Insidout: Interview with James Howard Kunstler

by Owen Lipstein / InsideOut Staff November/December 2008

James Howard Kunstler’s 10th novel, World Made By Hand (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), is a fictional follow-up to The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change and Other Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Grove/Atlantic, 2005). The frequent contributor to The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Atlantic Monthly sat down to talk with us about why we shouldn’t—necessarily—be afraid of the future.

InsideOut: Looking at the predictions you’ve been making recently, you must be feeling very smart.

James Howard Kunstler: Well, let’s put it this way. It’s gratifying not to be made a fool of by having made bad predictions. I actually have some experience with that, having written eight years ago that the Y2K problem should be taken seriously.

IO: Let’s talk about oil.

JHK: Well, there are really three things going on, and they can be stated pretty plainly. One is the fundamental peak-oil problem, which is really a matter of the demands permanently outstripping the supply.

The [second] one is what we call oil nationalism, which has changed the nature of the game quite a bit. In order to understand this, note that only about 7 percent of the world’s oil is now produced by what we call the old major oil companies—Exxon Mobil, Shell, etc., including the European ones. Most of the oil in the world now, over 90 percent, is coming from the national oil companies, like Saudi Aramco, Brazil’s Petrobras, Mexico’s Pemex, and the virtually state-directed companies in Russia. And they’re changing the way the oil markets function.

For one thing, Petrol favored customer contracts with other nations rather than putting a lot of their oil onto the futures market, which is an auction process. So, this is a big new thing, especially for a nation like the United States, which needs to get two-thirds of its oil from outside our own country. What that means is that an ever-growing percentage of the world’s oil pool is being taken off the auction market, and to some degree, but made less accessible to us.

Now, part and parcel with this is No. 3: the growing oil-export crisis. The nations that export oil to the likes of us, the importers, are virtually all, in one way or another, past their peak production and in a state of depletion. Their export rates are declining even more steeply than their depletion rates. And what that means is that we’re going to get into trouble with our oil supplies much sooner than we had anticipated—strictly on the basis of depletion alone.

IO: And how soon is that?

JHK: It’s a little hard to tell—because of the interruptions of the hurricanes—exactly how this is going to proceed, and how quickly. Because already there’s a substantial part of the country that’s suffering from gasoline shortages, even as we speak, and that’s the Southeast.

IO: What does all of this mean?

JHK: What [it] suggests is that when the net energy available to the industrial world decreases, there will be no more industrial growth, as we call it. And so, all of the paper that’s created and traded to represent the hopes and expectations for producing wealth—namely, stocks, bonds, and other tradable instruments—these things begin to lose their legitimacy. And I think that that was partly…behind the creation of all these substitute financial securities that have now caused such a problem: the whole alphabet soup of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, structured investment vehicles, and other sort-of-Frankenstein tradable paper that was created, in effect, to generate wealth from nothing. And because the reality of the world is that you really can’t get something for nothing, they all turned out to be fraudulent. And that is at the center of the crisis that we’re in today in the financial sector.

IO: Talk to us about what this signifies for small-town living.

JHK: One of the reasons I wrote my novel was to illustrate these points. There is, for example, a broad notion that as suburbia fails, people will all move back to the cities. And I think what we’re failing to take into account in this is that our great American metroplexes are not appropriately scaled for the energy diet of the future—and that they’re going to suffer disruptions every bit as severe as the suburbs will.

The successful places will tend to be the places that have meaningful relationship[s] with [their] agricultural surrounding[s], and this leads me to believe that we’re going to see the reactivation of a lot of small towns and small cities that have been deactivated for half a century. There are many of them in upstate New York, and many of these enjoy a favorable relationship with water transport and water power, which will be an additional advantage.

IO: For readers who have not yet read that novel, can you set
the tone?

JHK: Well, [World Made by Hand] is set in an unspecified, not-distant future in a small town north of Albany. As the story opens, the electricity is flickering out. Communications are pretty sparse. The people have heard that there was an election and that there’s a president named Harvey Albright in Minneapolis, but they don’t really know how he got elected. And they get very little news of the outside world. There are no newspapers anymore, the Internet is down, there’s a commercial boat trade [on] the Hudson River, but there’s been a great deal of banditry and gang activity on the waterfront that has made commerce difficult.

IO: In the book, people don’t make much of death. Why?

