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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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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Towns
Pie
Despite
Managed
Install
Obvious
Apple
Pantheon
Along
Motherhood
Cola
American
Apples
Coca
Dream
Damage
Mart
Home
Visible
Desolation
Every
Town
Icons

More quotes by 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
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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 don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
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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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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Motion is a great tranquilizer.
James Howard Kunstler
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I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.
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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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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Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.
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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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 living arrangements American now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually.
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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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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The increment of new development will be the single building lot, if we are lucky, and most of the codes that are now enforced will be ignored because the redundancies they mandate will not be affordable.
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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The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
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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.
James Howard Kunstler
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I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.
James Howard Kunstler