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" I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs. "

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" The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education. "

James Howard Kunstler

America

Story

Society

" Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens. "

James Howard Kunstler

Be Prepared

Good

You

" Parallel parking is desirable for two reasons: parked cars create a physical barrier and psychological buffer that protects pedestrians on the sidewalk from moving vehicles; and a rich supply of parallel parking can eliminate the need for parking lots, which are extremely destructive of the civic fabric. "

James Howard Kunstler

Moving

Two

Create

" Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression. "

James Howard Kunstler

Think

Suffering

Powerful

" The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents. "

James Howard Kunstler

Living

Rain

Environment

" Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel. "

James Howard Kunstler

Tourist

Power

Going

" Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information. "

James Howard Kunstler

Focus

Information

Economy

" Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. "

James Howard Kunstler

American Dream

Home

Apple

" When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking. "

James Howard Kunstler

You

Hard

Society

" The model of the human habitat dictated by zoning is a formless, soul-less, centerless, demoralizing mess. It bankrupts families and townships. It disables whole classes of decent, normal citizens. It ruins the air we breathe. It corrupts and deadens our spirit. "

James Howard Kunstler

Spirit

Air

Breathe

" On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. "

James Howard Kunstler

People

Life

Home

" I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses. "

James Howard Kunstler

Talking

Solutions

" I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century. "

James Howard Kunstler

New Life

Great

New

" History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory. "

James Howard Kunstler

History

People

Moving

" Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we've known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very, very high. "

James Howard Kunstler

Conflict

You

Saying

" Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth - on the quality and the character of it - and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland. "

James Howard Kunstler

Character

Change

Growth

" I think that Obama's failure to reestablish the rule of law in money matters is the most damaging thing that he's done - and perhaps the most damaging thing that has happened in American politics in my lifetime. Because once the rule of law is absent in money matters, then anything really goes in politics. "

James Howard Kunstler

Failure

Think

Politics

" Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds. "

James Howard Kunstler

Media

Black

Truth Is

" If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it. "

James Howard Kunstler

Internet

Enjoy

Future

" I do all I can to maintain good health. I eat mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say. I get a lot of exercise. I lead a purposeful daily life. I stay current with the dentist. I made the formative decision of where to live over thirty years ago when I settled in a 'main street' small town in upstate New York. "

James Howard Kunstler

Live

Health

Good

" I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the future. "

James Howard Kunstler

Building

Future

Just

" My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale. "

James Howard Kunstler

People

Rely

Question

" Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope. "

James Howard Kunstler

Growth

Technology

Reality

" I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a 'time out' from technological progress as we know it. "

James Howard Kunstler

Out

Know

Time