91+ James Howard Kunstler Quotes On Education, Education James Howard Kunstler And Urban

James Howard Kunstler was an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He was best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, which focused on the issues of urban development and urban design, and the challenges of peak oil and climate change. Kunstler was an advocate of New Urbanism and smart growth, and was a frequent lecturer on the topic of creating more livable cities and towns. Following is our collection on famous quotes by James Howard Kunstler on education, leadership, education james howard kunstler.

Top 10 James Howard Kunstler Quotes

1. A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
2. The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
3. Americans threw away their communities in order to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying.
4. Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.
5. The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.
6. Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression.
7. At the heart of our misunderstanding and infantile behavior is the wish for a miracle cure.
8. Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.
9. For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.
10. I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.

James Howard Kunstler Short Quotes

• Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
• America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.
• Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.
• The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
• I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.
• Societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
• Anything goes and nothing matters.
• I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
• It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
• Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

James Howard Kunstler Famous Quotes And Sayings

On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. — James Howard Kunstler

I was not a hard-liner against nuclear, because I viewed that as perhaps the only way we might keep the lights on another 25 years. But lately I am on board with Nicole Foss's argument that we will not have the capital or even the social cohesion to build anymore nuke plants. — James Howard Kunstler

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. — James Howard Kunstler

I believe we are deluded about alternative energy. The key is, whatever we do, we're going to have to do on a very modest scale. It's all about scale. We're not going to build giant wind farms with Godzilla-sized turbines all over the place. That's a fantasy. — James Howard Kunstler

We could do some household and neighborhood or town wind energy. But even this will run up eventually against the problem of needing an underlying fossil fuel economy to fabricate the hardware. Same with photovoltaic (solar) energy. We're going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us. — James Howard Kunstler

The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease. — James Howard Kunstler

Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel. — James Howard Kunstler

Government at all levels in the USA right now is engaged in a quixotic campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We're determined to run WalMart, Disney World, the Interstate Highways, suburbia, and an imperial military by other means than oil. We'll squander a lot of dwindling resources in the process. — James Howard Kunstler

We are in for a fiesta of default, repossession, and distress selling of suburban property, much of which will lose its presumed usefulness and monetary value in an energy-scarce economy. — James Howard Kunstler

In many places, the zoning prohibits the mixing of retail and residential. This stupidity has been accompanied by stupidities in municipal policy, such as disallowing accessory apartments - under the theory that renters are incapable of behaving decently. — James Howard Kunstler

The "Green" community, the enviro people, are preoccupied with running all the cars differently. Our techno-grandiosity has us gibbering about high-speed rail - which we don't have the capital for anymore - but nobody is interested in repairing the existing rail system, which would be far less costly and hugely beneficial for us. In short, we are acting cluelessly. And life is tragic. The clueless usually suffer. — James Howard Kunstler

I generally avoid over-population arguments. But there's no question we're in population overshoot. The catch is we're not going to do anything about it. There will be no policy. The usual suspects: starvation, war, disease, will drive the population down. There's little more to say about that really, and it's certainly an unappetizing discussion, but it's probably the truth. In any case, we're in overshoot and we face vast resource scarcities. — James Howard Kunstler

Anyone who studies the energy predicament understands its connection with the operations of capital - and by this I do not mean capitalism as an ideology, I mean the behavior of acquired wealth and its deployment for productive purpose. (A lot of educated idiots don't understand this, and we waste a lot of time blathering about capitalism.) — James Howard Kunstler

The Long Emergency will be chiefly characterized as a "time out" from technology. It could plunge us into a dark age of superstition. My guess is that we will lose a lot of knowledge and skill. But I also believe the human race desperately needs this "time out." — James Howard Kunstler

When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking. — James Howard Kunstler

Peak oil is already upon us. It is destroying our banking system, that is, our system for marshalling capital, and that is about to put us out of business-as-usual. So, we have to carry on with business-not-so-usual. This could mean anything from your children finding careers in farming (rather than show biz or plastic surgery) to reorganizing households differently to traveling from New York to Boston by boat. — James Howard Kunstler

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy. — James Howard Kunstler

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green. — James Howard Kunstler

The increment of new development will be the single building lot, if we are lucky, and most of the codes that are now enforced will be ignored because the redundancies they mandate will not be affordable. — James Howard Kunstler

I am a sur le motif painter, always in-the-field, with a French easel that folds up into a box, with backpack straps on it. Many of the sites I haunt are desolately beautiful. Few other people go there. I am gloriously alone, unmolested, and absorbed in attempting to see what I am looking at. — James Howard Kunstler

What we face is a comprehensive contraction of our activities, due to declining fossil fuel resources and other growing scarcities. Our failure is the failure to manage contraction. It requires a thoroughgoing reorganization of daily life. No political faction currently operating in the USA gets this. Hence, it is liable to be settled by a contest for dwindling resources and there are many ways in which this won't be pretty. — James Howard Kunstler

I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies. — James Howard Kunstler

The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us. — James Howard Kunstler

We're not going to reform our moronic land-use laws, which mandate suburban sprawl one way or another. They're simply going to be ignored when it becomes self-evident that we cannot build stuff that way anymore. — James Howard Kunstler

I believe our techno-zealotry will be moderated by sheer circumstance. We will do what reality compels us to do, not necessarily what our fantasies propose. — James Howard Kunstler

