A New York Interlude

There's something about New York City that inspires the credulous. At least, that's what it does to me.

The first time it happened was in the spring of 2006, during a business trip to the Big Apple. Rummaging in an airport bookstore for something to read on the outward leg of my journey, I came across James Kunstler's bestselling cautionary tale about Peak Oil titled The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. Curious and alarmed, I plucked the book from the rack, flipped it over to survey the promotional blurbs, and read how the author "graphically depicts the horrific punishments that lie ahead for Americans for more than a century of sinful consumption and sprawling communities, fueled by the profligate use of cheap oil and gas." Yikes! Then I thought "Oh come on, how bad could things be?" I handed the clerk fifteen dollars to find out.

Initially skeptical, within a few pages I was hooked. Part of it was the subject matter, which I knew something about, but a lot of it was Kunstler's cheeky writing style, which engagingly mixed fact and speculation into a sardonic and irresistible stew of lefty millennialism. As a conservationist, I was aware of various calamities stacking up on the horizon like a line of planes waiting to land, including climate change, water shortages, and species extinction. But Kunstler's book opened my eyes to the civilization-changing nature of inevitable oil depletion, as well as the interconnections of all our unsustainable activities, each grounded in our economy's messianic belief in unlimited growth on   a    finite  planet. It  all  flowed  into  what  he  called  the    Long