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
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.
I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it.
When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.
The living arrangements American now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually.
Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.
As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.
Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the 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. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.
The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.
No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.