509 FBF: The Long Emergency with James Howard Kuntsler

Today's Flash Back Friday comes from Episode 186, originally published in November 2013.

James Howard Kuntsler is the author of "The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century" and "Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of a Nation" among many other books.

James is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994) and The Long Emergency (2005). In The Long Emergency he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities. Starting with World Made by Hand in 2008, Kunstler has written a series of science fiction novels conjecturing such a culture in the future.

Kunstler so gives lectures on topics related to suburbia, urban development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament" and a resultant change in the “American Way of Life.” He has lectured the TED Conference, the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the International Council of Shopping Centers, the National Association of Science and Technology as well as at numerous colleges and universities, including Yale, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, DePaul, Texas A & M, West Point, and Rutgers University.

Also a seasoned journalist, Kunstler continues to write for The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, RollingStone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Op-Ed page where he often covers environmental and economic issues. Kunstler is also a leading supporter of the movement known as "New Urbanism."

To learn more about James, you can visit http://kunstler.com