There is not going to be a "hydrogen economy," and no combination of alternative energy systems or fuels will allow us to continue the suburban pattern. It's finished. We will, however, desperately need to grow more of our food closer to home, and so the preservation of agricultural hinterlands is of great importance. But don't expect the fiesta of suburban construction to continue more than a few more years.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.

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.

Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.

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.