Kunstler on a Post-Oil Future

“Maybe I’ll see you again in ten years, when whales are pulling the cruise ships.” “The shopping and suburban living fiestas are over.” “Phoenix is going to dry up and blow away.” “The immersive ugliness of America is entropy made visible.” “Americans are overfed clowns eating clown food and driving around in clown cars.” “Democrats need to stop wasting time on gender identity issues and start working on things that matter.” Kunstler is quite a character and has a forceful speaking style that is engaging, if at times a bit over the top. You get the sense that, if his politics were different and the situation presented itself, he’d make an excellent right-wing dictator.

While this was sort of a “we’re screwed, really screwed” speech, Kunstler fully believes that the end of the cheap energy era is going to force the world to re-localize after the globalization bubble bursts. We’ll have to design and inhabit walkable, human-scale cities. We’ll have to travel less and interact with our neighbors more. We’ll have to produce and consume local goods and local food. Motoring will become less affordable and therefore less ubiquitous. And so on. Basically, all the stuff that makes American urban architecture and culture terrible – suburban sprawl, the design and construction aesthetic of the strip mall, big box stores – depend on a cheap oil economy, so they can’t last. In that sense, the speech was strangely hopeful.

Though his new book is on the crisis of “post peak” oil economy, I found Kunstler’s thoughts on new urbanism the most interesting. I’ve added Geography of Nowhere to my to-read list.