James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler's jeremiad against suburbification was originally written as an essay under the title "Why Is America So Fucking Ugly?" The book recounts the history and culture by which the US has made unpersons of me and my fellow ambulators, leading to what Kunstler repeatedly calls the "crisis of place in America" (e.g. 189). "No one who could avoid it would want to be on foot on a typical collector road. Any adult between eighteen and sixty-five walking along one would instantly show more fall under suspicion of being less than a good citizen" (117). How often I have resembled that remark.

In the early 1990s, when this book was first published, Kunstler was already able to point to two generations of Americans who had never lived in any town or neighborhood physically designed for humans rather than automobiles. Despite his diagnoses here, and the perpetuation and development of the ameliorative work that he itemizes in his final chapter, a third generation has been added since.

A silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns was a widespread cessation of motor traffic, and it was a moment when many US Americans were forced to confront the realities of their local built environments. Some urban pedestrianizations undertaken at that time have persisted. But to the extent that 21st-century progress has been made on the problems that Kunstler's book discusses, the Trumpist reaction has worked to halt and where possible reverse that progress. "Drill, baby, drill," is necessarily paired with a resentment of pedestrians and cyclists. They hate us for our freedom, and the mind-manacled thralls of the Cybertruck, the minivan, and the SUV are determined to drive us all to hell with them.

At the 2026 moment of my reading, petroleum prices are spiking in response to the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. Kunstler offers some explicit discussion of the "oil crises" of the 1970s, and he takes as axiomatic that the precarity of fuel costs associated with impending peak oil will eventually put paid to car culture, leaving us with the inhospitable landscape that has been built for these metal monstrosities. Indeed, he forecast a pivot in oil supply for right about ... now. show less

If you are interested in reading about an 11-year-old boy who experiences not one but two separate instances of a guy masturbating in front of him, boy do I have a book for you! How about reading about a guy who would rather pawn his wife off to another man to “be satisfied” instead of being emotionally close to her? Because, of course, the only way a woman could be satisfied is with male penetration! But it’s OK! Everything is better because he went to a fancy prostitute, who gave him show more drugs and turned his manhood back on. Or how about a “he/she” prostitute getting murdered because the guy who was paying for their services felt icky about it?

This is the most cis white boomer male book I have read in a very long time.
-Women are the homemakers and don’t want to bother their pretty heads with running the town. They require a man to protect them. No exceptions.
-Boys become men by having sexual acts foisted upon them.
-Men who have sex with other men are wrong and twisted, but prostitution is ok as long as it is between a male and a female. A man has needs, you know! Doubly ok when said prostitute is beautiful, lives in a very nice house, and can cook.
-A man is not a man if he can’t perform sexually. In fact, he has no reason for living.
-That newfangled rock music is just noise.

On and on and on. show less

James Howard Kunstler brings up very thoughtful points in this book. It made me observe my world a little differently, from the buildings I see every day to the infrastructure on which I rely, to my complete inability (and everyone else's as well) to do without an automobile in this crazy, silly little world we call ours. Kunstler addresses the problem of the loss of community as a symptom of urban sprawl, and he's right.

Of course, there are many people to blame for this mess we've created, show more most of them long dead, and therefore excused from punishment. On the other hand, the mess they've helped create just tumbles along in the name of profit and growth.

I was assigned chapters from this book for a college course on Cities and Suburbs. I've always meant to read it in its entirety and I'm glad I did. I remember reading an article of Kunstler's (an excerpt from a book, actually) from The Long Emergency, which is a bit scary and alarmist, but also very good.

If only we could reverse time's hand by about 200 years, perhaps we'd have an entirely different place to observe. Then again, maybe not. The last chapter, "Better Places," was especially moving for me. He described the plight of farmers in Vermont in the 1980s and '90s. It's almost exactly what happened to my grandparents, who were dairy farmers their whole lives. Lacking understanding about what a "land trust" means, they sold to a developer and were completely swindled. Though there are undoubtedly some who want to continue farming, land prices and property taxes make it nearly impossible to continue a family tradition. It is really too sad.

"Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell." - Edward Abbey show less

I'm a regular reader of Kunstler's blog so I was a bit worried in picking up this book that I would just be reading rehashed blog posts, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Certainly the point of view here is very much the same one that Kunstler brings to his blog. But the material here does seem coherent in an expansive way, covering a lot of territory but in a well-structured way.

Whether there is an audience that can learn much from this book, that is a curious puzzle. Most of the book show more is a catalog of the many dimensions of the present crisis - peak oil, climate change, the collapse of financial structures. Kunstler discusses how all these dimensions fit together. There must be a few folks that are just learning about the present global catastrophe who can learn here about some new aspects of the situation. But I think most folks will fall into one or the other of the two polarized extremes of our days, the convinced doomer or the true believer in progress. This book is not likely to be the miraculous instrument that can open the minds of true believers!

Kunstler does sketch out here some ideas about what post-catastrophe society is liable to look like. How many of our modern social and political ideals are likely to survive the material technological crash? Will multi-culturalism and gender equality survive? Whether Kunstler's thinking is accurate or not on such topics, it is certainly thought provoking. He presents his rather unorthodox positions in a reasonable way. Whether or not folks agree with him, I think many a doomer may well be moved to rethink some aspects of the future society they foresee. I don't think very many true believers in progress will get far enough in the book anyway, but Kunstler's rather retro social vision will just underscore for them the unacceptability of his equally retro technological vision.

In the retro-technological arena, an intriguing question that Kunstler addresses, as have many others, is the future of the internet and of electronic information technology. Kunstler agrees with a common doomer perspective, that unreliability in the power grid will bring down the web. I worked many years in the semiconductor business, long enough to have some understanding of the mind-boggling cost and complexity involved in designing and manufacturing chips. Moore's law is surely another one of the exponential evolutionary trajectories of technology whose lifetime is necessarily finite. If people buy new gadgets because of the improved capability, then sales will plummet as the pace of improvement slows. Slowing sales will lead to reduced investment, and that accelerating feedback system will make it difficult even to maintain present manufacturing capabilities. The digital technology that is so pervasive today, the tablets and smart phones and mp3 players and cameras... this is miraculous technology, kept alive by a wildly enthusiastic consumer marketplace. I don't worry so much about powering all these devices. I worry about replacing them as they break. show less