World Made by Hand (Kunstler)

Author Bio
• Birth—1948 
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York, Brockport 
• Currently—lives in Saratoga Springs, New York

Kunstler was born in New York City to Jewish parents, who divorced when he was eight. His father was a middleman in the diamond trade. Kunstler spent most of his childhood with his mother and stepfather, a publicist for Broadway shows. While spending summers at a boys' camp in New Hampshire, he became acquainted with the small town ethos that would later permeate many of his works. In 1966 he graduated from New York City's High School of Music & Art, and then attended the State University of New York at Brockport where he majored in Theater.

After college Kunstler worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone. In 1975, he began writing books and lecturing full-time. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and was formerly married to the children's author Jennifer Armstrong.

Described as a Jeremiah by the Washington Post, Kunstler is critic of suburbia and urban development trends throughout the United States, and is a proponent of the New Urbanism movement. According to Scott Carlson, reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kunstler's books on the subject have become "standard reading in architecture and urban planning courses".

Non-fiction books
Since the mid-90s, he has written four non-fiction books about suburban development and diminishing global oil supplies. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, his first work on the subject, The Geography of Nowhere, discussed the effects of "cartoon architecture, junked cities, and a ravaged countryside", as he put it. He describes America as a poorly planned and "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."

In a 2001 op-ed for Planetizen.com, he wrote that in the wake of 9/11 the "age of skyscrapers is at an end", that no new megatowers would be built, and that existing tall buildings are destined to be dismantled. In his books that followed, such as Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind, and The Long Emergency (2005), he pushed hard on taboo topics like a post-oil America. He was featured in the "peak oil" documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet, as well as the Canadian documentary Radiant City (2006). In his recent science fiction novel World Made by Hand (2008), he describes a future more dependent on localized production and agriculture, and less reliant on imports.

In his writings and lectures, he makes a strong case that there is no other alternative energy source on the horizon that can replace relatively cheap oil. He therefore envisions a "low energy" world that will be radically different from today's. This has contributed to his becoming an outspoken advocate for one of his solutions, a more energy-efficient rail system, and writes "we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system if we expect to remain a united country."

What people say...
Charles Bensinger, co-founder of Renewable Energy Partners of New Mexico, describes Kunstler's views as "fashionably fear-mongering" and uninformed regarding the potential of renewable energy, biofuels, energy efficiency and smart-growth policies to eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Contrarily, Paul Salopek of the Chicago Tribune finds that, "Kunstler has plotted energy starvation to its logical extremes" and points to the US Department of Energy Hirsch report as drawing similar conclusions while David Ehrenfeld writing for American Scientist sees Kunstler delivering a "powerful integration of science, technology, economics, finance, international politics and social change" with a "lengthy discussion of the alternatives to cheap oil."

In May 2008 oil reached $132 a barrel, lending credence to Kunstler's warnings about high energy prices. Kunstler commented on the price surge, stating...

I'm not cheerleading for doom, you understand... merely asserting that we have a problem in the USA. Our behavior and our lifestyle are not consistent with reality. The markets are registering this for the moment.

Kunstler, who has no formal training in the fields in which he prognosticates, made similar dire predictions for Y2K as he makes for peak oil. Kunstler responds to this criticism by saying that a Y2K catastrophe was averted by the hundreds of billions of dollars that were spent fixing the problem, a lot of it in secret, he claims.

Kunstler has made several failed predictions regarding U.S. stock markets. In June 2005 and again in early 2006, Kunstler predicted that the Dow would crash to 4,000 by the end of the year. The Dow in fact reached a new peak of approximately 12,500 by the end of 2006. In his predictions for 2007, Kunstler admitted his mistake, ascribing the Dow's climb to "inertia combined with sheer luck".

The Albany Times Union reviewed World Made by Hand, opening with, "James Howard Kunstler is fiddling his way to the apocalypse, one jig at a time." The reviewer calls it "a grim scenario" with "an upside" or two.

In a critique of James Howard Kunstler's weekly audio podcast, the Columbia Journalism Review called the KunstlerCast "a weekly podcast that offers some of the smartest, most honest urban commentary around—online or off."

Kunstler has faced virulent criticism for his pro-Israeli stance in the debate over the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. (From Wikipedia.)