James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstleris an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere, a history of American suburbia and urban development, The Long Emergency, and most recently, Too Much Magic. In The Long Emergency, he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrariancommunities. Starting with World Made by Hand in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth19 October 1948
CountryUnited States of America
My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale.
If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned,and in the end the mystery is all there is.
Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.
Motion is a great tranquilizer.
On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other.
A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
I’m serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it,
Anything goes and nothing matters.
The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.
The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.
The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things
Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.