James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency"

John-Michael Dumais: And now welcome to Oasis forum, where we explore issues that can help us positively evolve our lives, our society and our planet. Oasis Forum features authors, activists, artists and healers, working to increase our appreciation of the interconnectedness of life on earth. Each week we explore a new topic that impacts our health, our families, our communities, our work and our environment. Our goal is not just to discuss present challenges but to develop an awareness of root causes, and importantly to explore potential solutions. At Oasis Forum our aim is to inspire hope and share practical ideas for creating a world that works for all. And we're happy to have with us here this evening James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency:Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century. Some have called Kunstler's writings pessimistic, others realistic, you get to decide here this evening, as we look at some of the possibilities facing our culture in the next few years as we face oil depletion, climate change, habitat loss and other converging catastrophes. Welcome to Oasis Forum, James Howard Kunstler.

JK: Hi, nice to be here.

JMD: Thank you so much for joining us today. I'd like to begin, if I may, by reading a quote from your book that I think sets up the conversation nicely, may I?

JK: Yes, sure. Go ahead.

JMD: On page 148: "It may not matter anymore whether global warming is or is not a byproduct of human activity or if it just represents the dynamic disequilibria of what we call nature. But it happens to coincide with our imminent descent down the slippery slope of oil and gas depletion, so that all the potential discontinuities of that epochal circumstance will be amplified, ramified, reinforced and torqued by climate change. If global warming is the result of human activity, fossil-fuel-based industrialism in particular, then it seems to me the prospects are poor that the human race will be able to do anything about it, because the journey down the oil depletion arc will be much more disorderly than the journey was up. The disruptions and hardships of decelerating industrialism will destabilize governments and societies to the degree that concerted international action, such as the Kyoto Protocols or anything like it, will never be carried out. In the chaotic world of diminishing and contested energy resources, there will simply be a mad scramble to use up whatever fossil fuels people can manage to lay their hands on. The very idea that we possess any control over the process seems to me further evidence of the delusion ripping our late industrial culture, the fatuous certainty that technology will save us from the diminishing returns of technology."

So that's actually quite a mouthful, and most of your book is actually kind of a mouthful. I found myself wanting to underline everything, and when I got to that point I said, "You know you might as well just commit the book to memory, because you really can't underline everything," but I want to thank you for what I consider to be a comprehensive book, and one that just doesn't look at it from one simple angle of oil depletion or of resource depletion (not that that's simple), but that looks at it from sociological angles, historical angles, economic angles and everything else. I want to thank you for a very comprehensive book, and ask you to make any comments that you'd like as we get going here in this conversation about the long emergency.

JK: Well, I am just ready to rip; I don't have any planned preamble, so you're welcome to ask me whatever you like.

JMD: Let's start with some of the issues. I am not going to spend a whole lot of time trying to establish the oil depletion scenario, because I believe that we've done that with other interviews, and we will certainly touch on that here today. But I would like to go into some of the other stuff you go into which is again quite a bit. Let's first talk about some of the myths about some of the other energy technologies that we are looking towards that might solve the problems, such as solar, coal, wind, and hydrogen. Are these myths that we're talking about, or are these going to be solutions for us?

JK: Well. Let's start generally - there's a great wish among the American public to be rescued from the energy predicament, at least by those who even know about it. There's a belief that we are going to be rescued by "technology" and alternate energy. There's a great deal of confusion in the public about the distinction between technology and energy. They are not the same thing. You need energy to run technology. So technology alone is not going to solve this set of problems for us. I think the basic equation is this - no combination of alternative fuels or systems of running them that we know about is going to allow us to continue running the United States the way we run it now, or even a substantial fraction of it. We will certainly be using alternative fuels and renewables like solar power, wind power and waterpower, but it is likely that we are going to use them on an extremely local basis, perhaps on the neighborhood or even household basis. There are a number of other issues that are raised by this-one of them is the whole question about whether or not we can even manufacture the components needed to run this kind of equipment - the solar panels, the wind-turbines, and etcetera, without an underlying oil-based economy. I think that's something that's not settled at all.

