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Quote by James Howard Kunstler

“Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading.”

Quote by James Howard Kunstler

Author

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is an American author known for his critical analysis of American culture in the post-industrial age. His work often focuses on urban planning and environmental issues, particularly his criticism of suburbanization and car culture. more

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“The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.”

“Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.)”

Mean Purpose Energy Wealth Study Waste Behavior Capitalism Connections Educated Ideology Idiot Operations Productive Predicaments Deployment

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“What we face is a comprehensive contraction of our activities, due to declining fossil fuel resources and other growing scarcities. Our failure is the failure to manage contraction. It requires a thoroughgoing reorganization of daily life. No political faction currently operating in the USA gets this. Hence, it is liable to be settled by a contest for dwindling resources and there are many ways in which this won't be pretty.”

Way Faces Political Growing Activity Resources Dues Manage Usa Fuel Daily Life Contests Fossils Comprehensive Fossil Fuel Liable Scarcity Factions Contractions Reorganization

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.”

Way Reality Faces Depends Tasks Consistent Daily Life

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“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.”

Humans Mean Ends Grows Attention Growing Farms Farming

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“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).”

Mean Bigs Dies Economy Economic Streets Boxes Locals Chains Commerce Retail Rebuilding Main Street Walmart

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“We have to make some things for ourselves because the conveyer belt from China is doomed (this process is known as import replacement). We have to do transportation differently, because mass motoring and even commercial aviation will soon be over. We have to inhabit the landscape differently because both suburbia and the metroplex mega-city will be obsolete, so we will have to return to a more traditional disposition of things in smaller urbanisms associated with productive agricultural hinterlands.”

Process Cities Known Return Mass China Traditional Landscape Productive Aviation Doomed Disposition Belts Transportation Obsolete Imports Replacements Mega Suburbia

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“We're still promoting stupid wasteful behavior in agribusiness - everything from ethanol production for cars to genetically modified crops. In commerce just about everything we do politically is in the service of WalMart and the systems tied to it. In transportation, we could, for instance, have compelled General Motors to produce railroad rolling stock as a condition of their bail-out, but we didn't do that. Instead, we're chasing the phantom of electric cars - and, believe me, we are going to be mortally disappointed how that works out.”

“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.”

World Mean Government Running Process Levels Military Right Now Resources Determined Oil Campaigns Usa Engaged Highways Interstate Walmart Suburbia Quixotic

Author:James Howard Kunstler

“I believe we are deluded about alternative energy. The key is, whatever we do, we're going to have to do on a very modest scale. It's all about scale. We're not going to build giant wind farms with Godzilla-sized turbines all over the place. That's a fantasy.”

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Author:James Howard Kunstler