James Howard Kunstler Quotes

Whole ideologies had to be constructed to account for being modern and to explain it.

Like China, the United States is divided… in half between wet and dry. Though the human population of the United States is proportionately much smaller than China's, the amount of effort America has expended on manipulating habitats and altering terrain is as impressive in its own way as China's birthrate. Especially significant is the stupendous amount of paving laid down in the United States during the past hundred years. It prevents rain from being absorbed as groundwater and sends it instead into rivers, and… into the ocean. The effect of this is the inability of water tables and wetlands to recharge and the diminishing ability of the terrain to support life. In the United States, only 2 percent of the country's rivers and wetlands remain free-flowing and undeveloped. As a result, the country has lost more than half of its wetlands.

Fossil fuels are a unique endowment of geologic history that allow human beings to artificially and temporarily extend the carrying capacity of our habitat on the planet Earth. Before fossil fuels—namely, coal, oil, and natural gas—came into general use, fewer than one billion human beings inhabited the earth. Today, after… two centuries of [mining of hydrocarbons and burning them as] fossil fuels, and with extraction now at an all-time high, the planet supports six and a half billion people. Subtract the fossil fuels and the human race has an obvious problem. The fossil fuel bonanza was a one-time deal, and the interval we have enjoyed it in has been an anomalous period of human history. It has lasted long enough for the people now living in the advanced industrialized nations to consider it… normative. Fossil fuels provided for each person in an industrialized country the equivalent of having hundreds of slaves constantly at… [t]he[i]r disposal. We are now unable to imagine a life without them—or think within a different socioeconomic model—and therefore we are unprepared for what is coming.

The rebellion of the hippies… based itself on the notion that abundance was a natural entitlement, and one could "drop out" of an insecure, deadly, and frightening industrial culture to live off the fat of the land. It was inescapably a jejune philosophy, fraught with contradictions. For the hippies, the natural order of things included items such as stereo record players, electric guitars, motor vehicles for adventuring around the country, cheap bulk whole grains, and other products of an… industrial way of life. The hippie platform… with all its mystical incunabula, rested on the platform of “normal” American life and would have been impossible without it.

…All …the non-fossil fuel energy sources… depend on an underlying fossil fuel economy. You can’t manufacture metal wind turbines using wind energy technology. You can’t make lead-acid storage batteries for solar electric systems using any known solar energy systems.

employed a cast of volunteers… to act out roles following a script in which a terrorist released smallpox in one eastern U.S. city. The result was sobering to an extreme. The public health system virtually collapsed. Hospitals degenerated into chaos. Smallpox spread to twenty-five states and overseas. The national stockpile of vaccines proved to be deeply inadequate. The exercise was called off after four days from the sheer exhaustion of the participants, while the fictional epidemic was still spreading.

You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and... advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.

In any case, it is human nature to consider a place “home” if you were born there, […] have family there, or have spent some portion of your life there, and people are naturally reluctant to leave home. I daresay that many Americans now living in the Southwest will not be disposed to understand what is really happening—that the carrying capacity of their home region has been suddenly and drastically reduced—and they will hunker down hoping for a return to better times.
The vested owners of all those sun-drenched tract houses may stick around for a while and fight over the region, perhaps thinking that they are reenacting the great historical dramas of the nineteenth century—such is the long-term effect of canned entertainment on the collective imagination. The violence and loss of resources will surely send some American citizens fleeing. After a while, it will be obvious to even the staunch defenders that places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque will never again support the populations that were possible during the height of the cheap-oil blowoff in the late twentieth century. They will then pack up and move elsewhere, sacrificing their houses and ties to a disintegrating community. These new refugees may move into careers that they never could have conceived of twenty years earlier, when they were young college graduates: farmer, farm laborer. Wherever they go, they are going to discover a nation preoccupied with food production above all other activities.

[Globalism's] demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. As markets close, societies will turn increasingly to import replacement[s] for sheer economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and... by more intensive... labor as oil and natural gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all... the... relationships... that we have taken for granted as permanent will be radically changed [...]. Life will become intensely and increasingly local.

After World War II, the American public made two momentous and related decisions. First was the decision to resume the project of suburbanization [that was] begun in the 1920s and halted by the Great Depression and war. By the 1950s, the prevailing image of city life was Ralph Kramden’s squalid tenement apartment on television’s The Honeymooners show. Suburbia was the prescribed antidote to the dreariness of the hypertrophied industrial city—and most American cities had never been anything but that. They were short on amenities, overcrowded, and artless. Americans were sick of them and saw no way to improve them. Historically, a powerful sentimental bias for country life ruled the national imagination. As late as 1900, most U.S. citizens had lived on farms, and American culture was still imbued with rural values. As far as many Americans were concerned in the 1950s, suburbia was country living. There was plenty of cheap, open rural land to build on outside the cities, and as soon as mass-production house builders like William Fevitt demonstrated how it might be done, suburbia would be thoroughly democratized—country living for everyone. That suburbia turned out to be a disappointing cartoon of country living rather than the real thing was a tragic unanticipated consequence…

The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar... voices... were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation.

