Duncan Crary: For the remainder of the program, we are going to hear from James Howard Kuntsler, one of the leading critics in the world of suburban sprawl. James Howard Kuntsler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind, Home From Nowhere and most recently, The Long Emergency.
Well humanists often speak about their views on religion, philosophy, separation of church and state and science. One of the topics that doesn't often make the discussion is "the human habitat." And it's a rather important part of humanism because that is where we humans live, in a world that we make for ourselves. And according to Kunstler, we've made a real mess of it.
Jes Constantine: Duncan spoke with Mr. Kunstler in his habitat near Saratoga Springs last week.
Duncan Crary: James Howard Kunstler, something horrible has happened to the human habitat over the past 60 years.
James Howard Kunstler: I'll say.
Duncan Crary: [laughs] I wonder if we could begin this discussion by having you read a brief passage from the introduction to your 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere?
James Howard Kunstler: I'd be pleased to Duncan, thank you very much.
James Howard Kunstler (reading): Thirty years ago, Lewis Mumford said of post-World War II development, "the end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set." The whole wicked, sprawling megalapolitan mess, he gloomily predicted, would completely demoralize mankind and lead to nuclear holocaust.
It hasn't come to that, but what Mumford deplored was just the beginning of a process that, instead of blowing up the world, has nearly wreaked the human habitat in America. Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new; we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable every year. For many, the word development itself has become a dirty word.
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading -- the jive plastic computer track home wastelands, the Potemkin shopping village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the "gourmet mansardic" junk-food joints, the Orwellian office "parks" featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chaingang guards, the particle board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call "growth."
The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastations of rain forests, and other world-wide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.
I had a hunch that many other people find their surroundings as distressing as I do my own, yet I sense too that they lack the vocabulary to understand what's wrong with the places they ought to know best. That is why I wrote this book.
Duncan Crary: And then I marked another passage for you. A little bit later on in the intro if you could read that please.
James Howard Kunstler (reading): I suppose that my experience in suburb, city, and town life left me biased in favor of town life -- at least, insofar as what America had to offer in my time. That bias is probably apparent in the chapters ahead. But all places in America suffer terribly from the way we chose to arrange things in our postwar world. Cities, towns, and countryside were ravaged equally, as were the lesser orders of things within them -- neighborhoods, buildings, streets, farms -- and there is scant refuge from the disorders that ensued.
The process of destruction that is the subject of this book is so poorly understood that there are few words to even describe it. Suburbia. Sprawl. Overdevelopment. Conurbation (Mumford's term). Megalopis. A professor at Penn State dubbed it the "galactic metropolis." It is where most American children grow up. It is where most economic activity takes place. Indeed, I will make the argument that this process of destruction, and the realm that it spawned, largely became our economy. Much of it occupies what was until recently, rural land -- destroying, incidentally, such age-old social arrangements as the distinction between city life and country life. To me, it's a landscape of scary places, the geography of nowhere, that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat. This book is an attempt to discover how and why it happened and what we might do about it.
Duncan Crary: James Howard Kunstler, thank you so much for reading that.
James Howard Kunstler: You're welcome.
Duncan Crary: You are probably the loudest critic of suburban sprawl.
James Howard Kunstler: I'll try to whisper from now on.
Duncan Crary: [laughs] But I've heard you speak many times and you have visual images that are very important to your talk. I know that we're on the radio here now, but so much of what you say about suburban sprawl and horrible architecture is very funny.
[laughs]
You have things -- like you refer to buildings as "Darth Vader's Helmet" or "The Death Star", and of course, with the picture on the screen the audience goes wild.
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, it's sort of a comedy act. It's sort of involved in a comedy act. But look, I was a theater student in college. That was my major, believe it or not. And I was exposed to Samuel Beckett at a tender age. And Samuel Beckett put it very well. He said, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness."
So these environments cause us so much unhappiness, so much distress, that they're a source of comedy.
When you see a Laurel & Hardy comedy from the 1920s -- these two morons hitting each other with two by fours and dropping pianos on each other -- or you know, even a Tweety Bird cartoon, what we're seeing is people hurting each other, but we laugh.