Now, where coal is concerned, I happen to have a friend in town here where I live here in upstate New York, who is writing a book for [unintel] about the coal industry, and he's a pretty experienced journalist, you know, as I am, a middle-aged guy with a lot of experience, and he's been talking to the coal executives in the last couple of years, and he's told me that there is in fact - they tell him - that America has quite a bit less coal than is generally believed-there's a general idea in the public that we have hundreds and hundreds of years of a coal supply in the United States, and he says that is just not true, and he says, furthermore, the quality of the remaining coal that we have is not that great, and so that presents a set of interesting problems.

Finally, there is the whole nuclear question, which to me boils down to a matter of if we want to keep the lights on after the year 2025, we may have no other choice. But I say that with full recognition of the problems and issues that are raised by nuclear power. And that's the round up on alternative fuels. I think the bottom line is we are going to have to do a lot more with a lot less. We are not going to run the interstate highway system and Disney World on solar power or wind turbines. The hydrogen question is a bit more complex; perhaps Richard Heinberg explained it, did he?

JMD: He did to some degree, but it certainly wouldn't be bad to touch on that again.

JK: Well, it seems to me the way the 'hydrogen economy' is being sold to the American people is largely a hoax, because hydrogen is the most common element in our neighborhood of the universe, but because of its chemical nature it is always found combined with other elements in chemical compounds, like water, H20 or methane, which is carbon and hydrogen joined together-and to separate them -- to split them up and free the hydrogen takes more energy than you can get from the hydrogen that you free up. So the whole thing is like the Adirondack blanket joke about the guy who wanted to make his blanket longer so he cut 12 inches from the top and sewed it to the bottom. There are additional problems with hydrogen involving its chemical nature, which makes it very difficult to store and makes it difficult to transport through pipes. It is very corrosive and tends to eat through the seals, and it's such a light element, you know, it's the lightest element on the periodic table, that it takes up a lot of space, so you can't get that much of it in a contained space, even under pressure. They estimate that a 40-ton truck of the type that we use to carry gasoline around in to refill the stations, that a comparable truck would only be able to carry about 800 kilograms of hydrogen, which isn't much. In fact it's so little that it might make the trip itself not worthwhile, so hydrogen is fraught with all sorts of problems and you know I think the bottom line on that is it isn't going to happen. We can certainly manufacture hydrogen, we've demonstrated that, but can we do it on the scale to run all the automobile and truck fleet of America? Forget about it. It's not going to happen. So there you have alternate fuel.

JMD: Then we have Canadian companies looking at the tar sands and oil shale there, and what do you have to say about the potential for that?

JK: Well, there are a lot of delusions running around about that. One of them is that people think there are trillions-the equivalent of trillions of barrels of oil out there in the tar sands-not true at all. At very best there is another equivalent of Iraq out there in the tar sands, and you're faced with the additional cost, because tar is not oil. You have to basically mine it before you refine it, and you have to liquefy it using a tremendous amount of energy in order to melt it, so that adds another whole layer of expense to the process. There's no question that it's there. Is it going to allow us to run Disney world or the interstate highway system? I don't think so. You know, it may allow the people in Canada to keep their lights on a bit longer.

Another thing you have to figure is this-under the NAFTA treaty, Canada is obliged to sell us a certain amount of their stuff, especially there natural gas and some of their oil resources, and the time may come when they decide that isn't such a good idea, that maybe they ought to keep more of it for themselves, because they are going to need it, so I don't think we are going to see the end of that argument either. By the way, the Canadians have made contracts with China for some of the energy that's in the tar sand area.

JMD: That's one of the things Richard Heinberg talks about that we actually didn't get to talk about on his interview last week - the coming resource wars. What do you see for countries such as the United States and China, who are on the one hand interdependent, but also competitors, and will increasingly become competitors for these scarcer resources?

JK: Well, it's a very interesting situation, isn't it? We are going to be contesting for the remaining oil left in the world, most of it happens to be in the regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. China can walk into central Asia; they can extend their influence there very physically if they want in Kazakhstan and some of the former Soviet Republics that have some oil. You could imagine that they might extend their influence further, and they may also offer their protection to Saudi Arabia and essentially make a deal with them, saying, "Well, you know, you've been under the nuclear protection of the United States for 60 years. Why don't you try our nuclear protection? It's pretty good, too, and by the way, you can sell us oil, and you won't have the same cultural and religious problems with us that you have with the crusader Christian West."

