Monday, August 1, 2022 12:19 PM EDT
In this podcast we speak with David Collum who often has surprising views on the the predicaments of our time.
American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger
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James Howard Kunstler
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I’ve said it over and over again: History is a prankster. It can surprise you at the darndest times.
If you think we’re headed into a transhuman nirvana of continuous tech-assisted orgasm, social equity, and guaranteed basic income, you are going to be disappointed.
Work Experience
Publications
| Too Much Magic | |
| James Howard Kunstler | |
| Atlantic Monthly Press | |
| 06/19/2012 | |
| In Too Much Magic, Kunstler evaluates what has changed in the last seven years and shows us that, in a post-financial-crisis world, his ideas are more relevant than ever. “Too Much Magic” is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. Their visions remind him of the flying cars and robot maids that were the dominant images of the future in the 1950s. Kunstler’s image of the future is much more sober. With vision, clarity of thought, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over, and the time to begin preparing for the long emergency has begun. |
| The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel | |
| James Howard Kunstler | |
| 09/07/2010 | |
| A novel of America’s post-oil future. In the sequel to his novel, World Made by Hand, Kunstler expands on his vision of a post-oil society with a new novel about an America in which the electricity has flickered off, the Internet is a distant memory, and the government is little more than a rumor. In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, travel is horse-drawn and farming is back at the center of life. But it’s no pastoral haven. Wars are fought over dwindling resources and illness is a constant presence. Bandits roam the countryside, preying on the weak. And a sinister cult threatens to shatter Union Grove’s fragile stability. In a book that is both shocking yet eerily convincing, Kunstler seamlessly weaves hot-button issues such as the decline of oil and the perils of climate change into a compelling narrative of violence, religious hysteria, innocence lost, and love found. |
| World Made by Hand: A Novel | |
| James Howard Kunstler | |
| 01/06/2009 | |
| In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever. |
| The Long Emergency | |
| James Howard Kunstler | |
| Atlantic Monthly Press | |
| 04/13/2005 | |
| The global oil predicament, climate change, and other shocks to the system, with implications for how we will live in the decades ahead. What sets The Long Emergencyapart from numerous other books on this theme is its comprehensive sweep—its powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change—along with a fascinating attempt to peer into a chaotic future. And Kunstler is such a compelling, fast-paced and sometimes eloquent writer that the book is hard to put down. --David Ehrenfeld The American Scientist |
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