Duncan Crary: [laughs]
James Howard Kunstler: Getting hit by a two by four, in reality, is not a pleasant thing. In fact, it can kill you. But when you see it on stage in a film or something, it becomes funny because we identify with the pain of it.
So the pain of our everyday environments in America is so extreme. They're so bad. They suck so egregiously that all that's left, finally, is humor.
Duncan Crary: Yeah. What are some of your favorite one liners you've come up with? I know you were talking about how WalMart and stores like WalMart alway display a patriotic totem to ward off all criticism which would be why we see so many flags--
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, the reason that we see flags flying over the Denny's restaurants is not because they really give a damn about the war in whatever country we're in at the moment. But it's so -- it allows them to put up crappy buildings that can't be criticized.
So the flag is a totem warding off criticism.
Duncan Crary: [laughs]
James Howard Kunstler: And that's why we see so many of them, especially in front of the corporate headquarters. They also have the little ensemble of the three flags: the state flag, the town flag, and at center, the U.S. flag.
Duncan Crary: You talked about how different buildings -- like how you can't see the WalMart from the Target (next door) because of the curvature of the Earth.
[laughs]
James Howard Kunstler: Yes, well, you just said it for me. Right. Because the streets and then the parking lots -- the scale is so huge that you end up feeling like you're in a surrealist painting that you can't find the horizon really, you know? You're sort of lost in space out there.
And to be lost in space is really extremely distressing. And one of the reasons that the whole success of urban design depends on defining space well is that people don't like to be lost in space. They like to know where they are. They like to know where things begin and end, you know?
Duncan Crary: I heard you giving your "TED talk." You had a picture of a street with two juniper shrubs or whatever in a bark mulch bed. And you described one as the mother ship and then R2D2 and C3PO.
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, there were three of them. It was a big juniper shrub and two little junior ones. And yeah, they were exploring the planet to see if they could colonize it. They were doing a chemical analysis of the bark mulch to see if they could live there.
Duncan Crary: [laughing]
James Howard Kunstler: But that was a comment on the idiocy of our landscaping design, which tends to be used as a nature BandAid to mitigate the failures of our architecture. Because our buildings suck so badly.
You know, we think that if we stick a little bark mulch bed with juniper shrubs in front of them, that it makes it OK. But that gets back once again to this idea, which I think is really crucial to understanding this, that we have no confidence in our ability to create urban places, and so nature is always the default setting for the cure.
And so where this stuff is concerned, this is why you see so many stupid landscaping fantasias around American cities and suburbs: because our buildings our so bad, we're constantly trying to hide them behind beds of shrubs and crabapple trees and all that crap.
And that's what we've been doing. We've had this idea that if you've got a wounded, or maimed, or mutilated city, the cure is nature. And it usually is delivered in the form of a nature BandAid, you know, a planting bed full of stuff.
What you're basically seeing is also a very deep typological confusion over what is inherently urban and what is rural. Between what is in the town, and what is in the country, and what belongs where. Typically, what this involves is people trying to "ruralize" the city.
Duncan Crary: Mmhmm.
James Howard Kunstler: If your city is bad, you try to cure it by bringing the country into the city. And what we've demonstrated in about fifty years of doing this is that it's no cure at all, in fact, it only makes things worse. But it points out our complete loss of understanding of how these things work, especially typologically. The urban things belong in the urban places, and the rural things belong in the rural places.
One of the things about the word "open space", I tell lecture audiences all the time: "Delete that from your vocabulary. Do not ask for 'open space'; do not ask for 'green space'," because they are abstractions, and if you ask for it, an abstraction will be delivered in the form of a juniper shrub bed full of bark mulch.
Or you'll get -- what you get frequently is a cartoon of the local surrounding countryside. Like around here, we like to put up a cartoon of the Adirondack forest in the middle of the city, you know?
