Quote

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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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Process
Campaign
Unsustainable
Means
Oil
Squander
Running
Campaigns
Interstate
Government
Engaged
Imperial
Right
Determined
Disney
Mean
Resources
Highways
Quixotic
World
Military
Usa
Dwindling
Levels
Sustain
Suburbia

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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 industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
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 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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Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
James Howard Kunstler