Kunstler: America’s New Religion, Part II

Suburbia is going to fail. You can state that categorically: It’s going to fail in terms of investment and it’s going to fail in terms of utility. We’re not going to be able to use it; we’re not going to be able to make those trips from 38 miles outside of Minneapolis and Dallas.

The Europeans, by the way, they’re going to have plenty of problems too. They’re not going to be without problems, but they made a set of different choices. They didn’t destroy either their central cities or the idea that city life had value. Very important. They didn’t destroy their public transit and they didn’t destroy their local agriculture. We did all of those things and so the people in Minneapolis or 28 miles outside of Dallas or Orlando are going to be twiddling their thumbs, while the people in Barcelona and Dusseldorf are going to be going about their lives


We’re going to have to inhabit the land differently. That means cities that will have a different character from what we understand now a city to be. And it means a productive rural landscape that behaves differently. We’re going to have to get very serious about growing our own food closer to home or we’re going to starve. I heard a very interesting thing from a Pennsylvania farmer five months ago at a conference down there