They did that in the middle of Glens Falls, in one of the most crucial real estate parcels in the absolute center of town, where they allowed this UFO Burger King to land about 14 years ago. And it was obviously such a disgraceful building at the center of their town, and so inappropriate, that they then went out and spent about a million dollars on landscaping to conceal it. So what they succeeded in doing was putting a cartoon of the Adirondack wilderness around this inappropriate building in the very center of their town. And the last thing we need is a cartoon of the Adirondack forest in the middle of the town.
Duncan Crary: After reading your book and hearing you speak many times, the word "suburbia" has come to take on a new meaning for me. My interpretation of suburbia is to disconnect elements of the world and isolate them. And by doing so, it's like severing the head from the body of a human being. We've done this to our communities; we've also done this to the way we think. Am I far out there, or do you agree?
James Howard Kunstler: Oh no, it's -- one of the chief characteristics of suburbia is its disaggregation (and I'm not saying "desegregation", by the way disaggregation), the disassembly of the organs of civic life, and then the consequent isolation of them, so that all the people live in one place, all the shopping occurs in another place, the offices are in a third place, the industrial stuff is in the fourth place, and all of it can only be accessed by cars.
It's just not designed well. It's poorly designed. It's designed only to satisfy the traffic engineers, really.
One of the great tragedies of the beginning of the 21st century is that our economy became about little more than building suburban sprawl. And this is an enormous problem, because suburban sprawl is a living arrangement with no future.
Duncan Crary: Mmhmm.
James Howard Kunstler: You can state that categorically. And so, what our economy has become is an organism devoted to building more stuff that has no future.
Duncan Crary: A guest that I had on this show last month, Richard Dawkins, made a bold statement once about how raising a child, identifying your child with a religion is a form of child abuse. And I want to ask you: is raising your child in suburbia a form of child abuse? And maybe I should even say: is raising a teenager in suburbia a form of child abuse?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, it is a good point. I would hasten to say that I think we overdo the whole abuse angle a lot. We've become hysterical puritans in that sense in our time. But it may be a response to the fact that we are in fact inflicting a lot of damage on ourselves and find that we can't stop doing it.
Duncan Crary: Mmhmm.
James Howard Kunstler: I mean, we can't stop inhabiting our suburban environments, because we've invested so much of our national wealth in them. They're there! The vast housing tracts etcetera, they're there. And they are indeed very punishing for the development of children. Little children -- that is, children between five years old and let's say fourteen -- they require certain things growing up in a human habitat that they don't get in suburbia.
The main thing is that they need to develop this thing called their personal sovereignty. You know, the management of their own body in time and space, and that means learning to make their own decision about, like, how to get home from school in time for dinner, or how to get from school to the clarinet lesson and then back home again by their own devices, without the assistance of somebody else.
This is something that the average eight or nine year old can learn how to do successfully. I learned how to do it in Manhattan when I was a kid. No problem. I got on a Lexington Avenue bus, and I went up 20 blocks from my grammar school, went to my music lesson, and got home by myself.
But now, the way that our towns, our suburbs are designed, kids as old as 14 have to be ferried around, or 15 or 16 have to be ferried around by the family chauffeur. The upshot is they don't develop any ability to manage themselves in time and space! And that's a very fundamental thing.
But it gets worse than that. Kids between the age of about seven and fifteen also have to learn a whole set of social skills, like how to spend money, how to order food in a restaurant, how to behave in a public place. You know, the public places in suburbia are the leftover scraps: the berm between the WalMart and the K-Mart. And you know what kind of behavior goes on up there? Teenagers go up there, and they torture kitty cats and they smoke animal tranquilizers, and they make homemade tattoos. That's what happens there.
Kids who grow up in a civilized environment, like a town that has actually integral parts to it, where they can get from one place to another, they go down to the coffee shop here in Saratoga -- they're allowed in there by the way, there's no restriction on being a kid, you can go in with your girlfriend if you're 15 years old or 16 and drink coffee. And you can't torture kitty cats and smoke crystal meth and do homemade tattoos in a coffee shop. Because if you do that, they throw you out, they ask you to leave.
