News & Politics
The Small Cities at the End of the Tunnel
James Howard Kunstler sees a future beyond peak oil. He calls it Newburgh and Kingston.
Customers shop for produce at the Food Project’s Farmer’s Market in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester. According to James Howard Kunstler, as we head into our low-energy future, we will rely more and more on local food and local businesses.
A lot of people—more and more every day, it seems—view consensus reality as bogus. You’ve got your conspiracy theorists (Mossad!!! The Trilateral Commission!!!), and then there are those who see the world through green-tinted glasses and decry a world in denial about things like peak oil, the environmental costs of consumerism, climate change and…the list goes on and on.
The Saratoga-based writer and social activist James Howard Kunstler belongs to the latter category, with an asterisk for originality. For decades he’s been a prophet in the wilderness, proclaiming that the king has no clothes. His 1994 book, The Geography of Nowhere
, was an acidulous critique of what he called the “tragic landscape” of suburbia. In The Long Emergency
(2006), Kunstler turned his attention to peak oil and forecast hard times followed by a low-energy future built around small towns and local produce. The author of many fiction as well as non-fiction works, Kunstler is hailed by some for the incisiveness of his vision and excoriated by others for being “overwrought” and “pessimistic”—characterizations, it must be added, that he rejects out of hand.We recently talked with Kunstler about consensus reality, his quite alternate reality, and the gap between the two.
Jim, when I scanned the Web for responses to your books, I kept coming upon characterizations like “grim” and “apocalyptic.” Are these fair descriptions of your work?
No. My view of the future is realistic, not bleak.
I’ve written two novels set in the postapocalyptic future. Part of my agenda in writing those books was to depict a future world that would be much more austere than the one we’re used to, but would have all kinds of compensations such as making your own music, working alongside your neighbors, and eating real food. I had a conscious mission—to introduce readers to a world that wouldn’t be as bad as their nightmares depicted.
We have plenty to be concerned about, but there are also plenty of ways we can re-organize our world to make it a better place to live.
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