Following on from the great show with Sally Ludwig from Transition Guelph, no discussion of transition or sustainability can be complete without mention of formidable social commentator James Howard Kunstler.
James is a renowned author and speaker who has written a great deal about the peak oil crisis and the serious impact it will have on our society and way of life.
His best known works are The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. Both are an essential read for anyone concerned about our current predicament.
You should also try and catch James in Gregory Greene’s documentaries, The End Of Suburbia and Escape From Suburbia. Again, they are essential viewing to understand how we got in this mess and what we need to do to get out of it.
James Howard Kunstler said that he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.”
His most recent non-fiction work, The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, focused on the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other “converging catastrophes of the 21st Century.”
James was in Guelph for the Guelph Civic League Amazing Possibilities conference in May 2006. His presentation has to be one of the best I have ever heard.
If ever there was the time when we need to heed the words of James Howard Kunstler it is now.
We are already very late in starting to deal with these issues… we will not do future generations any favours to wait any longer.
Listen to the presentation:
