Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

I urge people not to think in terms of "solutions," but in terms of intelligent responses to the quandaries and predicaments that we face. And there are intelligent responses that we can bring forth. But when I hear the word "solution," I always suspect that there's a hidden agenda there. And the hidden agenda is: "Please, can you please tell us how we can keep on living exactly the way we're living now, without having to really change our behavior very much?" And that's sort of what's going on in this country. And it's not going to work.

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.

If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it.

At the heart of our misunderstanding and infantile behavior is the wish for a miracle cure.

The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.