The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005. Hard cover. Very Good/Very Good. 6x1x9. What will happen when our current plagues of global warming, epidemic disease, and overpopulation collide to exacerbate the end of the oil age? The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind, much of it based on the exploitation of cheap, nonrenewable fossil-fuel energy. Our daily enjoyment of oil and gas has given us the energy equivalent of three hundred slaves per person in the industrialized nations. But life as we know it is about to change radically, and much sooner than we think. No combination of alternative energies will permit us to continue living the way we do, or even close to it. This book tells us just what to expect after the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. 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.