James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is an American writer, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.

In 1966, Kunstler graduated from New York City's High School of Music & Art, and 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.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Kunstler worked "a lot of odd jobs, from orderly in the psychiatric wing of the hospital, to digging holes for percolation tests in housing subdivisions".

In 1975, he began writing books and lecturing full-time.

Kunstler's blog states that he has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, and the University of Virginia, has appeared before professional organizations such as the AIA, the APA, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Kunstler lectured on topics related to suburbia, urban development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil predicament", and a resultant change in the "American Way of Life."

He lectured at the TED Conference, the American Institute of Architects, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the International Council of Shopping Centers, the National Association of Science and Technology, as well as at numerous colleges and universities, including Yale, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, University of Illinois, DePaul, Texas A & M, the USMA, and Rutgers University.

As a journalist, Kunstler wrote articles for The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and its op-ed page where he covered environmental and economic issues.

Kunstler is also a supporter of the movement known as New Urbanism.

Over the course of the first 14 years of his writing career (1979–1993), Kunstler wrote seven novels.

Since the mid-1990s, 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".

The book was described as a jeremiad by The Washington Post.

Kunstler is critical 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".

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."

He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development, The Long Emergency (2005), and Too Much Magic (2012).

In The Long Emergency he imagines peak oil and oil depletion resulting in the end of industrialized society, forcing Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or semi-agrarian) communities.

In World Made by Hand he branches into a speculative fiction depiction of this future world.

Kunstler was born in New York City to Jewish parents, who divorced when he was eight.

His family then moved to the suburbs on Long Island.

His biological 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 a small town ethos that would later permeate many of his works.

He lives in Greenwich, a town in Washington County, New York.

In a 2001 op-ed for Planetizen, 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.

His career peaked with the popularising of the concept of peak oil, for which he was a prominent spokesman, such as in the 2004 documentary The End of Suburbia.

His 2005 book The Long Emergency became an oft-cited reference for the predicted imminent collapse of human civilisation.

However, oil supplies increased due to fracking, and the collapse did not happen during the timeframe Kunstler predicted.

Kunstler is a harsh critic of both the Republican Party, describing them as "a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good."

and also the Democratic Party and their "underhanded attempts" to get rid of Donald Trump, a man whom Kunstler sees as showing "strength".

He was also a promoter of the concept of a so-called "deep state" working to overthrow and thwart Trump.

He endorsed Trump for re-election and declared that he intended to do "everything he can to prevent the Democrats from winning the election."

In an interview with American Conservative, Kunstler attacked gay marriage, describing it as "cultural mischief" that would further damage "a struggling institution".

He is a subscriber to the conspiracy theory that the 2020 United States presidential election was fraudulent, describing it as a "fraud-inflected election" on his website, and he suggests that the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was the work of left-wing groups.

In recent times, Kunstler has had financial problems, and was described as "seethingly angry" about his writing income falling to only a few thousand dollars annually because of "the tidal wave of free content on the web".

In addition, his "lucrative college speaking fees" have disappeared, which he blames on "the rising hysteria on campus against threatening ideas".

Kunstler now uses Patreon to crowdfund his writing.

In an interview with Doug Casey published on October 13, 2021, Kunstler called the COVID-19 pandemic a "scam", and on October 11 he published the debunked vaccine conspiracy theory that the vaccine would kill people "steadily over the weeks and months" and went on to name hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as "effective" treatments.