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| James Howard Kunstler |
JHK HAS BEEN WRITING ABOUT OUR "LONG EMERGENCY" FOR DECADES. He began his career writing for Rolling Stone magazine as a young man, and by the 1990s turned his attention to the state of American cities, publishing The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993), his seminal work on urban design that coincided with the growth of the “New Urbanism” architectural movement. His premise is that the automobile, the growth of suburbia, the hollowing out of city cores with the rise of box-store shopping, etc., have degraded their physical infrastructure and made the design of inappropriate, ugly and even dehumanizing buildings and cityscapes possible, leaving us with urban environments without character or community: "cities from nowhere”, in other words.
In the early 2000s, he turned his attention to energy issues, oil in particular, and began writing and blogging on the sustainability of our current economic model, and whether there is a looming energy crisis in our future. Without cheap, plentiful and easily-accessed fossil fuels, the ability of modern civilization to function at its current level of consumption is questionable. What happens if oil becomes scarce or too expensive? How will that affect the operation of our industries, our commerce, and things as basic as heating and lighting our homes? Can renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels? These questions occupied Kunstler for years until in 2005 he published perhaps his best known work, The Long Emergency, which detailed how America (and all developed* countries, really) will enter a period of decline and restructuring, eventually having to exist using a far less energy-intensive economic model. He envisions societies that are more localized, decentralized, where towns and cities depend on nearby, home-grown agriculture and resources, and urban centres that would, by necessity, be smaller, “walkable” and no longer dependent upon the car. He has great concerns about larger cities and metropolises and their ability to feed and service their populations, as well as maintaining their complex infrastructure and buildings, many of which require exotic structural materials and large inputs of fossil fuels to remain viable. Smaller, more local, less energy use (a lot less!) is what is in store for our future, or as he dryly puts it: "The age of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad is coming to an end." No more imported anchovies!
JHK also wrote fiction in his youth and more recently as well. His “World Made by Hand” series, is a four book exploration of life in a small town in central New York State following the sudden collapse of the federal government. After Washington D.C. is destroyed and the country fragments, the town of Union Grove must learn to exist without electricity, long-distance communication and travel, trucked-in goods, and to do without most non-local supplies of food, goods and services. It’s as if the entire town was transported back in time to the mid-1800s in one fell swoop! His “WMBH” novels explore life there over a period of a year, and examine how its people fare, with some thriving and others struggling. The books are a fictional exploration of what JHK envisions for our not-so-distant future. And surprisingly, they’re a fun read!
His most recent non-fiction book follows on his previous The Long Emergency and its sequel, 2012’s Too Much Magic.Living in the Long Emergency does not break new ground, but acts as a helpful summary and reminder of many of the topics JHK has dealt with over the years.
The
book is divided into three sections with 
the first part considering the current
state of what had once been on every energy-watcher’s radar: “peak oil”. Oil,
he reminds us, 'makes the world go round', and while there remains a great
deal of it (and natural gas) still in the earth—it’s getting harder and harder to get
at. Our societies can only function with easily available, cheap oil; without it,
everything grinds to a halt. In recent years, America has claimed energy “independence”
with fracking of “tight” or shale-oil deposits, and since
the early 2000s, there's been a significant increase in production. However, it is the low-interest
rate policies of the Federal Reserve, allowing companies to borrow at near zero percent, that make what otherwise would be
unprofitable and unsustainable enterprises able to continue operating.
Kunstler says this will not always be the case, and to watch for major
bankruptcies in the shale-oil industry in the coming years. Oil's future is not so much one of scarcity as it will be its cost (in extraction and processing), costs that are currently disguised by low interest rate policies. “My own conclusion is that shale oil will be a
shockingly short-lived ‘miracle’ and that the lending gravy train for it will
go off the rails. (226)
The same with coal (more and more “black” coal deposits, those with greater ERORI**, are being mined out, and “brown” coal, a poorer grade, is taking its place). This is true for other resources, including fresh water, arable land, etc.
He also reviews the alternative energy scene, from nuclear to wind and solar, and concludes alternative energy production will never “scale up” to the energy output level that fossil fuels provide. And there is no magic pill of new energy sources on the horizon. A much less energy intensive world is our future, he predicts.
His next chapters deal with people who have, or are adopting, lifestyles and businesses, as well as acquiring skills and knowledge, that will more readily comport with a world having much less available energy. He interviews several people, some who'd been following his blogging over the years. Their stories are inspiring.
His concluding chapters discuss a range of issues that will confront us in the near future: the topics of climate change, local food security, unstable economies (increasingly, our own), animal and plant extinctions (a particularly grim assessment), as well as the long-time Kunstler bug-a-boos: moral preening, “woke-ism”, the rise of what he mordantly calls the new “Jacobinism” in public discourse ("cancel-culture" et al), and the growing lack of faith in our political institutions, politicians and elites (in many cases, much justified).
In
his conclusions, he talks about structural inequalities in society, the
financialization of the economy, the corruption and ossification of many
institutions including medicine and higher education. (He speaks from an
American perspective, but many of his criticisms ring true in our own countries,
to one degree or another.) He mentions how we need to adopt personal values,
expectations and attitudes that are more likely to promote social harmony than
many we currently exhibit. If not, dysfunction and disorder will only
grow. Despite his rather bleak outlook on our immediate future, he says he is
optimistic for the “human project”, just not how we currently configure and conduct
ourselves. Living was published just before the Covid-19 pandemic, and his take on our societies' responses as well as our prospects emerging from the crisis would be interesting. Of course, he continues blogging at https://kunstler.com/
In the end he asks, “‘Now what…?’ What will happen next? What will you do? Better figure something out, because no one else will figure it out for you.” (249)
Words to the wise.
Cheers, Jake.
[For the record, reading The Long Emergency was my second “Uh-Oh!” moment. George Monbiot’s 2006 book Heat was my first; I’ve had several more since.]
*Kunstler refers to such countries as “over-developed.”
**Energy Returned on Energy Invested is the “ratio of the amount of usable energy (the energy) delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy used to obtain that energy resource.” For example, early "Texas Tea" crude from all those early gushers had an ERORI ratio of 100:1. Today's oil fields yield something on the order of only 10 to 12:1. (More energy in, less energy out.) |
| "WTF, Jay!?" "WTF!? Right back at you, Ray!" |
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