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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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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Economic
Chains
Retail
Dies
Boxes
Economies
Bigs
Main
Networks
Means
Street
Chain
Mean
Soon
Commerce
Streets
Locals
System
Differently
Economy
Local
Rebuilding

More quotes by 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.
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The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
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The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
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I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
James Howard Kunstler
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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.
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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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.
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I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.
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.
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I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core.
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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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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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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Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs.
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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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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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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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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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