film that assumes that our whole way of living is going to change with the decline of fosile fuels — but though I don’t think everything the film warms of will actually come to pass, we’re definitely going to have to wake up and truly start to reduce of reliance on cheap oil.

Suburbia is an amazing inefficient way of life that sprung up in 20th century America and relies inseparably on the personal automobile. Unfortunately, it’s not a good way forward if we, as a country, want to maintain economic growth in the decades ahead. The solution is not to procure more petroleum. It’s to reign in our consumption.

In short, I have a car, and I commute farther to work that I would like, but I’m strongly in favor of gas prices rising. America needs a wake up shock, despite any near term economic consequences. We need to realize that we need to change our lifestyles because it’s not sustainable. In other countries where energy prices are higher, average consumers are much better about conservation — but although “green” is now a concept that’s beginning to catch on among young professionals who wish to be cool, we need to embrace conservation for its own benefits (not just the coolness factor) if we want to break our addiction to oil.

1) We need better public transportation. If we’ve learned anything from this summer’s gas prices, it’s that America needs more options for mass transit. DC residents are papered with a decent subway and bus network that networks the city and several miles into the suburbs, but there are so many places were there are frankly no mass transit options. This isn’t to say, of course, that DC’s subway is ideal. Tokyo, for one, puts us firmly to shame.

2) We need better urban planning — mid-sized communities connected by mass transit that supply residents with commercial areas and civil services that are walkable to residential areas. Americans need to be able to walk to their grocery stores, their schools, and their offices. Suburbia is, by and large, artificial and soulless. Why is everyone enchanted by old urban villages like Georgetown and Old Town Alexandria? Why then do these same people live out at the end of a cul-de-sac? Why does the “American Dream” involve a cookie-cutter house on a treeless patch of grass down the highway from a Walmart? Look at the housing situation in your area. I bet that the close suburbs (like Arlington) haven’t lost much if any value while the exurb sprawl has declined.

3) The answer is to bulldoze our strip malls and create new mixed-use developments. The suburbs aren’t beautiful. They’re not historic. McMansions beyond the beltway aren’t the future — Theyr’e the foreclosed past. But we need to start redesigning and regrouping before we’re foreclosed, before all the value is lost. I mean, economically, if we switch from SUV’s to Prius’s now, we’ll have more money tomorrow than if we keep driving the SUV hoping that gas prices will decline. Because they won’t. Energy was too cheap. It needs to go up to become the scarce commodity that it really is.

4) Alternative energy is local, not global. The 1990′s and 2000′s have been and still are the age of globalization. Not that globalization didn’t exist in earlier years, but these have been the decades of true globalization. Alternative energy is best positioned to meet the needs of local communities — solar panals on the roofs of houses, wind turbines up on a hill, even hydro-power won’t solve our industrial needs, but it can power communities.

Is it going to far to say that SUV’s are unpatriotic?