The planner, critic and novelist James Howard Kunstler -- author, most famously, of
The Geography of Nowhere, says a lot of things you don't want to hear.
Yet on the eve of the publication of his next book, The Long Emergency, Kunstler's poised to become one of the most in-demand speakers in America -- and with good reason, as many now predict oil prices may skyrocket as high as $100 a barrel this year.
And JHK, who specializes in telling home truths, has a few things to say about our preparedness for a sustained energy crisis:
We suffer from a kind of Jiminy Cricket syndrome in this country. We believe that if you wish for something, it will come true. Right now a lot of people -- including people who ought to know better -- are wishing for some miracle technology to save our collective ass.
There is not going to be a hydrogen economy. The hydrogen economy is a fantasy. It is not going to happen. [...] Nor will we replace the current car fleet with electric cars or natural gas cars. [...] Wind power and solar electric will not produce significant amounts of power within the context of the way we live now.
Kunstler's latest opus is excerpted in the
current issue of Rolling Stone. Many of the book's key ideas are summarized more colloquially in the rough transcript of
an address he gave at Time + Space Limited's annual
State of the Community forum in early January 2005.
(Full disclosure: The latter event was co-sponsored by the nonprofit citizens organization which I run, Friends of Hudson).
A resident of Saratoga (NY), Jim Kunstler can be abrasively opinionated. His hilarious and profane blog is called Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle. In his regular feature, Eyesore of the Month, he regularly uses words like "abortion" to describe ugly buildings. At times, it can seem like he relishes informing people about uncomfortable things they don't want to hear. For example:
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. [...] The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
(The swearing and doomsaying is, in my opinion, a deliberate strategy on Kunstler's part to wake people up. It's necessary in our habit-ridden and oversaturated society to get people's attention, and justified because the speaker wants people to start changing their lives before things get really ugly, not after the crisis is full-blown.)
Hearing (and co-hosting) just two of his lectures over the past couple of years has radically changed my worldview and my lifestyle. Because of Jim Kunstler, I stopped waiting any longer to buy a hybrid car (which is only a Band-Aid on the open sore of the nation's energy problems). More importantly, his predications have moved me to drastically reduce the amount that I drive to less than a third of what the average American drives in a year -- and that's still too much.
In general, thanks to my exposure to his work and ideas, I've become much more dedicated to making my hometown of Hudson a safer and more self-sustaining place to live.
This book should be required reading for all Kossacks. If even 5% of Kunstler's dire predictions come true, we are in for a rough ride for at least the next couple decades. (Particularly troubling are how his predictions of unrest and scapegoating across the nation -- but especially in Southern and suburban areas -- intersect with the hugely important reporting of people like Dave "Orcinus" Neiwert on domestic hate groups.)
So please, take a look at the Rolling Stone excerpt, and the lecture transcript. Get the book if so moved. Keep an eye out for Jim on his book tour. (I'm just assuming one is planned; I don't know that for a fact.) And while I don't think it's time yet to dust out those bunkers people built back in the 50s and 60s to prepare for nuclear war, and begin restocking them with canned kidney beans -- please consider making your lifestyle changes now, before it's too late.
Even if we are fortunate enough for Kunstler to be proved wrong, we'll be glad to be living more locally and sustainably anyway. I have no personal stake in this, except our mutual survival, so think about pre-ordering his book from an independent outlet such as Tattered Cover.