The Brown & White

The kind of society Americans know and support cannot continue, said James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency", a book about the issues future generations will face regarding the oil crisis, global warming and living in suburbia. Kunstler spoke on Tuesday in Lewis Lab.

America does not know how to pay back its debt, and our resources are approaching their scarcity limits, he said.

Kunstler also spoke about the future of America and what must happen for the country to be able to thrive in the future.

He focused on the depletion of oil. The United States uses one billion barrels of oil every two weeks, almost all of which is imported from other nations, he said. Oil will become a source for political turmoil, he said.

He said new, usable oil fields have not been discovered, so he anticipates a companion crisis in oil nationalism, meaning that oil-producing nations will learn to divide and distribute oil differently. There are no apparent combinations of alternative fuels that will allow America to keep running the way it is running, according to Kunstler. America needs to create more urban and rural towns.

Urban and rural towns would replace what Kunstler called "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," also known as suburban developments.

America cannot afford to build any more suburban developments, Kunstler said.

With the reintroduction of towns, Kunstler believes retail will have to be more locally based. Agriculture will be the focus of American grievance, Kunstler noted, and retail will no longer be run by Wal-Mart and other big stores.

Kunstler believes America will have nothing if production is not revived in some way.

"We don't need another souvenir spoon shop in America," he said.

Kunstler also said we need to get away from cars as the main mode of transportation, and stop looking for "groovy" ways to run them.

Instead, Kunstler believes it is tremendously important to restore the passenger railway in America.

Students said it is difficult to picture the America that Kunstler believes is impending.

"I just can't imagine living the way he described," Jenny Jones, '12, said. "There's no way people are going to start traveling more in trains instead of cars."

Kunstler sees no use for skyscrapers in the future. Places such as Las Vegas will eventually be home to no one but tarantulas, he said.

In the future, there will no longer be centralized school districts, or as Kunstler calls them, "pupil sheds." Homeschooling will replace public schools, he noted.

"It sounds like there is going to be so much that goes to waste," Jess Szafoni '12, said. "What are we supposed to do with everything that's left over?"

Some were confused on what life will be like if Kunstler's predictions occur.

"Everyone wants to have some hope and it's very important for you to understand, you are the generators of hope," Kunstler said. It makes a lot of people anxious or depressed to consider what is happening to our country, he said.

"This isn't a sitcom . . . this is a parachute jump that's not going to come to a nice easy stop when things are over."

South Mountain College and the Visiting Lecturers Committee sponsored Kunstler's visit.