The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
by By Kunstler, James Howard
Category: Political Science , Public Policy , Environmental Policy

The world is about to leave the relatively happy era of abundant cheap oil and enter into a long emergency in which peaking oil production will interact with other looming environmental and economic difficulties to effectively bring an end to civilization as currently constituted, argues Kunstler (a former editor at Rolling Stone). After describing the likely depletion of oil production in the very near future, he considers how it will interact with oil-driven geopolitics and attempts to burst any bubbles about the possibility of switching the economy to alternative fuels. He then considers looming environmental issues of climate change, epidemic disease, water scarcity, and habitat destruction, as well as the "entropic mess that our economy has become," as part and parcel of the story of the development of oil-based industrialism and its coming end. After describing the chilling political, social, and economic consequences of the end of oil-based industrialism, he considers how Americans should react to the coming disaster, arguing that life will have to become more intensely local, that the economy will have to be structured around food production, that land will have to be reallocated in terms of purpose and ownership (involving the dismantling of suburbia), and people may have to cope with the regional breakup of the United States. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)