James Howard Kunstler
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James Howard Kunstler (born 1948) is an American author, social critic, and blogger who is perhaps best known for his book The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban development in the United States. In his most recent book, The Long Emergency (2005), he argues that declining oil production will result in the end of industrialized society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian communities.
Kunstler was born in New York City. Spending summers at a boys camp in New Hampshire, Kunstler became acquainted with the small town ethos that would later permeate many of his works. In 1966 he graduated from New York City's High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), and then attended the State University of New York at Brockport.
After college Kunstler worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone. In 1975, he began writing books and lecturing full-time. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and was formerly married to the children's author Jennifer Armstrong.
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[edit] Writing
Kunstler has been an outspoken critic of suburbia and urban development trends throughout the United States, and has been a leading proponent of the New Urbanism movement. He has summed up his attitude towards the current American landscape by describing it as follows:
| “ | The tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work [is]...a land full of places that are not worth caring about [and] will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending. | ” |
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— James Kunstler
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He has also written that:
| “ | ...[the] physical arrangement of life in our nation, in particular suburban sprawl, [is] the most destructive development pattern the world has ever seen, and perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known. | ” |
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— James Kunstler
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More recently, he has written about the effects that he predicts the coming oil peak will have on society in his 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes. He appears in the documentary film The End of Suburbia (2004).
In addition to his other books on urban planning, Home From Nowhere, and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Kunstler has also written several works of fiction, the most recent being Maggie Darling: A Modern Romance in 2004.
[edit] Reactions and Criticisms
The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere are commonly cited by graduate students in planning as inspirational texts.[citation needed] While many find Kunstler's speeches and writings to be compelling due to his skilled use of narrative, his rhetorical style is notoriously short on subtlety, and is often profane. In interviews and on his blog, Kunstler has defended his choice of language, arguing that the gravity of the problems he addresses requires strong language to shock listeners and readers into awareness. He has also accused academics and others of allowing political correctness to overwhelm honest expression.
Some critics describe Kunstler as a fear-mongering worrywart intent on sowing panic in order to sell books. They point out that Kunstler, who majored in Theater at college and has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil.[1][2] Kunstler responds by saying that a Y2K catastrophe was averted by the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem, a lot of it "in secret," he claims.[3]
Other critics have faulted him for making inaccurate financial predictions. In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted that the Dow would crash to 4,000 by the end of the year.[4] [5] The Dow in fact reached a new peak by 2007.
In his predictions for 2007 however Kunstler admitted his mistake stating "Let's get this out of the way up front: the worst call I made last year was for the Dow to crumble down to 4000 when, in fact, it melted up to a new all-time record high of about 12,500. The reason we saw this, in my opinion, was that inertia combined with sheer luck to keep the finance sector decoupled from reality...". He also predicted however that in 2006 the United States housing bubble would start to deflate, which appears to be borne out by latest data. [6] However, unlike Kunstler's Dow predictions, which were uniquely his, the bursting of the United States housing bubble was widely forecast before Kunstler began discussing it.
[edit] References
- ^ Kunstler, James (1999-04-01). My Y2K - A Personal Statement. archive.org. Retrieved on 2006-11-12.
- ^ Kunstler, Jim (1999). My Y2K - A Personal Statement (html). Kunstler, Jim. Retrieved on 2006-12-12.
- ^ James Kunstler (2006). The Twang Factor (html). Retrieved on 2006-12-22.
- ^ James Kunstler (2005). Cluster Fuck Nation June 2005 (html). Retrieved on 2007-02-20.
- ^ James Kunstler (2006). Kunstler Predictions for 2006 (html). Retrieved on 2007-07-07.
- ^ "No question about it, the housing downturn is here now, and it's big." Hamilton, Jim. "New home sales continue to fall", Econbrowser, 25 August 2006.
