Global Warning

Social critic James Howard Kunstler has railed for years against the twin evils of bad urban design and suburban sprawl. Based in Saratoga Springs, the author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere warns that our beloved cars -- and the subdivided landscape they drive us to -- are leading American culture down a four-lane highway to destruction.

Kunstler's arguments have taken on new urgency in light of what scientists now agree is an impending, and permanent, global energy crisis. His new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, due out in May), imagines life -- and jobs, housing, architecture and transportation -- without access to cheap oil. An excerpt appears in a recent issue of Rolling Stone.

Kunstler got a rock-star reception last week at Middlebury College, where he entertained a standing-room-only audience with provocative predications about where our unbridled consumption is likely to land us. An eloquent, funny speaker who is not afraid to use the f-word, Kunstler agreed to a follow-up email interview with Seven Days.

Paula Routly: You've long criticized the housing and transportation policies that drove people from the cities to suburbia after World War II. Now it turns out "Levittown" is not only ugly and soul-killing, but unsustainable. Explain your vision of the "Long Emergency."

James Howard Kunstler: We poured our national wealth into the construction of a living arrangement that has no future -- and the future is now here. The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It was deficient and problematic as a human habitat even apart from the question of its sustainability. The way we live in America represents a tragic set of collective and individual choices we made at a particular point in history, the mid-to-late 20th century, when circumstances seemed to suggest there were no limits to our quest for comfort, convenience and leisure. These things turned out to be a poor basis for a value system and for an economy.

So life without oil equals the apocalypse?

Your word, not mine. I rather resent being labeled "apocalyptic." It demonstrates how poorly even journalists understand what we face, which is an epochal discontinuity in the conditions of daily life, not the end of the world. In fact, we don't even face a life without oil, at least not imminently. We face a life without cheap oil, which is a big difference. Specifically, we are heading into a period of social, political and economic turbulence, which will probably include a lot of hardship. That's not the end of the world. That's something that the human race has been through many times before. For instance, the Europeans of 1913 would never have conceived the degree of destruction and vicissitude visited upon their societies by two 20th-century world wars. We're equally blind and clueless about what we are facing.

Since the U.S. reached its peak oil production in 1970, what's happened in terms of geoeconomic power?

The U.S. controlled the oil industry and the markets from the late 1800s until 1970 because we could always pump more and goose up the global supply, moderating prices. We were also the world's leading consumers of oil, so we wanted low prices. After 1970, when U.S. production peaked, other people -- namely OPEC -- enjoyed the position as "swing producers." They controlled prices and markets, not us. They could always pump more, but we couldn't, because our total production was decreasing. The 1970s were therefore very turbulent economically and the U.S. suffered a lot. "Stagflation." Twenty-percent interest rates! High unemployment.

In the 1980s the world's last great oil discoveries, the North Sea and Alaska's North Slope, came into production softening oil prices. These substantial non-OPEC sources tended to take pricing power away from OPEC. The result was a temporary glut and a decade and a half of still-cheap oil. I regard that period as the final blow-off of the cheap-oil era.