Kunstler Nightmare

I first read James Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" as a junior in college for a social geography class I took. It changed my view of the world and gave me an understanding of our freakish prediliction for creating a future with no future.

After I read it I loaned it out whenever I could, as it actually is a book that should be read by every American -- though it is ghoulishly pessimistic. I e-mailed Kunstler a few years ago to thank him for making me see things that I hadn't bothered to look at before -- he chided me for loaning out my book instead of making my friends buy it...

But he also thanked me for my kind words and then proceeded to say we haven't even seen the worst of what our Geography of Nowhere was going to locate us -- that was way back in 1999.

Apparently, Kunstler is ready to unveil his own Book of Revelation upon us in May, when he releases "The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century."

I read an excerpt from it tonight in my new Rolling Stone issue and the passage is a big "told you so" to those of us that got the preface over a decade earlier.

I'm not sure that I want to buy and read the new book, as I have a pretty good inkling it paints a picture of the future that is so dreary as to be nearly unbelievable. It might be a bad trip I'm not willing to take -- but I probably hop the freight anyhow...