by J. Sophia

Artist by Name, Prophet by Profession, James Howard Kunstler’s name actually means “artist” in German.  It is missing those two dots above the “u” – which we like to put into brand names when we want to appear European – to render the German word for artist entirely correct: Künstler. But James does not just carry the name; he is indeed an artist in several fields.

I discovered Kunstler’s logical projections of The Long Emergency and other peak oil considerations about 5 years ago.  Thoughts concerning our growth-crazy super-capitalism and its eventual implosion – after eroding its own base and exhausting our resources – had been on my mind ever since I lived in Zimbabwe and saw the exploitation of an entire continent first hand.  Kunstler’s work, describing the mayhem to be expected when resources run short, when contamination of waterways render entire regions uninhabitable, and when the collapse of our financial systems make organized repair of nature or the return to civilized living in larger cities impossible, made perfect sense to me.  Intrigued by his book, I saw Kunstler in the documentary The End of Suburbia.  His passion and sharp wit made me laugh and cry.  He presents the irony-of-fate kind of view I wanted for a documentary I was working on at the time.  I listed him as one of the experts on peak oil I wanted to interview for that TV documentary titled Window Into The Future.  We think alike, I thought, except that I always focus more on the solutions.  I wanted to bring to audiences existing models of lifestyles and products already developed to solve the problems he was describing.  Unfortunately, Window into the Future did not get fully funded and bit the dust in 2006 – and I did not get to meet Kunstler.

In November 2010, I make a last minute decision to attend a TED conference in Albany and am thrilled to see Kunstler on the program.  I immediately look for him to tell him that I admire his work. “You are my hero!” I exclaim after his rather alarming speech.  “Cool,” he responds – and we hug! – Ah, like minds!  “Can I come to wherever you’re staying and interview you?” pops out of my mouth just like that – I know I want to talk more and meet the private person James Kunstler, not just the prophet on his soap box.  “I’m still in this time-warp coming back from Australia,” he says, “but next week will be fine. You can come to my house.” “Great!” and we exchange cards and personal cell phone numbers.

A few days later, I arrive at his current home – surprise, surprise, he lives in a suburban sprawl development – where the smiling Kunstler greets me between two regular gasoline guzzling cars in his driveway: a pick-up and a sedan.  No, there’s no electric car, no Prius, no bicycle.  “This is interesting!” I note, taking in the normal neighborhood.  “We don’t own this place,” he informs me.  “We’re just renting.”  He’s waiting for the housing market to take another nosedive before he’ll get some of his own land and property around here, he tells me.

We enter his rented modern contraption of all the fossil fuel derived amenities one could wish for, vinyl siding, carpets, window frames, appliances, all made just before the imminent depletion of the planet’s deep dark bodily fluids: crude oil.  And he’s helping to use it all up.  Might as well get that Long Emergency started as fast as we can!

We spend a minute in the fabulously equipped kitchen where he makes me a tension tamer tea and himself a green one.  No, no more coffee, no more bacon and eggs for breakfast and no more pork chops.  There are organic fruits on display and lots of shiny vitamin bottles.  “I had too many health problems, so I changed my diet drastically three years ago,” says Kunstler.  That’s so much later than his awakening to the fact that we need to change our behavior to enhance health on the planet and health in ourselves, I think to myself.  And he did not do it out of insight but out of physical distress.  It’s a long road from thought to action – especially in our own life...

Lots of light in the living room and a view of the woods and pastures of upstate New York greet me as James asks me to make myself comfortable on the couch.  Holding my hot tension tamer tea, I turn around to see that the walls are covered with paintings of nature, bridges, lakes and village settings.  “So your partner is the artist?” I presume, ignorant as I am. “No, no, that’s me! She’s the rare editions librarian at the College.”  There are landscapes, snowy hills, tree-lined city streets, lone farmhouses, impressionist style work.  James sits down under what must be a self-portrait of the painter’s back standing at the isle, working on a painting under a tree.  What a romantic setting.  None of the paintings show the despair his lectures and speeches evoke.  How do these two Kunstlers, the artist and the alarmist, go together?