And who knows, that might happen. Of course, the whole Middle East is sort of in play. No one can tell what is going to happen with Saudi Arabia, the Royal Family in particular. Somebody could walk into Prince Abdul's bedchamber with a cell phone full of Semtec(plastic explosive)at any moment, and that would be the end of about 20% of our oil imports.

JMD: Yes, you make quite a bit of the instability in that region or the stability created by focusing their angst on external forces like Israel and other things going on around the world, and what is the status right now of the Royal family, and what is the likelihood that we will see more instability there?

JK: Well, we've had about 6 months of relative stability and calm and a lack of atrocity in the news, but the fact of the matter is that the Saudi Royal family is in a precarious position, you know, if only from a population standpoint, the population growth of Saudi Arabia is so extreme, and they have such a large number of unemployed young men who have nothing to do, and every year the State's oil welfare that they distribute to their citizens becomes proportionally smaller per citizen as the population expands. In short, they have a large restive population there, and a lot of people who are ticked off and who would like to depose the Royal family, and we have no idea how long they are going to survive or what the regime will be over there. It's not something that we can feel that confident about.

JMD: I'm sure we're not, which I imagine is one of the reasons we are in the Middle East in the first place. Of course, Iran (whose coal and natural gas fields are reportedly operating far from capacity, and who has been making also deals with China, India, Pakistan, and Japan)is believed to be the next target of the United States neo-conservatives; again, the rational is that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, which could threaten other countries. What do you see happening there in the short and medium turn?

JK: Well, I don't have the same view of the Iraq and the Iran situation that a lot of my friends have, and I do consider myself a political-progressive-liberal democrat, basically, but I don't view the Iraq war the way they do. Strategically, I think we have to look at it this way, you know, the Iraq war was a desperate attempt by the United States to stabilize the region of the world that most of the oil is left in. Two-thirds of the remaining world's oil is in the Middle East. We wanted to stabilize that region desperately, and so what we did, in effect, is we opened a police station in Iraq, which is the most centrally located one and the best candidate, because they had a leader that was disliked by just about everybody.

We also secondarily went to Iraq to modulate and influence the behavior of Saudi Arabia and Iran, to maintain a presence there, so that they would not do anything extreme. So that said - we're there. We've been in Iraq for two years, the level of violence has remained fairly constant and substantial, and we're having a very hard time with it, and it raises a number of questions for Iraq alone, you know, how long can we expect to stay there? Does it mean two years, four years, six years - at what point does the American public become disgusted with the loss of life and the expenditure, at what point do we exhaust or bankrupt our military from being there? Can we, in fact, moderate the behavior of Iran? Well, that seems to be a project we cannot feel confident about either, because they seem to be going about doing what they are doing - they are making deals with clients who are very potent players in the world. They are making oil deals with China, and China may seek to help protect Iran in some fashion, because of their emerging relationship. Of course, China has a relationship with us, too; we have this enormous manufacturing-chain relationship with them. They make all our household goods, and we sell them all of our debt.

One thing I believe we can say is this-it happens to be my personal belief that all other things being equal, we're probably not going to remain in the Middle East as a military presence forever, and if not forever how long? Well, probably sooner rather than later, we'll have to withdraw, meaning sometime in the next several years we will have to start thinking about that, and maybe even doing it. I have a feeling that sooner or later the United States will have to withdraw into its own corner of the world - the Western Hemisphere, and I imagine that what we're going to see is that the world is going to become a bigger place again in some ways. We're going to be more or less restricted to our half of the world, and we will have trouble projecting our power elsewhere. We may lose access to all or part of that 2/3 of remaining oil in the Middle East. We may not be able to control that, and then we will be in our own hemisphere, and we will not have access to that energy, and we will have to make other arrangements of how we are going to run our country and run our economy. Whether or not we engage in a land war with China - that would seem not to have very good prospects for us.

JMD:Yes, we are outnumbered for one thing, and that's their territory.

JK: Yes, it's 13,000 miles over there - well, they [China] can just walk over, if we have a land war with them in Asia. I don't see that happening, but I can see a definite chill in economic relations, and I think that may happen anyway. I think that globalism is going to wither, and that we are going to live increasingly self-sufficiently and be thrown back on our own resources, as it were.

