Crippled by economic depression and environmental catastrophe, the American dream is dead in the water. And with peak oil hot on its hyperconsuming heels, America is looking for solutions, and it may have found a good one in the form of an ambitious national high-speed rail network that would connect its metropoles and mid-size cities together in green solidarity. Better late than never.

“In the ’20s, the American way of life looked just like Paris,” U.S. High-Speed Rail Association (USHSRA) president Andy Kunz told AlterNet by phone in a wide-ranging interview. (Read the entire interview here.) “Everyone was living in big cities, riding street trains, no one had cars,” he added. “But the oil and auto industries, working hand-in-hand with the government, converted the country away from that system. America wasn’t born with the system we had now. So the American dream as we know it is somewhat of a myth.

From 1945 forward, we built a different America based on sprawl. But the days of plentiful cheap oil are over, so whether we want to change or not, we will be forced to. And America is going to have a tough time adjusting.”

It will be much easier to adjust to the unimaginable economic and environmental crunches coming our way if we launched that system before peak oil smacks us upside the head as early as 2015, according to a recent report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command. And that’s being generous; some would argue that we’ve been experiencing peak oil’s birth pangs for over a decade. Right now, USHSRA’s projected rail network envisions functional regional high-speed networks in California, the Pacific Northwest, Northeast and Great Lakes region by 2015, and then a complete national system by 2030. But there’s no time to waste.