So, kids experience that -- they're socialized. They begin to learn the social skills necessary to be adults: how to conduct themselves in public places, what not to do, and they successfully do this. In suburbia, they don't get that.
And so what you get is just incredible huge volumes of terrible behavior. And they're usually unsupervised. There are no adults around to regulate torturing the kittycats and stuff like that. If there were sensitive adults around, that wouldn't happen.
It ends up being, rather than an abusive environment, I would say, an environment that does not successfully prepare kids to be successful caring adults.
Duncan Crary: Well let me ask you to describe to us a healthy urban block.
James Howard Kunstler: A really successful town is made up of integral parts. You think of these as the organs of the larger organism of the city or the town. And these organs are the residential organs where the people live, the commercial organs where commerce and trade take place, manufacturing organs, the civic organs where we have our meeting halls, town halls, and the police station. The cultural organs are the museum and the school, etc.
So you have these organs of the city and they're deployed in an integral way so that things are connected seamlessly so that most people can get to these things easily without prosthetic assistance, namely the car. And in a way that makes it comfortable, and indeed, even beautiful -- that allows them to enjoy the journey from one organ to the other in a way that is psychologically rewarding.
And of course, anybody who's been to a European city understands this, you know? You go to Rome, you go to Florence, you go to Paris, you go to Munich, because they didn't throw their cities away the way we did. They didn't lose the integral nature of the true urban organism.
And so you go around these places and you're going from the place that you're living or staying, to the place where you're getting breakfast, coffee, or going to an office or museum or something. And the journey of going from point A to point B is very rewarding, you know?
You're seeing things that were created deliberately to be beautiful, to reward the human spirit. You're not encumbered by obstacles. You don't have to cross an eight-lane freeway, generally, to get from one to the other.
The main characteristic of a healthy urban organism is that it is scaled to the energy diet that is available to it. Now, unfortunately, much of the 20th century in America provided an energy diet that was really abnormal. Because that was the height of the cheep oil fiesta, the cheep natural gas fiesta, and it allowed this sort of hypertrophic growth, the kind of abnormal hypergrowth of our cities, and then the suburban asteroid belts that grew up around them.
And we created these urban organisms that were scaled to something that cannot be sustained. They outgrew any possible energy diet that they would probably be left with after the peak of the oil era and when we entered that ark of decline, which we're now entering.
[music]
Brendan Sheeran: This is Brendan Sheeran. I'm a director of the Humanist Association of Ireland and you're listening to Humanist Network News.
Duncan Crary: I'm your host, Duncan Crary.
Jes Constantine: And I'm your host, Jes Constantine.
We're listening to an interview with Duncan and James Howard Kunstler.
[music]
Duncan Crary: In your book Home From Nowhere, in the end you have a personal note about yourself and you mentioned that you're not religious. You weren't raised in a particularly religious household.
What word do you use to describe the interaction between humans and their habitat? Do you use a word like "spiritual wellbeing"? There's something intangible in the human essence that requires a certain bit of aesthetic appeal. Or what terms do you use?
James Howard Kunstler: I use a number of terms that I think explain, at least provide, a framework for understanding this. I think that we are to some extent hardwired neurologically to feel either good or bad depending on what's around us and that this tends to be universal in human beings. You know, there are variations. And some people feel claustrophobic when they're in spaces that are too defined. And some people feel agoraphobic when they're in places that are overly open.
But you know, I think the average person likes to feel secure within the boundaries of a coherent, comprehensible place. They like to know where things begin and end. They like to see the idea of order expressed in the rhythms and patterns of things in architecture. And that's why we have things like columns, and pilasters, and brackets, and all these architectural adornments and devices, because they are not all ornaments, some of them are structural things obviously.
I think that we need these things psychologically. And you could extend that of course to some kind of spiritual realm, because I'm not a pure determinist or anything. I may not be religious, but I do think that we have a spiritual dimension to us and there is such a thing as beauty. There is such a thing as the tension of opposites. There are the deep mysteries of eros, eroticism, and sex which are not limited to sex. Which actually extend into culture and inform a great deal of what comprises beauty for us.
