Dismantling suburbia with author James Howard Kunstler

As day-by-day goes by do you even have a sinking feeling that none of life-as-we-know it, is sustainable? There’s a fragility to the things that we’ve built in our post-WW2 civilization that seems like it could topple over at any minute. It just doesn’t make sense. Surely we know there’s not really an endless stream of resources and a well-oiled machine that backs up the world that we’ve come to expect and rely on. If you want a completely different point of view on what that means long-term, then this podcast with James Howard Kunstler is a must-listen. He’s been studying where all this stuff is headed for quite some time. Jim is an author and a critic with many non-fiction, novels and plays behind him. He’s also done a fantastic TED talk on “The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs,” a lecturer at universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, DePaul, Texas A & M, West Point, and Rutgers University not to mention a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, RollingStone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the Op-Ed page where he often covers environmental and economic issues. He’s even been on the Colbert Report. Hopefully his point of view on how America is likely to get a lot smaller and how the different skills that we have as communities and individuals might need a really big change, gives your brain a wake-up call.

As day-by-day goes by do you even have a sinking feeling that none of life-as-we-know it, is sustainable? There’s a fragility to the things that we’ve built in our post-WW2 civilization that seems like it could topple over at any minute. It just doesn’t make sense. Surely we know there’s not really an endless stream of resources and a well-oiled machine that backs up the world that we’ve come to expect and rely on. If you want a completely different point of view on what that means long-term, then this podcast with James Howard Kunstler is a must-listen. He’s been studying where all this stuff is headed for quite some time.

 

Read more from Jim at his site and blog Clusterfuck Nation. 

Jim is an author and a critic with many non-fiction, novels and plays behind him. He’s also done a fantastic TED talk on “The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs,” a lecturer at universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, DePaul, Texas A & M, West Point, and Rutgers University not to mention a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, RollingStone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and the Op-Ed page where he often covers environmental and economic issues. He’s even been on the Colbert Report.

Hopefully his point of view on how America is likely to get a lot smaller and how the different skills that we have as communities and individuals might need a really big change, gives your brain a wake-up call.

mentioned in this episode

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