JHK: Well, a few things have happened. There’s mention of several signs of epidemics that have passed through the little town. One of them was an encephalitis episode. Another was something they call the Mexican flu. And the population has been reduced, substantially.

One of the characters at the center of the book is the town doctor, who no longer has any of the modern medicines that we’ve come to rely on, especially antibiotics and anesthetic, for pain relief or for doing any kind of surgery at all. He has to rely on opiates that the farmers grow for him. And so the mortality rate has gone up pretty high, and people can’t be rescued by the marvels of modern medicine.

IO: What about skills and occupations?

JHK: Well, there are no longer occupational niches for being, let’s say, a marketing director at The Gap. Or a greeter in a chain store. Or any of the other thousands and thousands of positions that are connected to the global industrial economy. People are thrown back upon skills [that] really have to be of use to their fellow man in a very practical, direct way.

So, you know, the people who are thriving, or at least getting by, are the local baker, the harness maker, the doctor…There are many successful farmers in the book, at least successful by the terms of the world that they’re in. They’re not starving; they’re taking care of their families and other people.

IO: Is there anything that cheers you up about the way things are headed lately?

JHK: Well, yeah, I think that there are a lot of things about contemporary life that are toxic, far beyond the securities that were created by Goldman Sachs and the rest of the boys. And I do think that if we’re forced to take a timeout from this technological rush that we’ve been caught up in, that it may have many benefits for us. And I view it as a timeout. I certainly don’t consider it the end of the world or an apocalypse.

And I’m a pretty cheerful person. I’m happy, I’m healthy. I’m independent. I’m not in debt. I’ve got a nice girlfriend. I get a lot of exercise. And so personally, I’m OK.

When I contemplate what is going on in the nation, it makes me a little queasy. [But] I’m very fortunate. I live in a corner of the country that is still more or less scaled to the conditions that are coming down at us. The two found inspiration and advice at food co-ops and farmers’ markets, in books and blogs, as well as at workshops in and around the Hudson Valley. They invited an herbalist over to point out what was already growing in abundance on the property: wild raspberries and blackberries, chickweed, motherwort, and English plantain. Then they planted a garden, some trees, and blueberry bushes. They dug two pits for composting, and welcomed red wiggler worms to their new homestead. J. took a beekeeping class, and now has two hives.


If the two of them can join the back-to-the-land movement, says J., anyone can. He works more than full time, sometimes 24 hours a day, days on end, as a wilderness guide, leading kids through challenge courses, and hiking and canoeing in the Adirondacks year-round. Lynn, a former journalist, is in her last year of nursing school at Ulster BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational Services, one of many in the state that provide shared services to participating public schools). They have a 12-year-old son, tenants, and an old house in need of updating and repair.


In other words, they have a very full life. In short, they’re exactly like you or me.


But now they have a worm composting pit, a manageable 4-by-8-foot garden, beehives, apple trees, berry bushes, and a vision for a self-sufficient future that is coming to fruition, in fits and starts, whenever and however they’re able to work it in. Lynn bakes her own bread. Makes her own juice. She wants chickens. And an orchard. She and J. are waiting for solar energy to become more affordable. They’d like to draw their water from the spring on their property. They’re interested in recycling their greywater, or wastewater. They’re starting from scratch. It’s been just a little more than a year, but they’re well on their way.


This year, the garlic was abundant—as were the blueberries, basil, cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes. The bees are thriving, the worms in the compost pit are thriving, and so are J. and Lynn. J. documents their progress on his blog, www.homesteadblogger.com/horseradishhill. His entries are erratic because of his work schedule, which becomes quite hectic in the summer when it coincides with prime gardening season.


So, the garden and the fields are a bit unruly, the apple trees didn’t do so well this year, and there were some setbacks with the potatoes. But this process is trial and error—a lesson they’re learning. And, as yet, they’re undeterred. They do what they can, when they can. And when they can’t, they don’t worry.


You can get a sense of the joy the two take in their new lifestyle with blog entries like this one: “The fireflies! All the wonderful fireflies! Our place is full of fireflies that spark all along the tree line and into the mostly wild fields. You can see they’re making a pattern, see the pulse pass along a line, even if their meaning is inarticulate to us.” They’ve stumbled into their dream, making it come true in an unlikely place, at a sometimes ungainly pace, but the results are inspiring.