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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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James Howard Kunstler
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 19
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
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Feel
Tracks
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Near
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More quotes by 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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
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 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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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 have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic.
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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Motion is a great tranquilizer.
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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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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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