James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler (2007)

James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.

See also World Made by Hand and The Long Emergency

Quotes

  • Western Civ[ilization]’s most infamous encounter with pandemic disease, so far, was the big first wave of the Black Death that had a marathon run from 1346 to 1353. That bug was the real deal. It killed folks left and right, every age group, every social station, and it killed them ugly. Few who caught it survived. Up to half the population of Europe perished, along with a lot of their social and economic ways. The cause of the Black Death was subject to every possible explanation except the actual one, Yersina pestis, a bacterium associated with rats and their insect parasites, fleas and lice, who also enjoyed an association with humans living in the generally squalid conditions of the day ­— the ancient Roman habit of bathing long forgotten. At the top of their list of causes was an angry God, and his wicked erstwhile subordinate, Satan. The “experts” of that time tended to cluster in the church hierarchy, with its drear obsessions and compulsions. The squishy boundary between the supernatural and reality loosed all manner of derangement. The Jews came in for much vilification, leading to massacres in Strasbourg, Mainz, and Cologne. On the whole, the episode represented a terrific humbling of humanity. The allegory of the Dance Macabre summed it up in [hu]mankind’s universal antic journey to… death. On the plus side, as modern interpolators [historians]… say, the bubonic plague winnowed down Europe’s population to a scale more congenial with its resource base. After that big first wave of the disease, [the] land was cheaper and human labor better rewarded. Eventually, more food got around. Incidentally, the plague provoked nostalgia for the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, especially among the scholars of Florence, launching the extravaganzas of the Renaissance [which led to the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution], the Enlightenment [which led to the Industrial Revolution which, in turn, led] eventually [to] our own pageant of techno-supremacist Modernity [which led to the problems we face today].
  • I’ve said many times that we can expect delusional beliefs to rise in proportion to the economic hardships we experience. That is exactly what’s happening. So, it’s necessary to remind people that life is tragic and history won’t shed a tear for us if we make poor collective decisions, or adopt beliefs that are inconsistent with reality. We are proud of declaring ourselves to be a “free country.” Alas, this leaves us free to pound our civilization down a rat hole, which is what we’re doing.
  • The last 150 years have amounted to such a cavalcade of wonders and technological marvels that we’ve literally programmed ourselves to expect it will continue indefinitely. This sequence of events — the telephone, the light bulb, electricity in every home, airplanes, motion pictures, television, the computer, and thousands of other conveniences to human life—programmed us to think there’s an endless supply of technological magic that can overcome anything. I think we’re heading into a time-out from technological progress as we’ve known it—and by that, I mean just the way I’ve described it, the expectation of endless magic. And I think that will come as an enormous shock to our culture.
  • I don’t think the previous Dark Age that followed the collapse of Rome was quite the same as what we’re facing. That involved a profound and incremental series of losses in knowledge, technique, and the ability to do things, everything from making good pottery and concrete to ways of organizing work. Our situation now has much more potential for cultural damage, because our conditioning in technological progress is so extreme. The letdown may be awful when it becomes evident we’re not going to solve our energy problems with algae secretions, solar, wind, or other alternative fuel schemes–that we’re not going to run [high-energy things like] Disney World, the Interstate Highway System, Wal-Mart, and the military on any combination of other energy systems. […] This has enormous potential for disrupting our sense of reality. It’s hard to predict the kinds of reaction[s] that this may generate, but I think you will have a society so profoundly disappointed by science and technology that it could propel us into a new dark age of superstition.
    • Ibid.
  • …we were becoming very delusional about the set of predicaments that we’re facing. I’m a little shocked at the quality and character of the delusional thinking and where it’s coming from. When you see articles in the New York Times, the supposed newspaper of record, that the USA may soon become a net energy exporter, you know there’s some kind of problem with perhaps the entire intellectual class in America.
    • Ibid.
  • Paper money is bad enough, as France learned under the tutelage of the rascal John Law in the early 1700s. The nation was broke, exhausted by foolish wars, and heaped under unbearable debt.
  • Monetary inflation became a thing for the first time since Roman days — a much easier trick with printed paper banknotes than with silver coins — but the effect was the same: the evaporation of “wealth” (which is what money supposedly represents).
    • Ibid.
  • We're living in environments that are punishing us, the immersive ugliness of North American cities can be described as entropy made visible. It's a condition that drives you towards death and stasis. [...] That's what people feel when they go down these miserable boulevards filled with miserable buildings, we need to do better.
  • Somehow I doubt that this Christmas will win the Bing Crosby star of approval. Rather, we see the financial markets breaking under the strain of sustained institutionalized fraud, and the social fabric tearing from persistent systemic political dishonesty. It adds up to a nation that can’t navigate through reality, a nation too dependent on sure things, safe spaces, and happy outcomes. Every few decades a message comes from the Universe that faking it is not good enough.