In fact, there's a wonderful book called On Beauty by Elaine Scarry. She makes the interesting point, which very few people have noticed, that one of the great crimes of modernist architecture is that it removed anything feminine from architecture. All the curves, all the flowers, anything that we remotely associate with female sensuality, was deliberately left out.
Duncan Crary: Yeah.
James Howard Kunstler: And it's odd that even the women in our culture don't complain about that.
Duncan Crary: But that's why you wrote The Geography of Nowhere, you said -- To give people a vocabulary to complain about that.
James Howard Kunstler: Yes. So you know, I've been trying to do that. So that's what I did. You know, we'll get beyond this, not because I'm complaining about it, but because circumstances are now developing that are going to compel us to do things differently and we will. And it's going to change everything about how we live. And it's going to change our ethos, and our aesthetic, our value system, and our concept of who and where we are. We're going to be a very different people when we exit the cheap energy era.
Duncan Crary: I hear a lot of people talk about alternative fuels. I don't care about alternative fuels to the same degree, and I'll tell you why: because I don't want to live in a world where I have to drive my car everywhere. I want to live in a well-designed world where I can live near where I work and I can enjoy recreation opportunities near where I work. And I feel like if they came up with some magic fuel to power everyone's SUV, I'm still stuck in this dystopian "Geography of Nowhere."
So I want return to having you explain a little bit more about...
James Howard Kunstler: I want to talk to you about this question you've raised because it's a very important one.
Duncan Crary: OK, let's do that.
James Howard Kunstler: You know, unfortunately there's a tremendous body of fantasy that has now grown among the American public about how we're going to keep on running our cars at all costs by other means than gasoline. And virtually all of these things now are fantasies. They're really very unreal. I mean, you can do them as science projects on a small scale, but they don't scale up to 200 million vehicles. You can run X number of vehicles on ethanol, or biodiesel, or french fried potato oil that's been used and thrown out, but can you run the entire US automobile fleet on the interstate highway system, and WalMart and Walt Disney World? Forget it. It ain't going to happen.
Duncan Crary: You've mentioned one of the main problems is that we're going to have to grow way more crops than we do now to create things like that though.
James Howard Kunstler: The whole thing is just total fantasy, you know? I mean, it's basically all these alternative fuels, as far as liquid fuels for cars goes they're all net energy losers.
And also, the way you've defined the problem is actually another layer of it that's much more important which is: we're right back into the diminishing returns of technology. If we enabled ourselves to drive our cars for another hundred years we'd completely destroy North America, not to mention the rest of the planet.
So of course, this is self-evident. The thing that is, for me, the most painful is to travel among the environmental community, which I do a lot these days because I do a lot of college lectures and I go all around the country constantly. And I'm rubbing elbows constantly with real hightoned environmentalists. And to an individual they are absolutely preoccupied with finding some snazzy new way to run their cars.
And they come up to me and they tell me that they just got a Prius, you know? They want me to pin a brownie point -- give them a brownie point, or put a metal on them, and it drives me crazy. Because they don't seem to have any sense of consequence about what this actually leads to.
If they would put a fraction of their mental energy into thinking about walkable communities or into retrieving really good urban design, we would benefit a lot more. Or if they put a tenth of their energy into the real important project that we face as far as transportation is concerned, which is restoring the American passenger system at all levels. That's what we really need. That's what we need the environmental people to put their energy into. Not to spend all their time thinking about how we're going to run cars differently, the way Amery Lovins does at the Rocky Mountain Institute.
It has such farcical dimensions that it's almost beyond belief that this is what the intelligent minority of American people are preoccupied with.
Duncan Crary: Because I feel that environmentalists in American have also fallen into the plague of suburban thinking. They're isolating the environmental issues, not just...
James Howard Kunstler: Absolutely, these guys -- listen, to a person, these people want to live at the end of a 20 mile dirt road connected to their society by the umbilical cord of their car.