JMD: You talk about the effects of various other things, but before we get to other converging catastrophes, let's draw out in the mind of the listener or illustrate what is the relationship of oil to the economy and the rest of the agricultural sector? I know this is a huge question, but if you can just give us a sketch for those who might not be fully aware how our dependence on oil reaches into every aspect of modern American life.

JK: Well, there may be 3 areas we can discuss succinctly. One is agriculture. Our food production in America is completely dependent upon oil and natural gas, and without it we would have trouble feeding ourselves. Moreover, we will have trouble feeding ourselves and we will have to reorganize agriculture on a local basis. There's just no question that we are going to have to grow a lot more of our food closer to home. We're not going to have the 3,000-mile Caesar salad anymore. This raises tremendous questions about reallocating land for farming and social relations that are entailed by farming. Farming in the future will likely have to be much more labor intensive when not using a lot of oil and gas inputs. What will the social relations be between the people who work the land and the people who own the land? Will there be a lot of resentment and grievance? Will the lives of their worker be miserable? We don't know the answer to any of those things, and that has implications for stuff that I imagine we will talk about a little later.

A second thing of course is that the whole American economy - the dirty secret of the American economy - is that it is based on the creation of ever more suburban sprawl and the accessorizing of it and the furnishing of it and the servicing of it, and that's our economy. And if you subtract suburban sprawl from our economy and all the activities associated with it, there isn't a whole lot left, except for haircutting, fried chicken, and open-heart surgery, and I think that is the explanation for why our business and political leaders don't want to touch the subject, because you start going there, and all of a sudden, you are talking about erasing most of the American economy. That's why John Kerry wouldn't talk about it, and that's why Al Gore wouldn't go near the suburban sprawl issue, because he didn't want to upset the home-building industry and everything associated with it. So, there's that whole problem. That of course has implications for finance and for money.

One of the big implications of the peak oil situation is that industrial economies won't grow anymore, because oil is the thing that makes them grow. If they don't grow, what happens to the financial instruments associated with economic growth, namely stocks, bonds, equities, securities and all those kind of things, you know, the implication is that they will contract like all the rest of the economy - you get all kinds of perversities, and I think the markets apprehend that. That's why we have the housing bubble, because at some level, collectively, the equity markets recognize that there isn't any more money to be made in stocks and bonds, and the only place for capital to appreciate right now is in the hallucinatory area of home appreciation, and it is a hallucination - it is not real - it is based on nothing more than the fact that the capital has nowhere else to go, plus the fact of super-low interest rates and cheap credit, loans made to anybody who has a pulse, and allowing the flipping of ever more houses. It is clearly a mania, and it clearly has a terminal point that's going to end in tears, so that's the financial aspect of the peak oil situation.

Is there a third? Well, I think it has to do with this - the fact that we're not going to be an easy motoring society anymore. The 21st century is going to be much more about staying where you are, not about being in constant motion. It's not going to be about mobility. It's going to be about being in a place that you care about and you have to care for and that is going to change the basis of how we live in this country. Well, that was a kind of a long-winded spiel, but there you have it.

JMD: No, that's good, that's good. Well, going back to your example of the housing bubble - at some point that's going to bust, I assume. What are some likely scenarios as those rates go through the floor and what do you think is going to happen to all these homeowners with huge mortgages, and what can they do about it, and what can communities do, what do you predict that they might be able to do?

JK: I don't think that communities are going to be able to do anything about it. I think we're going to see a natural process, a change that has to occur, a release of tension in the macroeconomic sense. And personally I think we are going to see an orgy of default and a fiesta of distress sales, of distressed properties that people can't pay their notes on, and I rather imagine that the suburban development industry is going to grind to a halt, and that the home building industry as we've known it is going to wither and vanish eventually. I think we'll see little development in the decades ahead. We're really at the end of a very, very manic cycle, and when that's over, we're going to see mostly contraction.

JMD: Let's take that as an entry to talk more about the economic situation in this country. And the point you mention in your book about when gold was decoupled from the dollar as a monetary standard - can you say what happened from that point on and where are we today?

