Sarah Streed (SMS): [In your book excerpt, published in Rolling Stone magazine] you quoted Carl Jung: “People cannot stand too much reality.” Briefly, what is this reality that people cannot stand?

James Howard Kunstler (JHK): That the growth medium for our way of life will not continue to exist as it has, mainly, cheap energy, and that it will require us to change the way we live whether we like it or not. Nobody wants to think about those things.

SMS: That’s true. How did you choose the title The Long Emergency as exemplifying the coming years?JHK: I think it describes what we face with some precision. It’s no more complicated than that. I could have called it The Permanent Oil Crisis.

SMS: The other is better.

JHK: Yes, it seemed to me to be a new way of formulating it that people would understand.

SMS: Why do you think most Americans have never heard the term “Global Oil Production Peak”?

JHK: It’s a very good question and I would probably attribute it to a couple of things. One is that there’s just a lot of cognitive dissonance right now in our collective national imagination. That tends to be a product of a society under stress. The other thing is that I think Americans are leading fairly frantic lives where they’re bombarded with a lot of useless and stimulating information constantly and we’re having trouble sorting out what’s meaningful from what is just drivel.

SMS: So what would be some of the meaningful things?

JHK: That we have to prepare for a different way of living. That our expectations for continuing to live in a driving utopia are unrealistic. That we face a discontinuity in the systems we depend on in daily life—like industrial agriculture based on a lot of cheap oil “inputs.” All these things are contributing. And finally, what I call the psychology of previous investment, which ought to be a fairly self-explanatory term.

SMS: This is your term?

JHK: No, the idea that you put so much of your cumulative wealth into a certain system for living that it becomes unthinkable to imagine having to do it differently or change it or reform it or even let go of it.

SMS: Right. One’s mind just won’t go there.

JHK: It won’t go there. It’s outside the context of what you are capable of imagining—it’s so horrible.

SMS: So how come your mind can go there?

JHK: Well, personally, it may be because I didn’t lead the suburban middle class existence for most of my adult life. I was playing a starving bohemian until I was in middle 40s. …I never got used to living the really comfort driven life, the leisurely life. That’s my personal situation. It’s a peculiarity of my experience.

SMS: I’m wondering if you’ve been influenced by, or talked with, Wendell Berry?

JHK: I’ve been influenced by him but never talked to him, nor met him.

SMS: Because [Berry] talks about going back to small farms, rural communities …

JHK: I would say Berry’s writings have been very influential to me personally. We come from very different backgrounds but have drawn some very similar conclusions. He’s a half, if not a whole, generation older than me.

SMS: Is that the only difference? You said you came from “very different backgrounds.”

JHK: Very different. I was born and raised in NYC, in Manhattan, and he’s a Kentucky farm boy.

SMS: So what is the answer to the “global energy predicament” we now face?

JHK: The simple answer is this: We’re going to have to downscale all our activities in America, including the way we grow our food, the distances we travel and the way we live in relation to that. The way we do commerce and trade, the way we do farming, education. All of these are going to have to be downscaled, downsized. In addition to that, along with that, we’re going to have to live much more locally than we do. That means a lot of the systems we currently depend on, like getting our household goods from 12,000 miles away—the average Caesar salad travels 2,500 miles—all that stuff, we’re going to be done with that. We’re probably going to have a much lower standard of living, in terms that we’re familiar with. I think there will be some things that will change for the better, but they may be things that people initially view as hardships. We’ll have a lot less canned entertainment. We’ll work differently. Our concept of leisure will change; it will not be the same as sitting on the sofa with a channel changing remote. We’ll have much different relationships with the people in our community—probably much more complicated and meaningful relationships.

SMS: That was my next—and last—question. You ended the article by saying, “We will have to cultivate a religion of hope.” We’re [WICEC] an interfaith group and I was very interested in this. Do you think of this as a spiritual thing?

JHK: Yes. I think we live in a society that in some ways is depraved at the most ordinary level. For example, we’ve seen the Las Vegasization of the American mind in a very particular way. It’s now normal in America to get something for nothing. This is a very destructive social idea. It leads to all kinds of problems including the loss of the belief in earnest efforts—and the implications are profound. This is the kind of society we now live in.

SMS: So when the Long Emergency happens, we’ll go toward, or turn, toward the other kind of society?

JHK: I think that some people will find a pathway toward a different belief system. Some of them may get there directly; some may take a twisted path. Since we are going to be living locally, we’ll be seeing belief systems develop on a much more local level. We may not remain a nationally cohesive society, the way that we have. Some regions of the country may be in more distress than others and there’s going to be a lot more spiritual turbulence. The more fortunate places will be where people can develop cohesive communal agreement and arrive at a new value system based on something other than leisure and getting something for nothing—and evading responsibility—and many of the other things that I consider to be of a depraved, social or cultural infrastructure.

SMS: It’s kind of exciting almost, in a way?

JHK: I think it would be exciting for those of us who are not satisfied in our current situation. But it will also open the possibility for people going in destructive directions. I think there will be a lot of angry people out there, who will vote for American style Nazis.

SMS: Maybe that’s already happened?