Too Much Magic (2012)

  • Peak [living] human population will… lag… peak [extraction of] oil and peak [extraction of other] mineral resources until these conditions express themselves as food shortages. This means that the human population will continue to rise for a while, even as we begin to encounter these... limits. It’s not possible to estimate how much the [living] population will increase because the relationship between energy and mineral resources and food production is a very fragile equation, subject to any number of discontinuities. To these, add the complications of weather disasters arising from climate change, including drought, the spread of plant diseases, and so forth. This lagging further rise in [the living] human population will only make the inevitable contraction more acute once food shortages begin. […] We're putting a strain on everything the earth has to offer us. While the combination of peak stuff and… billion[s of] [living] humans is forcing the issue, ...the truth is that circumstances will now determine what happens, not policies or personalities. [...] Population overshoot is therefore unlikely to yield to management. Rather, the usual suspects will enter the scene and do their thing: starvation, disease, [...] violence [...] [and] death [...].
    • Chapter 1, p. 10.
  • The Industrial Revolution still cannot be considered an unqualified success, for all the comfort and convenience enjoyed by a minority of people in the world. Where we stand now is the brink of unprecedented damage to the ecology of the only habitable planet in the only universe we know of, and I refer not just to climate change—which may or may not be caused by human activity —but to all the other insults and injuries we’ve done to the biosphere. While industrialism led to the formation of a prosperous middle class, it also plunged millions of people into the grimmest kind of regimented quasi-slavery in conditions that were arguably no improvement over their grandparents’ lives as agricultural peasants (or their distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers).
    • Chapter 4, p. 74.
  • Industrialism hasn’t been an abiding set of activities in any particular place but rather a dynamic cycle, of takeoff, peak, and ebb. It has rotated from region to region and country to country, along the way disposing of whole classes of people when it was through with them, chewing through habitats, resources, political systems, and landscapes. The working classes of Europe and America had their decades of factory life and the scene has shifted to Asia, which may be peaking now in the face of constraints on fossil fuels. In the United States, the cultural memory lingers on of the brief, ecstatic period after the Second World War when men on the automobile assembly lines made better salaries than college professors and factory workers enjoyed all the blandishments of suburban living. But of course that was the very peak of the cycle in America. The same class of people is now on the scrap heap, reduced to minimum-wage service jobs at best, or relegated to the cottage industry in outlawed drugs, with the gaps filled by subsidized idleness. Great Britain is a similar story, with Germany and France less eager to surrender their manufacturing.
    • Chapter 4, pp. 74–75.
  • The more comfortable we have become with the blandishments of industrial technology, the more complexity we are burdened with —as the BP oil blowout and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown remind us—and the more likely we are to meet the very fate we are desperately trying to avoid: our rendezvous with entropy [a euphemism for death].
    • Chapter 4, p. 76.
  • The American scene changed hugely in the 1920s. Modernity transformed everything from women’s clothing to the human imprint on the landscape. The car liberated rural America and began cluttering up the cities. The first tractors started a revolution on the farm.* Muscular American industry outinvented and outproduced all competitors around the world. Foreigners watched our movies and learned to play jazz. A sense of intoxication ran through Wall Street, prompting excessive risk-taking and wild speculation in any novelty, the participation of easily snookered, inexperienced investors buying stocks with borrowed money (“on margin”), unregulated investment pools that behaved like hedge funds do today, “bucket shops” that amounted to betting parlors, and a great deal of insider banking misconduct around financial markets that were hardly policed at all. After it all crashed in October 1929 the loss of confidence was epic. Decades later, scholars still puzzle over the cause of the Great Depression. It was a reality failure. The things that people believed in proved spectacularly unreliable, especially in the realm of money and other abstract paper extensions of it.
    • Chapter 6, p. 119.
