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 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."

As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.

Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic.

The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

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

It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.