JK: Well, I am not necessarily a gold bug myself. I don't think gold is the be-all-and-end-all of civilization, but our idea of value has been decoupled not only from gold, but it has been decoupled from the idea of the productive creation of wealth per se. You know, the whole idea that wealth is a service economy of people buffing each other's nails is a nonsensical thing. We have not been creating wealth with this, in fact, the whole suburban explosion of last 20 years, which has supposedly resulted in the creation of wealth, in the sense of a lot of mc-mansions and mc-houses and new buildings and new strip malls and new big box stores and all this stuff. You could just as easily view that as a tremendous liability for the United States in the future, as being an albatross around our neck.

I regard suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, and a place that was characterized by having no future as soon as it was built. The bottom line is that we're going to be engaged in a massive reevaluation of what value is, and we will probably experience a substantial period of disorder, around those questions, you know, what is a dollar really worth? Well, the dollar may lose its value very seriously. I don't know if it will ever come back or what will happen to it, but I think there's going to be a lot of confusion about what has value. Some assets will have value and some will not. I don't know if Walter Keane paintings or Hummel figurines are going to have a whole lot of value when people are having trouble feeding themselves, or Thomas Kincaid paintings - people are paying an enormous amount of money for these ridiculous prints. It's hard to say, but I imagine that we are going to return for some time to a very hands-on practical idea of what is valuable. It may involve a lot of barter, and I imagine we'll see all kinds of paper circulating, but I don't think it'll be in the form of monopoly money issued by localities. I think it will be more in the form of promissory notes, bank notes and things like that, even bills of laden, you know, exactly like the kind of things that we saw in the early 19th century.

JMD: And you also talk about other types of converging catastrophes, and I'd like to spend a little bit of time on those, and then we'll return to what people and communities can do, and what's likely to happen in these various domains of living that we've been talking about. Why don't we go next to water scarcity that you bring up in one of your chapters.

JK: Well, It's going to be worse in some regions of the country than others. It's going to be tough for people who have been depending on fossil water, which is the water in the underground aquifers left over from the previous ice age, and we've been pumping that out of the ground to irrigate land that we're farming, but we're farming with fossilized water in the same way that we are farming fossilized fuel. We are talking here about Nebraska, Montana, the western plains - the West is going to have trouble, I think, places like Phoenix and Las Vegas. They are already having trouble, plus, because of climate change, they are dealing with what appears to be a 500-year drought. It doesn't mean a drought that's lasted for 500 years, it means a drought of the kind that hasn't been seen for 500 years - a stretch of time, a series of years that have been so low in rainfall and snow pack that the river levels are at historic lows since we began measuring, since the European conquest of North America, and that is where the Colorado river system is at right now and the dams and the reservoirs associated with it that serve Las Vegas and parts of Arizona and California. Well, seven states in all, really, so that's going to be a problem.

Internationally, if you look at China, China has ecological problems that make ours pale before theirs, particularly with water. They've been drawing down their water table in the Northern part of the country, where most of the grain is produced, at the rate of over ten feet per year, and they have become net grain importers now. They literally can't feed their enormous population, and their grain yields are going down steadily for the last 5 years, so their prospects are poor, and climate change is likely to aggravate many of these problems, and eventually we will see a lot of turbulence, people leaving places that are no longer habitable, no longer productive, and it will make for a lot of trouble.

Now one other aspect of the water situation is(and this has implications that are somewhat more positive for the Northeast)we do have a lot of local hydropower sites for producing electricity that were decommissioned after the 1950s and 1960s, because the big power companies didn't want to maintain these small hydro-plants. I know there are a lot around my area. We have quite a few small rivers - the Hudson river is up here and the Mohawk river and so on. We're probably going to have to get serious about local-hydroelectric-power generation in our towns in the Northeast. But that represents an opportunity for us, and we should consider ourselves fortunate.

JMD: Indeed, part of my concern is with the rush for some people to think about solar, mostly around here, is that, first of all, its quite expensive, and second of all it takes care of me, but it doesn't take care of my community. So what you're suggesting is that that may be a community-scale solution. Do you see other community-scale solutions while we're on that topic?

JK: Well, they're very iffy. Wind turbines do work, but not all places are equally windy and the wind is not that reliable, plus turbines break a lot - I don't know how far we're going to get with that, plus the problem that I already mentioned, how far into the future can we keep on manufacturing the components that we need for this, if there's no underlying cheap-oil economy that supports that kind of manufacturing? We really don't know the answers to those things. There's a hope on the part of many environmentalists that we don't go hog wild with whatever remaining coal that we have, but frankly, I don't know how Americans are going to heat their houses. Half of the houses in America are heated with natural gas, and as Richard Heinberg might have explained, we have arguably a more immediate problem with natural gas depletion than even with oil.

JMD: You mentioned something about the winter of 2003 - some catastrophe almost happened with natural gas - could you elaborate on that?

JK: Every year there's what's called a summer injection season. When houses are not being heated, the gas companies all over North America get gas out of the ground, and they put it into storage in certain places in the ground at the heads of the pipeline network. The natural gas of America runs all around the United States in a pipeline network (it doesn't run around in trucks, although a little of it runs around in the form of propane, but most of the natural gas we use is methane, and it runs around through a pipeline network, so when the winter heating season comes, all that gas in storage is released and starts moving around.

Well, in March of 2003, we ran very low on stored gas from the previous injection season, and the pressure started to go down in the regional trunk lines of that pipeline network, and we had never been in this situation before, where the pressure had gone so low that the furnaces have gone out as a result. It's never really happened on a mass basis, so the specter was that if the gas pressure got that low and the furnaces went out all over America, or lets say all over a region, such as the New York-Connecticut metropolitan region, then some of the furnaces would restart automatically, because the newer furnaces do that, but a certain percentage of them wouldn't, and when the gas pressure returns, you'd have this potential for exploding furnaces, with gas being released but no pilot light on, and that raised the specter of what is the power company going to do? Are they going to send technicians around to every building in the region to check every furnace? They'd need thousands and thousands more employees to do it, so we had this unprecedented situation that nobody knew how it was going to play out. As it happened, the pressure never got that low that furnaces went out, but believe me, for a while they were very worried about it, and it could happen again.

JMD: Are they prepared for that in the future?

JK: Well, it still raises the same problem. There are still going to be x number of furnaces out there that are not going to restart automatically, and you're still not going to have 50,000 employees to go out and check them, so it's just another example of us whistling past the graveyard - nothing happened that time, and we're hoping nothing happens again, but it's just hope.

JMD: Now, you also talk about epidemics. Can you touch on that for a moment as part of these converging catastrophes?

JK: Well, we know they're out there. We know that AIDS is out there, although our society is not suffering as much as Africa, or even parts of Asia now or Russia. We know that some of our old disease adversaries are coming back at us with new immunities to antibiotics we've developed for tuberculosis and other diseases such as staphylococci, and we know exotic diseases are moving into new regions because of climate change - things like West Nile and Dengue fever turning up in North America. West Nile is now in all 48 lower states, and in the hardships that we face in the long emergency that is ahead, we are going to be dealing with people with compromised immune systems - people who are hungry, people who are cold, people who are old and not being properly cared for - and a lot of these diseases are going to take advantage of that. With AIDS all bets are off, because the rate is doubling every certain number of years.

JMD: I think you said 5.7 years in the book.

JK: Yes, I forget what it is now offhand, but it's not a whole lot, and we now have instances of new strains of AIDS turning up in New York City that are resistant to the sophisticated drug cocktails that have been cooked up to combat that disease, and you know, we really don't know where that's going. Like all viral diseases, AIDS has a big capacity to mutate, and we simply don't know which direction it's going to go in, so it's going to combine with global warming and with the hardships produced by the peak-oil situation to take advantage of human weakness and human frailty.

JMD: So, looking ahead at what communities can do - we've talked a little bit about the need to do re-localization, especially in food production, we've talked a little bit about commerce, what about housing?

JK: Well, let's talk about commerce - we actually haven't talked about that, and it's going to be a big problem - that's just regular everyday trade, which we have sacrificed to the alter of Wal-Mart. Wal-mart has systematically destroyed every local commercial economy in America, practically - Wal-Mart and things like it - and it happened because the growth medium of cheap oil and relative world peace for 50 years allowed it to happen. It wasn't particularly a conspiracy, but the American public has been complicit in throwing away their own local economy, and now they're going to have to reap the consequences of that. One of them is that it is not going to be easy to rebuild local networks of economic interdependency; they will not spring forth like mushrooms after the rain. A lot of the knowledge for running local businesses and small businesses used to be transmitted through families, and that transmission of information stopped for more than one generation, so its going to be hard to retrieve it. We're probably going to have fewer things to buy and fewer manufactured goods in the future. Shopping is going to fade more into the background of our lives, and we're not going to be living in that blue-light-special-shopping frenzy that we've been enjoying for the last 20 years.

JMD: And many of the things we have come to take for granted, we don't produce anymore - textiles among them - do you see those things coming back as well of necessity?

JK: Well, I don't know, one thing is we are not going to replay the 20th century. Many of the factories that used to produce these things in the United States were scaled to cheap energy, which was available in 1923 or 1951 when these factories were built and rebuilt, and tooled and retooled. We're not going to relive that episode, so it remains to be seen how we are going to produce things. We may only be able to do it on a much smaller scale, perhaps a cottage scale - we really don't know. You know the human race is ingenious, and I think that we will make things that we need, but it will be a much more limited pallet, a much more limited menu than we've been accustomed to.

I do want to say something to the question you raised a minute ago about what we can do locally. I think one of things we really have to do is this - I wrote three previous books about the fiasco of suburban development and all the issues around that, even before I got involved in the energy issues. Before, there was this idea that suburban sprawl was optional, you know, that towns could either do it if they wanted to, or do something better, it didn't really matter. Now it matters a lot. Every continued misallocation of resources that we continue to make - permitting new strip malls and approving new suburban subdivisions miles away from town - any continuing activity of that kind is going to add to the tragedy of what we're moving into. And we have got to stop. We have got to get serious at the local level about changing the rules of the game, and changing the way we value our land and changing the way we do development. We have to get serious about reestablishing this clear distinction between what is rural land and what is town land; and what is the place where the rural activities of food production take place, and where are the places where the civic activities take place - one of the great disasters of suburbia was that it erased this distinction - it allowed people to think for a half a century that everybody could lead an urban life in a rural setting, and that is a terrible basis for establishing a sustainable economy and a sustainable nation. We now have to reform that and make that distinction clear again, so that's one of the first things that we have to do at the local level is really get in there and stop the monkey business at the city council level and the planning board level, you know, it's not funny anymore, we really have to stop that, we have to do a different kind of development, if we do any at all.

JMD: Yes, at top of the interview before we got on the air, I was talking about some of the things that some communities are doing - you may know about Yellow Springs, Ohio, taking this seriously as well? And yet peak oil and a lot of the things you are talking about - these converging catastrophes - are still off most people's radar. What do you see is going to function as the ultimate wakeup call here? At what point do you think the wave will be ascendant for people's listening will really open up?

JK: I don't think there's going to be an ultimate wake-up call. I think we will segue-way directly from sleep walking into the future to being very deluded about what our predicament is and being desperate and doing desperate things, and I think that we will see a lot of desperate political action and a lot of political mischief on the part of people who are bewildered and confused. I don't think there's going to be any wake-up call at all.

I think what you'll see is a lot of disorder and a lot of turbulence in every area of our lives, our economic lives, our political lives, our social lives - there are going to be a lot more people that have no jobs, and they are going to be very puzzled, you know, why did this happen? They will blame George Bush or whoever is in the White House. They will blame their local leaders. They will fight desperately to maintain their ability to live in their suburban houses, because that is where all their wealth has been invested, you know, that will be a futile battle, but they will do it nevertheless, and I am not expecting that there's going to be any kind of great awakening and eruption of common sense.

JMD: Well, maybe when it gets bad enough, people will wake up and realize that they have to do something different, that what they've been doing status quo is really not that functional.

JK: Yes, I think a bottom-line kind of idea is that people will realize at some point that they have got to make other arrangements. What those arrangements will be, who knows? The people who find themselves going from office work to farm work may be very resentful, and they may want to seize the property of those who have it. There have been revolutions before in this world, it wouldn't be the first time, and they do tend to happen during periods of economic emergencies and stringencies, so its not out of the question that something like that would occur. We would hope that it wouldn't, but who knows.

