Global Warming - Interview With Jim Kunstler

[mhr]

Global Warning
by Paula Routly
13 Apr 2005

Social critic James Howard Kunstler has railed for years against the twin evils of bad urban design and suburban sprawl. Based in Saratoga Springs, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere warns that our beloved cars -- and the subdivided landscape they drive us to -- are leading American culture down a four-lane highway to destruction.

Kunstler's arguments have taken on new urgency in light of what scientists now agree is an impending, and permanent, global energy crisis. His new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, due out in May), imagines life -- and jobs, housing, architecture and transportation -- without access to cheap oil. An excerpt appears in a recent issue of Rolling Stone.

Kunstler got a rock-star reception last week at Middlebury College, where he entertained a standing-room-only audience with provocative predications about where our unbridled consumption is likely to land us. An eloquent, funny speaker who is not afraid to use the f-word, Kunstler agreed to a follow-up email interview with Seven Days.

Paula Routly: You've long criticized the housing and transportation policies that drove people from the cities to suburbia after World War II. Now it turns out "Levittown" is not only ugly and soul-killing, but unsustainable. Explain your vision of the "Long Emergency."

James Howard Kunstler: We poured our national wealth into the construction of a living arrangement that has no future -- and the future is now here. The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It was deficient and problematic as a human habitat even apart from the question of its sustainability. The way we live in America represents a tragic set of collective and individual choices we made at a particular point in history, the mid-to-late 20th century, when circumstances seemed to suggest there were no limits to our quest for comfort, convenience and leisure. These things turned out to be a poor basis for a value system and for an economy.

Snip ......

http://www.energybulletin.net/5302.html

[IrateCitizen]

1. I'm really beginning to like this Kunstler guy!

I've primarily concentrated on cultural dissolution up to this point, but Kunstler seems to do a good job of bringing other aspects of collapse into focus.

My favorite part of this interview is he spends the whole time talking about how difficult things are going to become, how our whole way of life as we know it will dissolve before us, and concludes with the following:
Personally, I am a fairly cheerful person.

Bwaaaahahahaha! :rofl: