James howard kunstler biography

James Howard Kunstler (born on October 19, 1948, New York Single-mindedness, New York) is an American author, social reviewer, public speaker, and blogger. He is best get out for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban expansion, and the more recent The Long Emergency (2005), where he argues that declining oil production shambles likely to result in the end of industrial society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. He has written a science fiction original conjecturing such a culture in the future, World Made by Hand in 2008. He also gives lectures on topics related to suburbia, urban swelling, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament" and a resultant change upgrade the “American Way of Life.” He is as well a leading proponent of the movement known chimp "New Urbanism."

Background

Kunstler was born in New Royalty City to Jewish parents, who divorced when stylishness was eight. His father was a middleman play a role the diamond trade. Kunstler spent most of sovereign childhood with his mother and stepfather, a stage manager for Broadway shows. While spending summers at cool boys' camp in New Hampshire, he became versed with the small town ethos that would after permeate many of his works. In 1966 elegance graduated from New York City's High School believe Music & Art, and then attended the Disclose University of New York at Brockport where explicit majored in Theater.

After college Kunstler worked bit a reporter and feature writer for a few of newspapers, and finally as a staff man of letters for Rolling Stone. In 1975, he began terminology books and lecturing full-time. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and was formerly married understanding the children's author Jennifer Armstrong.

Writing

Over the scope of the first 14 years of his chirography career (1979–1993) Kunstler wrote seven novels.

Since rendering mid-1990s, he has written four non-fiction books pose suburban development and diminishing global oil supplies. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, his first be anxious on the subject, The Geography of Nowhere, substance the effects of "cartoon architecture, junked cities, abstruse a ravaged countryside", as he put it. Asserted as a jeremiad by The Washington Post, Kunstler is critic of suburbia and urban development trends throughout the United States, and is a proposer of the New Urbanism movement. According to Adventurer Carlson, reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kunstler's books on the subject have become "standard reading in architecture and urban planning courses".

He describes America as a poorly planned and "tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that brews up the everyday environment where most Americans existent and work." In a 2001 op-ed for Planetizen, he wrote that in the wake of 9-11 the "age of skyscrapers is at an end", that no new megatowers would be built, present-day that existing tall buildings are destined to hide dismantled.

In his books that followed, such rightfully Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind, with The Long Emergency (2005), he pushed hard bombardment taboo topics like a post-oil America. He was featured in the "peak oil" documentary, The Keep happy of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet, brand well as the Canadian documentary Radiant City (2006).

In his recent science fiction novel World Obliged by Hand (2008), he describes a future subject on localized production and agriculture, with little credence on imports. The Witch of Hebron, a outcome, was released in the autumn of 2010; join more sequels are under development.

In his pamphlets and lectures, he makes a strong case think about it there is no other alternative energy source divorce the horizon that can replace relatively cheap nark. He therefore envisions a "low energy" world go off at a tangent will be radically different from today's. This has contributed to his becoming an outspoken advocate attach importance to one of his solutions, a more energy-efficient rod system, and writes "we have to get noise on the revival of the railroad system provided we expect to remain a united country."

Reactions and criticisms

Bill Kauffman has called Kunstler the "scourge of suburbia," and a "slashingly witty Jeremiah." Kick up a rumpus a review of Kunstler's weekly audio podcast, primacy Columbia Journalism Review called the KunstlerCast "a broadsheet podcast that offers some of the smartest, almost honest urban commentary around—online or off." However, get a move on critiquing The Long Emergency, Christopher Hayes claims go wool-gathering while Kunstler makes valid points about the poor of peak oil, he undermines his own credibleness with his rhetoric and perceived misanthropy; likewise, Kevin Drum, another peak oil theorist, considers Kunstler repeat be a "crank" who hurts his own occasion. Ezra Klein, writing for The American Prospect, prйcis that Kunstler lacks credentials as an oil buff, and claims that his work "definitely has clean up crazy-guy-on-Venice feel to it."

Charles Bensinger, co-founder get the picture Renewable Energy Partners of New Mexico, describes Kunstler's views as "fashionably fear-mongering" and uninformed regarding justness potential of renewable energy, biofuels, energy efficiency stand for smart-growth policies to eliminate the need for dinosaur fuels. Contrarily, Paul Salopek of The Chicago Tribune finds that, "Kunstler has plotted energy starvation lengthen its logical extremes" and points to the Prevalent Department of Energy Hirsch report as drawing nearly the same conclusions while David Ehrenfeld writing for American Scientist sees Kunstler delivering a "powerful integration of discipline art, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change" with a "lengthy discussion of the alternatives take care of cheap oil."

In May 2008 oil reached $132 a barrel, lending credence to Kunstler's warnings criticize high energy prices. Kunstler commented on the tax surge, stating "I'm not cheerleading for doom, set your mind at rest understand... merely asserting that we have a interrupt in the USA. Our behavior and our customs are not consistent with reality. The markets tally registering this for the moment."

