Episode 421: Living in the Long Emergency: A Conversation with James Howard Kunstler

 
James Howard Kunstler is a writer and a critic of culture. I first saw him in the documentary The End of Suburbia which came out in 2004. You can find it on-line but what you find is an edited version. The longer version is the version I recommend. I learned from that documentary something called Peak Oil. James Howard Kunstler wrote several books along that topic including The Long Emergency in 2005, and a series of novels set in a post-oil future including A World Made By Hand, Witch of Hebron, A History of the Future, and The Harrows of Spring.

In March 2020, he published. Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way.

Mr. Kunstler was on my radio show in 2012. At that time we discussed his book Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. Nine years ago we discussed Peak Oil, "Happy Motoring," and the coming collapse of an unsustainable experiment in living. Now here we are in 2021. Is what James Howard Kunstler wrote about then manifesting itself now? In other words, to be more direct, is the Covid pandemic, outside of the virus itself, but the lockdowns, the closure of businesses, the economic contraction connected at all with Peak Oil, and perhaps other peaks? That is why I invited James Howard Kunstler to be on Freedom Loves Company.