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

James Howard Kunstler

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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Everyday
Environment
Inspiration
Entropy
America
Environments
Made
Ugliness
Visible
Motivation

More quotes by James Howard Kunstler

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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.
James Howard Kunstler
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Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.
James Howard Kunstler
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It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
James Howard Kunstler
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Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
James Howard Kunstler
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Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process.
James Howard Kunstler
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I was not a hard-liner against nuclear, because I viewed that as perhaps the only way we might keep the lights on another 25 years. But lately I am on board with Nicole Foss's argument that we will not have the capital or even the social cohesion to build anymore nuke plants.
James Howard Kunstler
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Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins.
James Howard Kunstler
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We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house.
James Howard Kunstler
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The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
James Howard Kunstler
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On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other.
James Howard Kunstler
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Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.
James Howard Kunstler
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I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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Of course, the toxic bullshit of incessant advertising and show biz for nearly a century has stripped us of cognitive abilities for dealing with reality that used to be part of the normal equipment of adulthood - for instance, knowing the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen. We bamboozled ourselves with too much magic.
James Howard Kunstler
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Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
James Howard Kunstler
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The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.
James Howard Kunstler
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When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
James Howard Kunstler