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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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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Understand
Comes
Hard
Things
Thinking
Delusional
Stressed
Society

More quotes by 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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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.
James Howard Kunstler
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It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.
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
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I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend.
James Howard Kunstler
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The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
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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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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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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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 suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.
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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Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it.
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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America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.
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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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).
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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In my view, suburbia in general has very poor prospects. I think it will only become devalued and probably more dangerous. It's chief characteristic was that it represented a living arrangement with no future - and that future is now here.
James Howard Kunstler