Has the Long Peak-Oil Emergency Begun?

Interview: Writer and urbanist James Kunstler talks about America’s auto-dependent culture, urban sprawl and what he sees beyond our dependence on oil.

The record high price of gasoline has been all over the news in recent weeks. While Americans were smart enough not to fall for the congressional Republicans’ ham-handed effort to buy votes with a $100 rebate, polls show that Americans are worried about gas prices, and are beginning to think about changing their energy devouring ways. All of this makes novelist James Howard Kunstler look very prescient.

In 1993, James Kunstler revolutionized the way Americans think about their landscape when he released his first non-fiction book, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. The New York Times described it as “an impassioned rant against suburbia, shopping malls, cheap disposable architecture and the fragmentation of communities fostered by an increasingly mobile, car-oriented culture.” He has continued this crusade with articles in a wide range of publications and in his most recent book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century.

In this book, Kunstler argues that the world will soon pass “peak oil,” the point at which more than half the world’s recoverable oil supplies have been used. According to Kunstler, America ’s auto-dependent culture and landscape will make this transition to a post-oil economy extremely painful. He predicts potential wars over dwindling oil supplies, massive abandonment of suburban sprawl areas, and, ultimately, a return to the time when people ate locally grown produce and did not commute dozens of miles to work each day.

We caught up with Kunstler to chat about the intersection of urban planning and progressive politics, and what the future will look like if, as he predicts, oil prices just keep rising.

Campus Progress