Please, please, stop referring to yourselves as "consumers." OK? Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you're using that word "consumer" in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion we're having. And we're going to continue being clueless going into this very difficult future that we face — James Howard Kunstler

The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today. — James Howard Kunstler

My beef with the alt-fuel people is not the renewable or alt-fuel ideas themselves. Sooner or later, there's no question we're going to have to rely on them. For me, it's an issue of scale. — James Howard Kunstler

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements. — James Howard Kunstler

The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there. — James Howard Kunstler

We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention. — James Howard Kunstler

I have a new theory of history, which is certain things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time. And suburbia seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a special time and place in history, with special dynamics. And now, we're going to have to live with the consequences of that. And the consequences will be tragic. — James Howard Kunstler

The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in. — James Howard Kunstler

Motion is a great tranquilizer. — James Howard Kunstler

We're living in a culture that doesn't believe in decorating buildings, or proportioning them properly. And they don't know how to do it anymore because they haven't been doing it for, you know, the better part of the century. — James Howard Kunstler

I do not believe we will get to Ray Kurzweil's proposed "singularity" in which human minds meld with machines to produce, in effect, synthetic human evolution. Our basic problems with maintaining the electric grid argue against that fantasy. — James Howard Kunstler

In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands. — James Howard Kunstler

People don't like railroad tracks near them? We'll see how they feel when the percentage of U.S. citizens who can afford to drive a car goes way down, as it will. — James Howard Kunstler

Consider how badly-built suburbia is. Many business buildings are not designed to outlast their tax depreciation periods, and the McHouses are made of particle board, vinyl siding, and stapled-on trim. A lot of suburbia will simply become the slums of the future. Most of the rest will be salvage or ruins. — James Howard Kunstler

Of course, the toxic bullshit of incessant advertising and show biz for nearly a century has stripped us of cognitive abilities for dealing with reality that used to be part of the normal equipment of adulthood - for instance, knowing the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen. We bamboozled ourselves with too much magic. — James Howard Kunstler

The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century. — James Howard Kunstler

I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core. — James Howard Kunstler

I think the deeper truth is that the Kyoto Protocols will not be followed by anyone really and that, in effect, nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse emissions. — James Howard Kunstler

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs. — James Howard Kunstler

It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there. — James Howard Kunstler

Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence. — James Howard Kunstler

In our current frame of mind, or paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, we like to think that marshalling government policy is the way to get things done. — James Howard Kunstler

No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it. — James Howard Kunstler

[Suburbia] represents, after all, the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We built it during our most affluent period of history, and in the decades to come we will be comparatively destitute collectively. In short, we will not have the resources to retrofit most of suburbia. — James Howard Kunstler

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last 50 years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading. — James Howard Kunstler

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. — James Howard Kunstler

We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house. — James Howard Kunstler

My own opinion is that the suburban project is over. We are done. We don't know it yet. For about five years or so the people who deliver all that crap - developers, realtors, various money people - have kicked back waiting for the system to get going again, to resume all their accustomed behavior. They wait in vain. They just haven't figured out that we face a new disposition of things. — James Howard Kunstler

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it. — James Howard Kunstler

Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it. — James Howard Kunstler

In my view, suburbia in general has very poor prospects. I think it will only become devalued and probably more dangerous. It's chief characteristic was that it represented a living arrangement with no future - and that future is now here. — James Howard Kunstler

We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes. — James Howard Kunstler

The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things — James Howard Kunstler

There is not going to be a "hydrogen economy," and no combination of alternative energy systems or fuels will allow us to continue the suburban pattern. It's finished. We will, however, desperately need to grow more of our food closer to home, and so the preservation of agricultural hinterlands is of great importance. But don't expect the fiesta of suburban construction to continue more than a few more years. — James Howard Kunstler

I abhor the word "consumer." Consumers, unlike citizens, have no implicit duties, obligations, or responsibilities to the common good. It's a degrading term. The use of it degrades the public discussion. — James Howard Kunstler

We have to do commerce differently because the WalMart system of big box chain retail will soon die. This means rebuilding local main street economies (networks of local economic interdependency). — James Howard Kunstler

If the Internet exists at all in the future, it will be on a much-reduced scale from what we enjoy today, and all the activities of everyday life are not going to reside on it. — James Howard Kunstler

It is true that we need a consensus to go forward with restoring passenger rail in America, and often a consensus is formed by political action, via government. That is all true. But we have no such consensus, and no one in government or politics these days has the will or the force of personality or perhaps even the understanding of the situation to get on with job of forming a consensus supporting rail. — James Howard Kunstler

My skills are not of the highest caliber, but I know a thing or two, and I occasionally produce a painting that contains passages of truth and beauty. — James Howard Kunstler

The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship. — James Howard Kunstler

Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic. — James Howard Kunstler

The living arrangements American now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually. — James Howard Kunstler

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. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending. — James Howard Kunstler

I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend. — James Howard Kunstler

Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs. — James Howard Kunstler

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction. — James Howard Kunstler

Life Lessons by James Howard Kunstler

1. James Howard Kunstler encourages us to live with intention and purpose, and to be mindful of our impact on the environment and our communities.
2. He believes that we should strive to create a more sustainable and equitable world, and to take responsibility for our own actions.
3. He also encourages us to think critically about the consequences of our decisions and to strive for a more meaningful and fulfilling life.