Even in the sprawling exurban cities of Dallas and Houston, places that Kunstler had come to despise for their collective cluelessness about the future, he had developed a following of people who embraced his view that the world was about to become one fantastically miserable place to live.īut what exactly would that world look like? How would we survive without microwaveable chicken fingers, Sub-Zero refrigerators, flat-screen TVs, and taxpayer-funded law and order? Which brings us back to World Made by Hand. When we met, Kunstler was traveling the country on a sort of Eve of Destruction book tour. Even if we weren’t at the “peak,” Kunstler argues, the global oil infrastructure is so fragile, and the globe so volatile, that any series of ill-timed catastrophes would be enough to send the world spiraling into chaos.

So say sayonara to the suburbs and New Zealand ski vacations and all the big-dollar jobs that come along with an oil-fueled economy. In the geopolitical trade they call it “peak oil.” The oil that’s left will be stretched thin by ever-increasing demand and industrial, political, and military competition on a global scale. In it, Kunstler lays out a journalistic argument that the world is running out of cheap oil and that we will soon surpass the 50 percent mark of extractable oil. I first met Jim Kunstler in the fall of 2005, shortly after the publication of his best-selling nonfiction book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. It’s anti–sci-fi, set maybe ten to twenty years out. This isn’t a sci-fi view into a future one hundred or fifty years away. Such is the fictionalized world envisioned by James Howard Kunstler in his new book, World Made by Hand. It’s as round and as large as it’s ever been. The globe is no longer flat (sorry, Tom Friedman!). The federal government has retreated to Minnesota, of all places (because who would attack them up there?), and with resources limited, race wars have erupted across the South. The Chinese have reportedly landed a man on the moon, but that’s probably more legend than fact in these paranoid times. Oil, or access to what’s left of it anyway, is as good as gone. A flu pandemic has wiped out a good third of the population, maybe more. That puts the global economy into a smoking tailspin. ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS have blown up Los Angeles and DC.

World made by hand