NEWSLETTER

	Part Two: The End of Oil James Howard Kunstler is an author and social theorist. That means he spends his days thinking about the way people live and work as a group, and his nights figuring out where that group is headed. He is the author of 13 books of fiction and nonfiction and he’s frequently asked to lecture at colleges that you’ll never get into, like Yale, MIT, and Columbia. About a month ago, we saw some of the local cool kids hanging out on the main road in Saratoga Springs, NY, where Kunstler lives. We asked them to listen to Kunstler talk about his latest book, The Long Emergency. It’s about when the world’s supply of oil runs out and we are living in a wasteland that makes Mad Max look like West Side Story.

James Howard Kunstler: All right, I’m going to try to explain some very serious, grown-up stuff. You see, the way that we live in America has become very, very heavily dependent on a lot of oil, and the world is facing total world oil depletion.

Kayla: What does that mean?

It means we are running out of oil, and we’re going to have to live very differently. We’re probably not going to be able to drive around in our cars like we do now. And we may have to go back to a kind of living in which people live closer to each other, and closer to the things they need, like stores. Now, shopping has been an important part of American life for the whole time you’ve been around, but that’s going to change drastically. Stores like Kmart, that depend on selling things that come from 12,000 miles away, will cease to exist. We’re going to have to do local business again.

Mike: Yeah, but we’ll just have local stores or something. We already have those anyway.

Actually it’s something that we haven’t done in this country for a long time. And it’s going to be very hard to learn how to do it again, because it doesn’t happen overnight. We’re going to have to learn how to farm again, we’re going to have to grow food close to home…

Kayla: I have a garden.

Not just gardening. A lot of the empty fields that you see around a place like this town are going to have to grow things. We’re going to have to get serious about using that land to grow food, because we’re not going to be able to move stuff 3,000 miles. We can’t move a Caesar salad 3,000 miles from California to Saratoga every time you want a Caesar salad. We’re going to have to get more serious about farming our own food, and doing it on a smaller scale with more human labor, fewer machines, less oil, and less artificial fertilizers. We may have to use animals to do some of the work instead of using tractors.

Robert: What, like bull carts?

We may have to use oxen and bulls and horses again, in a way that we haven’t done within the memory of anyone who’s now alive.

Robert: We’ll be like going to class on bull carts?

I wouldn’t stick my neck that far out, but I think we’re going to have real big problems with cars. One of the things that you may not realize, or know much about, is we used to have a really good railroad system in this country, and we’re going to have to return to that. We’re going to have to build the railroads up again. And another thing, I think that we’re going to see a big change in education and school. I have a feeling that high school, as we know it, is probably not going to continue very long into the future. For one thing, we’re going to have a lot of trouble running the schools that depend on those fleets of yellow school busses.

Kayla: Oh well. [laughing]

There’s another very big part of this package, and that’s the global climate situation. The ice caps are melting, the glaciers are melting, and we’re having extraordinary heat waves and floods and hurricanes. These climate problems are going to create additional problems for our farms. They will add another layer of difficulty.

Robert: So we’ll just get stuff from the government. Like hurricane relief.

It is probably not going to be like that. There will be a lot of trouble between different countries and different regions and different people. They will probably all be competing for scarce energy and scarce oil and scarce resources.

Mike: No way.

Yes way. In fact, we’re already seeing it. Some of you may know that there’s a lot of trouble in the world right now. The American army is fighting in the Middle East and Iraq, and there’s a war now between Israel and the Hezbollah in Lebanon. There is a lot of friction between the nations that have a lot of oil and the nations that have a lot of money to buy oil. There is even friction with other nations who are sitting on the sidelines. We’re all having different kinds of trouble.

Mike: Well, what if they make cars that just run off electricity? Or air? Hot air, I mean.

You can make cars run on all kinds of things. You can make them run on biodiesel or alcohol or even french-fried potato oil. The question is: Can you make 200 million cars run on all those things, or 50 million. Or even 25. And the answer to that is: Probably not.

Jennie: So what are we going to do?

You mean what kind of a world are you going to grow up in? I think it is going to be a very different one from the one of your childhood. It is going to be a more serious world. There will be a period of hardship because as we have access to less and less energy to run all of the stuff that we need to run, a lot of jobs are going to vanish.

Robert: What will we do for money?

Well, there may be some jobs that are real popular now that won’t be around in the future, like rock star or movie actor—or book author.

Mike: Where’d you get the name of your book?

I called my book The Long Emergency because I think that’s the kind of world that we’re going to be living in. The whole world is going to be in a kind of emergency that doesn’t quite end. It will keep on going and going and going.

Kayla: What do you mean?

I mean it will be a world where there are a lot of problems all the time. You’ll have to be resourceful and resilient and able to meet those challenges.

Jennie: Is there any hope?

Well, in this world you’ll have to generate hope yourself. And the way you’ll do it is by becoming a capable young woman. All of you will have to become capable young people who are confident about dealing with the problems that reality sends to you. That will require you to be serious people. Life is going to be harder for you than it has been for quite a few generations before you. And you may even have to be heroic in the way that you greet this new reality that we’re going to be living in. And I’ll be there with you for a while, and I’m going to write about it some more. So there you have it. I’ll see you guys around.


TO BE CONTINUED
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