Kunstler, who lives in Saratoga Springs, first rose to prominence with his influential 1993 look at suburbia, Geography of Nowhere, that cast a keenly observant eye, and scolding analytic voice to our “tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.” His 2005 The Long Emergency widened his critique to our way of life’s dependence on a shrinking resource, mixing equal parts geo-science, economics, and sociological methodology to discuss the ways in which the U.S. could change to save itself, including a shift away from the idea that we are all consumers back to the ideal of us all being citizens.
“The American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face — such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class’s private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future,” he wrote on his popular Clusterfuck Nation blog soon after The Long Emergency’s release.
It was after a dinner conversation with Kunstler that my wife and I decided to move from a rural setting to our present village home, the better to reduce our need for daily car travel and be part of more shared services.
How does Kunstler find peace, given the ways in which he sees our world?
“I find a lot of solace in every day life, including the things that I write and the life that I live,” he replies.
He mentions a new book set for delivery to his publisher October 1, on the subject of wishful thinking and technology.
“I think we’re facing a kind of mass delusion,” he says, talking about the “technological rescue” scenarios we’ve gotten used to coming up with “so we can just keep on truckin’.” “As societies get more distressed the delusional thinking rises…I think we’re going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.”
And yet, Kunstler adds, humans are resilient.
“There’s no question about that,” he concludes, with a chuckle.++
“Energy: Past, Present, and Future, with writer/thinkers James Howard Kunstler, James R. Norman, and Amanda Little — the first of The Ashokan Center’s new educationally enlightening series of discussions called the “Meeting of the Minds” — begins at 3 p.m. Sunday, September 25, at the Ashokan Center campus at 477 Beaverkill Road in Olivebridge, not far off Route 28A from the dividing weir over the reservoir.
For further information call 657- 8333 or visit www.ashokancenter.org.
The economic slowdown may have been engineered by global policy makers- Afraid that the planet doesn’t have enough resources for India and china to come on board to American middle class status, etc. Meanwhile w/ this global decline pollution levels would drop and open spaces preserved, etc…Simply kill the middle class and kill consumption.