Subdivided

James Howard Kunstler

Author and a long-time member of the New Urbanist movement James Howard Kunstler is best known for his long-held belief that peak oil would spell the end of the suburban lifestyle in the United States. When the price of a barrel of oil hit $147 during the summer of 2008, it seemed that his predictions were coming true. The resulting economic crisis and related events are only the start of what he refers to as “The Long Emergency.”

In his book of the same name, Kunstler explains why our country is on a path toward a major revolution in the way we do business and the way we live, and why it isn’t going to be an easy road there. Kunstler, who was born in New York City in 1948 and now lives in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., warns against relying on “technofixes,” such as electric cars and large-scale tidal power, to meet our mushrooming energy demands, which he says have to decrease drastically: There is no low-hanging fruit in Kunstler’s worldview.

As an outspoken—and some would say—angry critic of the status quo, Kunstler is not one to provide a standard brand of anything, including inspiration. Sustainable Industries caught up with Kunstler a month before he’s slated to deliver the keynote address at Cascadia Green Building Council’s Living Future “unconference,” where Cascadia CEO Jason McLennan says, “Kunstler will be provocative at a minimum.”

SI: What do you think about the recent growth of the sustainable business sector? Are “green” businesses and those involved in renewable energy and cleantech just the next economic bubble?
JHK: Well, I generally salute people who recognize the problems we face and make an effort to do things differently. I’m often misunderstood (poor me!) as being against alternative energy, for example. I’m not, of course. I’m confident we’ll try everything we can. I just add the reservation that we also have to make very different arrangements for how we live, starting with the big things, like how we occupy the landscape. My own guess about the future is that a lot of our models for how things work—like corporate enterprise—will not pan out under the new circumstances that I call “The Long Emergency.” We have no idea, for instance, how we will manufacture common household goods (of the type we’ve been mostly buying from overseas). I believe the scale of manufacturing will be shockingly small by today’s standards and there will be far fewer things (what we call consumer goods) to buy. Because our business models and the jargon associated with them may not work as we wish they will in the future, I do believe there is a high potential for mischief, for “bubbles” in respect to the misallocation of capital, and for just plain fooling ourselves.

SI: Are there signs that we are going in the right direction?
JHK: …I think it’s fair to say that at the moment we are failing to construct a coherent consensus about what is happening to us and what we’re going to do about it. … So in my opinion we are indeed in a kind-of crisis period, but I wouldn’t say there are a whole lot of people out there who are thinking very practically and productively about it.

SI: Is it possible for business to help us reach that coherent consensus and fix our problems?
JHK: I think enterprising spirits and persons, and possibly even groups, may eventually move us in the direction of responding intelligently to our predicament. But I’m personally not all that trustful of corporate enterprise as it is currently structured.