Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.

In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands.

The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.

The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.

The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a "time out" from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this "time out."

For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.