Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
James Howard KunstlerI do not believe we will get to Ray Kurzweil's proposed "singularity" in which human minds meld with machines to produce, in effect, synthetic human evolution. Our basic problems with maintaining the electric grid argue against that fantasy.
James Howard KunstlerMy skills are not of the highest caliber, but I know a thing or two, and I occasionally produce a painting that contains passages of truth and beauty.
James Howard KunstlerThe fortunate and successful New Urbanists will be the ones who can find local infill projects in small towns and small cities associated with farming, water transport, (perhaps rail too) and water power. I do not believe personally that we will retrofit much of suburbia in the way many people wish we might. The capital won't be there, and I'm rather convinced that the population is headed down - though this will be a lagging effect, because even starving people have sex.
James Howard KunstlerThe skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy.
James Howard KunstlerPlease, please, stop referring to yourselves as "consumers." OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word "consumer" in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face
James Howard Kunstler