My first question, jotted down yesterday, gains a new dimension:


1)      JS
Why this concern for the future? Do you have children?
JHK
You know, I kind of slid into this as I was researching my book Geography of Nowhere.  I started seeing the shortcomings and inadequacy of suburbia and the end of the resources it is built on.  I realized that this whole concept of a living arrangement of parents raising their kids in total isolation from any real life is doomed.  Living and raising kids deprived of seeing and experiencing production, farming or manufacturing, forests, rivers, or real neighborhoods, connecting to the rest of the world only by shopping at the mall and by watching television in the catalogue living room, will fail! –

JS
So you decided not to bring children into this failing world?

JHK
No, I never decided NOT have children.  In fact, I was married three times and had a lot of, well, I think a fair amount of sex, but it just never happened.  One of my ex-wives – no two of them – adopted a child after we divorced.  Eventually I said, well, what’s the matter here and I had myself tested.  The doctor told me it would be very unlikely that I would father a child.  So that was that.  I suppose I’m OK with just having sex.  I came to terms with that.  (He shrugs)

Kunstler is talking with a touch of sadness but matter-of-factly while I gaze at a particular painting across from me on the other side of the living room: a whole group of folks in bathing suits on rocks under trees at the edge of a creek – a sensual, summery scene in pastel colors, the figures in the frame relaxed and enjoying what looks like a family moment…a painting that captures a sense of well-being - not at all a sense of deprivation.  Kunstler quite comfortably lives in this richly contextualized 21st century high-end culture he deems so short lived in his books and speeches.  I slurp my tension tamer and relax further into the couch.

JHK
Back to Why the mission – it goes further back: I was a news reporter for Rolling Stone when the Oil Crisis of the 1970’s broke. I was exposed to what was going on and the fact that oil was going to run out some time probably in my lifetime and that meant that the car-based living arrangements will fail.   

JS
Then what drove you to do something about survival?

JHK
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe the human project has value.  Civilization is not just destructive.  But the human species is the curious branch of the primate family that is flirting with god-like powers!

JS
So if we’re not god-like, yet responsible for the destruction and/or the fixing of the planet, then what are we?

JHK
Angels and demons!  I’m on the side of the angels.

JS
And as an angel your philosophy is?

JHK
Working small scale – finding happiness. Endamonism.

JS
What’s that?

JHK
Producing happiness in life.  Seeing the human race as engaged in its purpose of producing happiness.  No worshipping of gods.  Celebrating life.  Creating beauty in culture.  Children are part of that – there is no other reason why I don’t have children. And I’m not gay.  I love the act of attempting procreation! 

JS
Are you, like me, of the ‘make love not war’ generation?

JHK
Totally!  War is excessive masculine behavior. But also survival of the fittest.

JS
Or the act of the male who suffers from such great lack of self-confidence that he needs to prove his potency to the world by destroying others?  And then becoming worthy of the trophy: the woman?

JHK (laughs)
So yes, we’re too macho and need to bring out more of our feminine side?

JS
Of course.  Isn’t that same warmonger, that conquistador also the man who is the wife-batterer? 

JHK
Well yeah: we’ve battered our planet, our mother Earth.

2)    JS
Are men in particular the perpetrators of this mis-planned, war-based world?

JHK
One could think so.  But look at the abundance of right-wing women in politics now.  I don’t know, do they want to be like men? They promote the same stereotypes and have the same shared behavior, sometimes worse.  The big thing here is habitual actions and life style.  On the other hand, I’m called a communist by the tea-baggers and on the other hand I’ve been getting a lot of criticism from left-wing women because they don’t like the female characters in my novels.  They are not modern enough, they say, and I’m told it’s a failure of my imagination.  I don’t show women in the corporate world and women are not acknowledged for their feminist revolution.  They’re not shown climbing the ladder.  It is totally ironic!  However, they still have positions of authority in my books.  There may be more division of sexes; not extreme though.  But we don’t need cry-babies, we need action.  I’m not one of those who believe we are all the same – we have different qualities. 

