James Howard Kunstler Quotes

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.

The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.

The living arrangements American now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually.

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.

Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.

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

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.

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.

Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.

The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things

No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.

Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.

Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.

I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.

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.

We are in for a fiesta of default, repossession, and distress selling of suburban property, much of which will lose its presumed usefulness and monetary value in an energy-scarce economy.

America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.

When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.

I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands.

The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.

The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.

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

We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house.

Motion is a great tranquilizer.

Societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.

People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will.

In our current frame of mind, or paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, we like to think that marshalling government policy is the way to get things done.

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.

My skills are not of the highest caliber, but I know a thing or two, and I occasionally produce a painting that contains passages of truth and beauty.

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

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

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.

We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention.

I believe our techno-zealotry will be moderated by sheer circumstance. We will do what reality compels us to do, not necessarily what our fantasies propose.

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.

I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.

We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes.

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy.

I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions.

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.

I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.

We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency).