Last night we went to see James Howard Kunstler speak about his new book "The Long Emergency" in a very packed Knowlton auditorium. Kunstler was a good speaker — by which I mean he was good at being funny while delivering a lecture about the impending collapse of our society.
Kunstler's very much a critic of suburban sprawl and has extrapolated his own sort of Bowling Alone-esque theory on the collapse of society at large as indicated by unfriendly architecture and the zoning failure of the suburbs. That's not really anything new and it's pretty close to what I believe myself. It's why I ran screaming to NYC as soon as I was out of high school and it's why I live in one of the great urban neighborhoods in the mid-west.
Kunstler's new book is all about the impending energy crisis and what will happen to the US when we finally run out of oil. Or at least get close enough to running out of oil that buying Hummers stops being a tax break. Kunstler says that the big cities will retract, people will become more dependent on agriculture and agricultural animals, and that there will be a lot of "economic losers," and those losers will be the basis for some ugly politics of fear. One might argue that's already occurring...(cough, cough, issue one in Ohio...cough cough).
My question for Kunstler is about his time line. He clearly (maybe even a little gleefully) thinks that this will happen in his lifetime and since he's no spring chicken, that means my lifetime. How long does it take for an empire to fall? How long until the Long Emergency?
