James Howard Kunstler - Writing

Writing

Over the course of the first 14 years of his writing career (1979–1993), Kunstler wrote seven novels.

Since the mid-1990s, he has written four non-fiction books about suburban development and diminishing global oil supplies. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, his first work on the subject, The Geography of Nowhere, discussed the effects of "cartoon architecture, junked cities, and a ravaged countryside", as he put it. Described as a jeremiad by The Washington Post, Kunstler is critic of suburbia and urban development trends throughout the United States, and is a proponent of the New Urbanism movement. According to Scott Carlson, reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kunstler's books on the subject have become "standard reading in architecture and urban planning courses".

He describes America as a poorly planned and "tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work." In a 2001 op-ed for Planetizen, he wrote that in the wake of 9/11 the "age of skyscrapers is at an end", that no new megatowers would be built, and that existing tall buildings are destined to be dismantled.

In his books that followed, such as Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind, and The Long Emergency (2005), he pushed hard on taboo topics like a post-oil America. James Howard Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work".(http://www.kunstler.com/bio.html) He was featured in the "peak oil" documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet, as well as the Canadian documentary Radiant City (2006).

In his recent science fiction novel World Made by Hand (2008), he describes a future dependent on localized production and agriculture, with little reliance on imports. The Witch of Hebron, a sequel, was released in the autumn of 2010; two more sequels are under development.

In his writings and lectures, he makes a strong case that there is no other alternative energy source on the horizon that can replace relatively cheap oil. He therefore envisions a "low energy" world that will be radically different from today's. This has contributed to his becoming an outspoken advocate for one of his solutions, a more energy-efficient rail system, and writes "we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system if we expect to remain a united country."