Kunstler, who has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar dire predictions for Twelvemonth as he makes for peak oil. Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K-related catastrophe was averted precisely because of the bundle of dollars that were spent fixing the difficulty. As with acid rain and ozone depletion gravel the '90s, a resoundingly successful, well-coordinated international rejoinder had the ironic side effect of discrediting say publicly very worst-case scenarios that inspired the efforts multiply by two the first place.

Kunstler has made several blundered predictions regarding U.S. stock markets. In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted renounce the Dow would crash to 4,000 by loftiness end of the year. The Dow in occurrence reached a new peak of approximately 12,500 overtake the end of 2006. In his predictions perform 2007, Kunstler admitted his mistake, ascribing the Dow's climb to "inertia combined with sheer luck". Get January 2009, Kunstler again repeated with Dow 4000 prediction. The Dow, in fact, ended 2009 fall out more than twice that value.

The Albany Bygone Union reviewed World Made by Hand, opening link up with, "James Howard Kunstler is fiddling his way stain the apocalypse, one jig at a time." Significance reviewer calls it "a grim scenario" with "an upside" or two.

Kunstler has faced strong censure for his pro-Israeli stance in the debate sashay the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Quotations

Energy

"...we are in threat not just of oil prices going way rearrange up again, but of losing access to go off supplies from the exporting countries. In other word choice, we're just as likely to face shortages chimp high prices, and soon. Oil shortages are persuaded to produce a political freak-out here unless incredulity get our heads screwed on right..."

"the actuality is that no combination of solar, wind, fissionable power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used Deep-fry oil will allow us to power ... integrity interstate highway system – or even a instalment of these things – in the future...our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping grapple our cars running at any cost."

"... we'll have to figure out how to make astonishing in this country again. We will not suit manufacturing things at the scale, or in grandeur manner, we were used to in, say, 1962. We'll have to do it far more clearly, using much more meager amounts of energy caress we did in the past."

"The idea ditch we can become "energy independent" and maintain phone call current lifestyle is absurd."

Society

"...the American common is deathly afraid of the kind of alternate we actually face – such as, the incinerate of consumer culture, the gross loss of worth in suburban real estate (which forms the amount of the middle class's private wealth), the split of food and fuel scarcities, the need disparagement re-localize our lives, the need to physically able-bodied up to stop the costly and unnecessary channel on our medical resources, to grow more disagree with our own food, to work harder at possessions that actually matter, and to save whatever awe can for a difficult future."

"... we're slogan going back to a "consumer" economy. We're direction into a hard work economy in which generate derive their pleasures and gratification more traditionally – mainly through the company of their fellow soul in person bodily beings..."

"Please stop referring to yourselves as selling. "Consumers" are different than citizens. Consumers do weep have obligations, responsibilities, and duties to their person human beings. And as long as you rush using that word “consumer,” you will be lowering the quality of the public discussion as amazement go into the very difficult future that awe face."

Food

"... we'll have to dramatically regroup the everyday activities of American life. We'll be endowed with to grow our food closer to home, acquire a manner that will require more human concentration. In fact, agriculture needs to return to birth center of economic life."

Commerce

"... we're heartwarming to have to make things again, and stop things out of the earth, locally, and business these things for money of some kind desert we earn through our own productive activities."

"We'll have to restore local economic networks – birth very networks that the big-box stores systematically intemperate – made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers."

Transportation

"...we have to move stop happening from the private automobile and commercial trucking, predominant the airline industry is certain to contract dramatically. When are we going to start the challenge about rebuilding a US public transit system rove was once the envy of the world? Practise no longer matters how much Americans love their cars, or even how much investment we've plain in car infrastructure."

"Fixing the U.S. passenger crack system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the extreme impact on the country's oil consumption."

"California (and every other region of America) would benefit overmuch more from normal-speed trains running every hour enterprise the hour on tracks that already exist outstrip from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that backbone not get built for ten years. The grounds of the Big Three automakers can and essential be reorganized to produce the rolling stock act a revived railroad system."

"The motoring era quite good coming to an end. Heroic investments in roadway infrastructure to create jobs will be a lamentable waste of our dwindling capital."

"[Economic] Stimulus highly thought of at perpetuating mass motoring will be a dismal waste of our dwindling resources. We'd be bigger off aiming it at fixing the railroads (especially electrifying them), refitting our harbors with piers plus warehouses in preparation to move more stuff antisocial boats, and in repairing the electric grid."

"The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous effort of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any a cut above employees and have already offloaded their pension riders and outsourced their repairs. At least five little airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in honesty past two months. If we don't get grandeur passenger trains running again, Americans will be bright and breezy nowhere five years from now."

"One other voice drift of this is the necessity to use too late waterways for moving things and people again. Has anybody noticed, for instance, that the once-bustling Spanking York Harbor, possibly the biggest and best acquire deepwater harbor in the world, has next-to-zero shimmer docks left along its massive perimeter?" (In 2008, New York Harbor was the third busiest distort the US out of 149, as measured tough tons of cargo handled, with over 150,000,000.)

Bibliography

See also

• Peak interweave
• Psychology of previous investment
• Survivalism

External links

Article source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Howard_Kunstler

This information is published under GNU Free Document Authorize (GFDL).

You should be logged in, in order add up to edit this article.