Episode 61: Architecture & Geopolitics with Author and Communitarian Jim Kunstler
Jim Kunstler’s Substack is a must read for me each week. He synthesizes the current events of the week through his wry and irreverent sense of humor. It’s rare a that journalist can tell you the facts and make you laugh at the same time.
Jim was born in New York City in 1948 and spent most of his childhood there. He has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers including Rolling Stone Magazine and my favorite alt magazine of in the 80’s, the Boston Phoenix. In 1975, he started as a full-time author, writing 9 fiction and non-fiction books about politics, culture, and architecture.
His 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. In his elegant and hilarious prose, he describes our evolution from Pilgrim settlements to the modern suburb in all its ghastliness.
Twenty-one years ago, in his 2005 book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, it seems like he was describing a future where the American people sleepwalk into a future of hardship and turbulence where we enter the long arc of economic, political and social decline sooner than we think. A future where Globalism withers and Life become profoundly local. I kind of feel like we are kindred spirits in the Locally Grown movement.
In his 2009 speculative fiction novel, The World Made by Hand, he describes what America might look like in a world of de-globalization and de-industrialization after the kind of social and economic catastrophe he writes about earlier.
His latest fiction work released last year, "Look, I'm Gone", tells the story of a middle school boy living in New York who is sent to a NH boarding school and experiences his adventures amidst the tumult of the JFK assassination.
Jim has also lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the American Institute of Architects , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He is also an accomplished artist, painting impressionistic landscapes and village scenes around his bucolic home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. All of his books, and artwork are for sale on Amazon and on his website at www.kunstler.com.
Jim Kunstler is quite the Renaissance man, and we are stoked to have him on the Locally Grown Podcast.