But this gets to another thing that is essential about understanding the problem of suburbia. The great promise of suburbia and one of the reasons that the environment community is suckered into it is that it promises to allow you to live an urban life in the rural setting.
You know, one of the things that this represents is the fact that we have absolutely no faith in our ability to create urban environments at all. So that the default setting for us now is that we have to live in a country or some cartoon version of it because our ability to create cities is so bad, our cities suck so badly, they're so unrewarding, they're so ugly, they're so poorly organized, they're so unintegrated, they're so psychologically defeating, they generate so much anxiety and depression that the default setting for the remedy for this is nature.
We don't even want to think about what a human construct could be that could be good. And so we put absolutely no effort into understanding how to do this. And that's one of the reasons that the environmental movement has been completely uninterested in urban design per se, because the human habitat doesn't interest them.
Duncan Crary: Right.
James Howard Kunstler: When I go around, one of the things that I notice that is also disturbing is that environmental community generally tends to view this thing they call the "environment" as having value only for recreation or scenery.
Duncan Crary: Right.
James Howard Kunstler: I mean they don't even value it for agricultural farm production. That says something about where we're at. And I hasten to add I'm hammering on the environmental communities here, but I'm a registered Democrat, you know? I'm not a neocon, I'm not a Republican, I'm not a conservative, I'm not a reactionary, but I think that the behavior and the ideology of the environmental community has been deeply out of sync with what we need to do in this country, which is to recreate a meaningful relationship between urban human habitats and a productive rural landscape, because we're going to have to produce our food differently in the future too.
Industrial agriculture in the country is going to fail along with all the other things that are dependant on cheap fossil fuel. I'm convinced that the disorders of the 21st century are going to return us to a lot of things that we used to do better, including designing better buildings and better towns.
Duncan Crary: Do you have any advice for our listeners as to what to do?
James Howard Kunstler: You bet. And the main thing is this: the same thing that I tell college audiences who universally say, "Can't you give me some hope?"
First of all, and I think I'm a very cheerful upbeat person. I'm not necessarily a rosy-eyed optimist, but you know, I'm a happy person and I believe that we're going to continue on.
You know, the kids complain that they want hope. And I'm not a hope dispenser to passive consumers of hope. But what I tell them is that the main thing that distinguishes, I think, a successful adult from a child is that an adult knows the difference between wishing for stuff and making it happen.
There's a whole long list of intelligent things that we can respond to this set of circumstances with. We need to be out there actively fixing our civilization, reforming the way we do our farming, our commerce, our schooling, and our trade. And building our cities and designing our homes and our buildings and all the things that are necessary to be part of a civilization. We're going to have to put a lot more thought and a more work into that.
And as we do that, I'm serenely convinced that we will become a much more hopeful people. In fact, if anything, all the marvels and technological miracles of the 100 years have only ended up producing a society which is profoundly unhappy, depressed, and anxiety ridden.
So we really have nowhere to go put up from here.
[start music]
Duncan Crary: James Howard Kunstler, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
James Howard Kunstler: It's been a pleasure, Duncan.
[music]
Jes Constantine: That was Duncan interviewing James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. His website is Kunstler.com.
So Duncan, that was a house interview. Can you tell us anything about Mr. Kunstler's house?
Duncan Crary: I can tell you that it's decorated with original artwork. Paintings of McDonald's, gas stations, and burned out abandoned cars.
Jes Constantine: Why am I not surprised?
Duncan Crary: I spoke with James Howard Kunstler on a number of topics including that one that didn't make it into the show, but I'll probably be posting some of those extra interviews on our website in the Web Extras section at HumanistStudies.org/Podcast.
Jes Constantine: Also on the page you can download episodes and read transcripts from previous shows.
To leave a listener comment, please call our toll free number 1-877-659-1515.
Duncan Crary: The use of our theme song, "I Ain't Afraid" was generously donated by Holly Near. You can learn more about her music at HollyNear.com.
I'm your host, Duncan Crary.
Jes Constantine: And I'm your host, Jess Constantine.
Duncan Crary: Thanks for listening.
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