  • Not to say that one would have to go back to a hunter-gatherer [or even a herbivore-insectivore] mode of existence in order to live on a solar budget. Pick any preindustrial culture you like, or pick the best or most relevant parts from any of them to get on with daily life, for instance, the habitations of Edo Japan, the division of labor of the Inca, the diet of the Florentines, the animal husbandry of Georgian England, the costumes of the Ming dynasty. Surely one could contrive life on a solar budget from these modes of daily endeavor and put together a satisfying existence that would amount to being civilized. Anyway, a great many of the useful inventions that made life comfortable and interesting were developed before we began using fossil fuels, quite a few of them in China alone. Add to that some additional knowledge that the human race has acquired since those historical periods, perhaps only the germ theory of disease, and you could enjoy a decent living standard.
    Anyway, that’s a theory. History does run backward now and then, and the centers of civilization shift from one place to another, but we've never seen anything like what we face: the crash of a turbocharged cheap energy economy along with an ecological catastrophe perhaps beyond the biblical scale. History is also not symmetrical; you don’t necessarily go down the same way you came, recapitulating earlier arrangements in the same sequence backward. What we might get instead could be just a one-way ticket to Palookaville instead of getting to relive the sixteenth century.
    • Chapter 8, p. 198.
  • An overwhelming majority of scientists who have looked into the matter agree that global warming is underway and is... caused by people burning fossil fuels. This is the meta-fact hovering over all the details. [...] In [mining and] burning so much [hydrocarbons in the form of] coal, oil, and gas [as fossil fuels] we've released [a fraction of] 460 million years of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere in a mere two hundred years. There are consequences for doing this. The trajectory of climate problems has gotten only more severe since I discussed the issue in The Long Emergency in 2005. Greenhouse gas emissions have exceeded predictions. The IPCC report expects a sea level rise of at least three feet [91 cm] […]; James Hansen of NASA says... seventeen feet [5.18 m]. If that is the case, there would be no need to argue over the finer points of how many square miles in the Netherlands would be underwater... along with Bangladesh, many Pacific islands, most of Florida, and the Mississippi River Delta, Houston, Jacksonville, Key West, and thousands of other places.
    • Chapter 8, p. 203.
  • We can conclude that the Earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization. We maintain a most uncertain toehold in our narrow niche of comfort here, with a vast community of other living things on a planet that might have a self-regulating life of its own. I’m not altogether convinced by the Gaia theory, but there’s plenty of reason to believe in a form of cosmic equilibrium that amounts to rough justice. There are consequences for our doings, and when we cross the frontier into the realm of too much magic cosmic judgment may come thundering through our little lives like what our distant ancestors thought of as the wrath of God.
    • Chapter 8, p. 215.
  • The Internet is now assumed to be a permanent fixture of human life. I doubt it will work out that way. It has been interesting while it lasted but I’m persuaded that it will not last very far into the future. Our resource limits are too stark and pressing. The electronic server “farms” composed of massed computers require too much electricity. Networked computing is unlikely to shift soon enough (if ever) to less energy-intensive nanomachines, or computers that run “biologically,” or anything else currently on the wish list for new leaps forward. The computer industry shows little interest in our fundamental resource limits. All this will come as a huge and unhappy surprise for people accustomed to thinking of technological progress as both inevitable and a kind of entitlement. We've been so dazzled by the magic of computers that we were not paying attention to what has happened in the background. A greater irony is that the Internet, including so-called social media and cell phones, is facilitating the first stages of epochal social unrest that will synchronize with the contractions in energy and economic activity that await us presently. Angry youth may be out rioting in the streets when their cell phone service goes dark for good.
    • Chapter 9, p. 226
  • NASA has no next-generation manned space exploration vehicle offstage. Officials have talked about developing a new rocket to put something out there, but the chatter sounds pretty vague and demoralized. I’m not persuaded that it will amount to anything. The end of the shuttle era was a poignant moment in American science, full of sad resonances for dissolving dreams of adventure in other worlds. The government is out of [real] money, and capital will only get scarcer as our fossil fuel energy inputs decline. Space travel will probably prove to have been another product of the cheap oil age, retrograde as that sounds. The truth works backward and forward, and sometimes it hurts.
    • Chapter 10, p. 241.
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