It has been... hard... to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in ...society. Even after the , that collapsed the twin towers of the and sliced through the Pentagon, [...] [we are] still sleepwalking into [an uncertain] [...] future. […] We are now headed off the edge of a cliff. Beyond that cliff is an abyss of economic and political disorder on a scale that no one has ever seen before. […] The national government will prove to be so impotent and ineffective in managing the enormous vicissitudes we face that the United States may not survive as a nation in any meaningful sense but… will devolve into a set of autonomous regions.

The belief that “market economics” will automatically deliver a replacement for fossil fuels is a type of magical thinking like that of the cargo cults of the South Pacific.
This age-old tendency of humans to believe in magical deliverance and to wish for happy outcomes has been aggravated by the very technological triumphs that the oil age brought into existence. Technology itself has become a… supernatural force, one that has demonstrably delivered all kinds of miracles within the memory of many people now living […]. There's no question that technology has prolonged life spans, relieved misery, and made everyday life luxurious for a substantial lucky minority. […] A hopeful public, including leaders in business and politics, views the growing problem of oil depletion as a very straightforward engineering problem of exactly the kind that technology and human ingenuity have so successfully solved before, and it, therefore, seems reasonable to assume that the combination will prevail again. There are, however, several defects in this belief.
One is that we tend to confuse and conflate energy and technology. They go hand in hand, but they are not the same thing. The oil endowment was an extraordinary and singular occurrence of geology, allowing us to use [a fraction of] the stored energy of millions of years of sunlight. Once it's gone it will be gone forever. Technology is just the hardware and programming for running that fuel, …not the fuel itself. And technology is… bound to the laws of physics and thermodynamics […]. All of this is to say that much of our existing technology simply won't work without petroleum, and without the petroleum "platform" to work off, we may lack the tools to get beyond the current level of fossil-fuel-based technology. Another way of putting it is that we have an extremely narrow window of opportunity to make that happen. In the meantime, here are the problems with the various alternative fuels, based on what we know now.

I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out until there was nothing.

In America, after the crash of 1929, the loss of faith in various forms of credit represented by abstract instruments of finance translated into a persistent lack of money—that is, a means of exchange— and the institutions devised to create it stood in disrepute. People could buy very little. Business stagnated. Companies would not hire workers when there was so little demand for products. It was a vicious cycle and it had vicious side effects. Another way of looking at the financial debacle of the 1930s is an ecological view such as ’s metaphor of the industrial economy as a “detritus ecosystem.”
Catton argues that the human race living off the “drawdown” of nonrenewable fossil fuel resources is the equivalent of the algae in a pond enjoying a temporary rush of nutrients in one brief season. Catton’s analogy can be applied and extended to clarify the Great Depression in the context of ecological economics. After the crash of 1929, something… definitely changed in America. But the puzzling part is that the “nutrients in the form of cheap oil—the plenty” Roosevelt spoke of—still flowed. So why did the economic environment become so intractably unhealthy? From an ecological view, the Great Depression represented the effects of severe socioeconomic pollution” produced by the oil-fueled boom of the 1920s, and this “pollution” had the effect of “poisoning the financial ecosystem and consequently killing off financial “organs” that people had come to depend on in order to “thrive” (i.e., to grow wealthy and reproduce). Specifically, the “pollution” killed off the organs that generated credit and turned it into money. This systemic “pollution” of the financial ecosystem harmed the industrial environment enough to temporarily quash any further exuberant “growth.” There was no human die-off but there was a die-off of expectations and a reduction in [the] carrying capacity of the U.S. economy.
Is it fair to say that the by-product of zealous oil use literally converts into such an abstract form of "pollution" capable of poisoning what amounts to a social consensus? This must return us to the idea of entropy. Entropy is the spending down of energy and its translation into negative by-products. […] Air pollution is one expression of entropy. But so is social disorder. So is [the] institutional breakdown. Bodily death is another. These negative by-products of entropy can become interchangeable as entropy progresses, depending on any combination of variable conditions and circumstances. A careful reading of twentieth-century history would bear this out. In the modern era, entropy has been expressed in conditions as seemingly unrelated as war, industrial pollution, pornography, mass political murder, the shattering of a consensus about the value of money, and incompetent parenting. The introduction of high entropy into a given system is profoundly destabilizing in many ways.