3)     JS
My next question was: would women do a better job?

JHK
Not necessarily.  Look at our universities.  We have lots of women as department chairs.  And everything becomes like psychotherapy: it’s all about feelings.  And this makes it harder to have real conversations about the future.  The future needs ACTIONS.  Men by virtue of their masculinity have the ability to make fast decisions, to act.  Women tend to delay.  On the other hand, a lot of care-taking is needed.  Women have put aside the care-taking and joined the rat race.  I believe care-taking is deeply undervalued and discounted.  Modernity must allow for care-taking as a valued contribution to society.  

4)    JS
Back to the failure of the car-based culture and suburbia: Does suburban life constitute some form of imprisonment of the mind?  Could we see suburbia as a prison camp breeding consumers?

JHK
Few people are as aware as I am of the “unintended consequences” of such projects as the suburban sprawl and the car-based culture as of the 1950’s.  Take one example: the elimination of housework.  Women now had dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, toasters, drycleaners at the mall, and supermarkets where you could shop for the week.  Result: women were either bored housewives watching day-soaps or, in the majority, forced into the work force to pay for all of the consumer stuff, because one income was no longer enough.  At the same time, with this increased labor force, wages stagnated.  The service sector expanded. And of course, manufacturing decreased in the US and we became predominantly a service economy.  So we can ask ourselves how much of this suburban lifestyle is really wanted by women and how much is coerced.  You also see cultural deprivation and impoverishment of societal interaction.  You have this supposedly advanced ‘casual lifestyle’ to the extreme.  You can wear your pajamas to the mall.  At the same time, you don’t have families meeting for gardening, a concert or the theatre, not even for bowling.  There is only television and the talk about the next thing to buy.  I’ve never phrased it that way, but you have a point calling it a consumer prison.  And it definitely is an imprisonment of the mind.

5)     JS
What have the ‘green’ changes in policies made in Europe over the last ten years achieved or missed?

JHK
Well, Europe has lived through the most horrifying conditions with the convulsions of the industrial revolution, the wars, and fascism.  People suffered a great deal during the last two centuries.  However, Europe did not give up on its cities and the everyday beauty of human habitats in general.  And Europe did not give up on mass transit and the quality of urban life and culture.  The esthetics of human environments never lost importance in people’s perceptions.  Capitalism was not able to kill that perception.  Therefore, we have city-life, a city culture, and functioning urban communities everywhere in Europe.  There’s also much less suburban sprawl.

JS
Did the US ever have concepts of beauty for human habitats, urban, suburban, rural or otherwise?

JHK
Mostly not, except for the attempts of importing European concepts in the late 19th century and early 20th century.  They remained attempts and the general culture or lack thereof was not able or not willing to live up to them – because everybody who owned anything could do what they wanted – and when a street, a village, a town is not unified on some level, or does not have a common concept, it’s hard to give a damn about it: it’s ‘everybody for themselves and none for the common good.’
Any civilization requires physical dwelling places worth caring about.  And that’s what was maintained in Europe.  In the US we have this crassness of our trailer-park and concrete jungle non-culture.  And the few Beaux Arts buildings are mostly not where people live or where an urban culture can develop.
In Europe, on the other hand, there’s the illusion of using Russia for their energy source, on the one hand and on the other hand there’s this dream of a technical “nirvana” where everything is easy! And the outcome is still doubtful – well, some of it could actually work – it depends entirely on scale.  Small self-sustaining communities using those principles could be created.

JS
The city of Curritiba in Brazil is often cited as an advanced urban, green living example.

