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

American people are sleepwalking into a future of hardship and turbulence. James Howard Kunstler, one of our shrewdest and most engaging social commentators, tells what to expect when we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and enter the long arc of depletion - economic, political, and social changes on an epochal scale - sooner than we think.The Long Emergency will change everything. Globalism will wither. Life will become profoundly and intensely local. The consumer economy will be a strange memory. Suburbia - considered a birthright and a reality by millions of Americans - will become untenable. We will struggle to feed ourselves. We may exhaust and bankrupt ourselves in the effort to prop up the unsustainable. And finally, the United States may not hold together as a nation. We are entering an uncharted territory of history.The Long Emergency is a startling vision of what lies ahead, bringing new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and which we can no longer afford to ignore. Read more