JMD: Well, I am going to ask you to share a hopeful vision with me, having to do with communities being able to wake up and learn, and if you could visualize and articulate what a community would look like if they were really waking up to this, in terms of how they take on the social aspect,the educational aspect. You said in your book how you felt that it is hard to imagine a more purposeless activity than American high school in our time, and we are looking at all this untapped social capital, creativity or human power - can you imagine a scenario, can you articulate how at least some communities might wake up in time and what would that look like in your ideal vision?

JK: Well, I would have to start by saying it isn't going to be utopia, but I think that some places will do better than other places, and it will probably depend on the quality of the community and the quality of their leadership. I do think that agriculture will come back much more to the center of American life, and the activities associated with it will. There may be quite a few benefits for us in the return of social relationships that we haven't seen for a long time in this country. For example, the idea of people working physically together at something that has meaning for them, of working shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors, of really getting to know their neighbors, being mutually interdependent with each other and doing things for each other rather than just being isolated in that pod of darkness in front of the blue light of the television by yourself, which is where most America has been for the last 40 years. I think that there will probably be a lot of surprises. I imagine that we'll have a lot less canned entertainment to divert us, you know, to soothe away the boredom of contemporary consumer society. And that implies that we will probably be doing a lot more with each other, spending more time with each other. We'll be solving problems together, we will be rebuilding a value system that is meaningful; we're going to have to replace the Las Vegas mentality that America now has that it's possible to get something for nothing. We're going to have to replace that with a value system that is more meaningful, based on honest effort and earnest enterprise, rather than just striking it rich or getting lucky, so those are the kinds of things I think await us in the long emergency.

JMD: And it seems to me that many of those things you suggested are actually a breath of fresh air - getting back to some social relatedness, some connectedness to place and the land, and what makes life really happen.

JK: Yes, I think there is a very good chance that this experience will rehumanize us in a way. One of the things that we just don't take into account at all are the diminishing returns of technology, not just the inconveniences and the blow back of technology, but the sheer dehumanizing quality of it, and the fact that it takes us away from each other so much. You know, cars are very interesting, marvelous machines, but a street full of angry people sitting in traffic is not such a wonderful experience, and it's not, as far as a society goes, it's not very good for society, so I think we stand to benefit quite a bit from stepping back for awhile, and taking time out from the hi-tech extravaganza that we've been enjoying or not enjoying.

Another thing that I think is self-evident is that for all of its vaunted attraction, the suburban American Dream way of life seems to produce more anxiety and depression than any other way of life in the world, short of being in an Iraqi prison. We have more depressed and anxious people in this country than any other society I know of. I think a lot of it has to do with the isolation and alienation of life spent in traffic and life spent in front of the blue light of television alone and the fact that our civic connections have been devastated by the suburban experience and even family life, the ability to even keep a family together has been devastated by the blandishments of contemporary life, so I think we have quite a bit to benefit from and to return to things that we haven't done in a long time in this country.

JMD: And in the last couple of minutes,I would like to give you an opportunity to say anything you'd like to our listeners about these times coming up and offer any hope and advice you might like to do.

JK: Well, I think the period I have called 'the long emergency' is going to require a lot of us; the time of the great American period of leisure and comfort will be coming to an end. We'll have to make sacrifices and work very hard in ways we haven't before, not just sitting under a video terminal. We're going to have to help each other a lot more, be available, be sympathetic, be less self-involved; we're probably going to have to develop a different spiritual relationship with places that we live in and the other people in them. I am not proposing a born-again experience, because that doesn't happen to be something that I am a part of, but I do imagine that people will be returning to some sort of organized religious practice of some kind, if only to provide them with an armature for organizing their lives emotionally. Look, I am 56 years old - I've outlived Babe Ruth and Mozart and [inaud]. I feel a lot of gratitude for having been alive at all in this amazing world. The philosopher Wittingstein said it is astonishing that anything exists, and that's true, so I wish us all good luck in the long emergency, and I hope to come along for the ride, and see how we make out.

JMD: Well, thank you so much for being with us Jim.

We've been speaking with James Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency:Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century, and Jim, I hope you'll come back and talk to us again as we go a little further down the road in our experiments.

JK: I'll be happy to come back, and thank you very much for having me on your program.