JHK
I don’t agree that it is one. It’s important to note that people get too infatuated with the Curritiba model and its bus system.  The buses are the big deal and they still run on diesel.  And they still cater to a commuter society.  We need walkable city centers in which people actually live.  Stockholm, Amsterdam, Barcelona are better examples.  Livable city centers that also care about beauty, quality of life, and culture for the city center dwellers. These cities are offering what I call “rewarding environments of beauty.”  We have to take those examples and construct a post petroleum world without all the pain that comes with crashes. 

6)    JS
A two-fold question:
a) How many and which of your predictions have come true?
b) What did not come true?

JHK
a) The housing bubble did blow up, the banks crashed, and then the economy tanked – a structural catastrophe.  That all happened exactly as described in The Long Emergency. 
Now some people think we’re out of it – but this is only the beginning.  There will be the second crash and prolonged downturn of the economy.
b) I think we’re only talking about delays – for example extracting natural gas from shale has delayed our gas shortage.  We’re doing this crazy ‘fracking’ which has truly evil consequences – we’re fracturing our underground rock and ground water systems to extract deep pockets of gas.  We pump millions of gallons of water and chemicals under pressure into a well and totally destroy the integrity of the shale.  This is so dangerous that any benefit is debatable.  We already don’t have enough drinkable ground water.  We polluted or chemicalized, with chlorine and fluoride, the water supplies for human consumption and work, and now we’re going to disperse tons of highly carcinogenic chemicals into our ground water resources – the few good water sources we have left in places like upstate New York or Pennsylvania.  That’s why we haven’t run out of gas yet.  But it’s not going to last long, even if we do all the fracking and polluting we could possibly do.

JS
Haven’t there been some reversals of polluted rivers and bodies of water, particularly in Europe?

JHK
Of course, as I said about the cities: European countries have not given up on cities, and they have not given up on rivers either.

JS
Some rivers, such as the river Rhine and the river Ruhr which were extremely polluted just 30 years ago have been entirely cleaned up and restored to life, now carrying drinkable water again. They are full of healthy fish and offer beaches in the summer for sweet water swimming…

JHK
That shows that it can be done where there is the will and funding to do it.  We have not gotten there yet in the US of A.  We need to invest into those changes. But when the economy is already in the tank nobody wants to invest in clean-up actions.  Things just get worse with the excuse of job-creation or staying in whatever dirty business.

7)    JS
With your daunting projections for the US – why not emigrate?  I have friends who have purchased land and have moved to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica to live on the land – why not you?

JHK
What do you mean, emigrate now?  To South America? I wouldn’t trust those political systems.  The governments are so unstable they could just take your land away any time, socialize it or declare you ineligible to own land in their countries.  I think it’s totally naive to think we can escape the coming chaos by emigrating to a poorer, less developed and less stable country, especially in Central America.  I care about my part of the world, right here in upstate New York where we can at least grow our own food because we still have water. 
Nevertheless, the problem is that we have NO working models available.  And we can’t just turn this thing around and make it sustainable.  We have to rethink our entire lifestyle.  But can we adapt?

JS
Do you have any hope for happiness then?

JHK
You know, I need to be alarmist or people won’t even read me or talk about me.  At least they are paying attention now.  The Long Emergency is taught at quite a few universities.  If more people do not become aware and start taking decisive action, we really are doomed!  But contrary to my “alarmist” speaker persona, I am actually quite a mellow guy actively pursuing happiness every day – in my relationship, my organic gardening, cooking, painting, and my conversations with intelligent humans...

JS
Yep, and you’ve just made my day by revealing that even the prophet James Howard himself, the alarmist, the doomsday singer on his soap box, is just a tad caught up in the current wasteful culture.  And by letting me know that the angel in him foresees new forms of localized community life that he will help co-create following male decisiveness ;-) – and, last but certainly not least, by the fact that James Howard, the ‘Künstler,’ sees and captures the natural and localized world and its beauty in awesome paintings. 

Thanks so much for sharing some of the Artist and the Prophet for this interview!