James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand, takes on suburban sprawl, disposable architecture and the end of the cheap oil era each week with program host Duncan Crary.
David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior adviser to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and serves as the executive director of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, and sustainability of Oberlin.
Orr is the author of seven books, including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and coeditor of three others. He has authored nearly 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications.
In the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a trustee of the Bioneers, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the Worldwatch Institute.
He has been awarded seven honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. Orr is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.
While at Oberlin, he spearheaded the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy.
In this bonus episode, James Howard Kunstler reunites with former KunstlerCast host/producer Duncan Crary for a behind-the-scenes discussion of JHK’s personal connection to the wildly popular S-Town podcast, a This American Life spinoff program. Back around 2010-2013, John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series began an email correspondence with JHK. John B was a real person, referred to by various people in the series as “brilliant,” “a genius,” “a real character,” and he was for sure. He was also a fan of Jim’s books, and, after getting his phone number off his website, took to calling him on the phone. The two probably had a dozen long phone conversations. It is well-known now that he called his home of Woodstock, Alabama, “Shit-town.” He regaled JHK with many a sordid tale of the home-folk, and even of himself. To Jim, the place sounded like “Hieronymus Bosch meets Dogpatch.” Since John B seemed so unhappy under his mask of hilarity and mirth, Jim tried to encourage him to think about moving. He always had an excuse for not doing that, but clearly John B and the neighbors he disdained, fought with, looked for love with, had a synergistic thing going. They needed each other to play out their never-ending crazy scripts of cracker mischief, vengeance, and failure. After a while, John B went dark. Jim thought JB had just gotten tired of advising him to move. As it turns out, what happened to John would become the subject of an audio documentary that has broken all the records in podcasting and stirred up a bit of controversy. Because so many of the concepts McLemore espouses in the series are inspired by JHK’s blogs and writings (sometimes John uses Jim’s exact phraseology), Duncan suggests the early KunstlerCast years are a bit like a “prequel” to S-Town. (Note: You can listen to all the previous episodes on the KunstlerCast feed for free, and you can purchase a book of based transcripts from the first five years.)
Our pal and frequent guest, Dave Collum, suggested we have a chat with his pal Tony Greer, an independent global market analyst with 25 years of trading experience in and around Wall Street. He graduated from Cornell University in 1990 and spent the first ten years of his career trading currencies, commodities, and precious metals at UBS and Goldman Sachs. In February of 2000, he left Goldman Sachs to start his own firm, Machine Trading, in the belly of the dotcom bubble. After 2 years and a great experience, Tony segued into a fifteen year career as a top producing equity sales trader at several different broker dealers including Stuart Frankel & Co., Dahlman Rose & Co., and Bank Hapoalim, where Tony ran equity sales and trading. The common denominator across shops, as the equity market evolved and electronic trading became more prevalent, was the subscriber growth of the daily note Tony wrote to his clients. As Tony’s subscriber list grew to over 1,000 market professionals he decided to leave the execution business and launch the Morning Navigator, as a subscriber model newsletter. He describes the Morning Navigator, steeped in technical analysis and behavioral finance, as “the morning note you will read first” and he has met with great success thus far. Tony lives in Atlantic Beach, N.Y. with his wife of 17 years, Gerianne, and their 3 children.
I’ll be chatting with Rocky Rawlins who is the man behind The SurvivorLibrary.com, a phenomenal website that contains scans in pdf-file form of hundreds of books on basic technology and the skills for applying them, mostly dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s hard to overstate the scope of this vast trove of practical knowledge — everything from bee-keeping to wagon and coach-building. In other words, what you need to meet The Long Emergency. The scientific elegance of these books and monographs is something to behold, the clarity of the language and precision of the instructions is breathtaking. I think you’ll like Rocky very much. A straight-up good dude.
[embed]http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_289.mp3[/embed] Today I’m yakking with return guest David Collum, the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, who has become a popular presence on the internet commenting on the financial system and the related predicaments of our time. He’s also been involved in the campus culture wars and is not too shy to talk about it. Dave is a live wire and lots of fun. This podcast is sponsored by David McAlvany’s excellent firm, ICA, for assistance in adding precious metals to your investment portfolio and advice on managing them. Call 1-800-525-9556. Or go to McAlvany.com/kunstler to request information. Direct download: http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_289.mp3 Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com.
World Made By Hand (Fourth and Final)
Amazon Hardcover | Kindle Autographed Copy Battenkill Books Northshire Books
New Interview with JHK about The Harrows of Spring
Praise for A History of the Future: “Kunstler skewers everything from kitsch to greed, prejudice, bloodshed, and brainwashing in this wily, funny, rip-roaring, and profoundly provocative page- turner, leaving no doubt that the prescriptive yet devilishly satiric A World Made by Hand series will continue.” — Booklist
My local indie booksellers… Autographed copies Battenkill Books Northshire Books or Amazon
Also: Published as an E-book for the first time! The 20th Anniversary edition With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page!
This episode’s featured interview is with transportation expert and urbanist Taras Grescoe, author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. Taras writes: “In the 20th century, our greatest cities were almost ruined by the automobile. Only a global revolution in transportation can bring them back from the brink.” He consults on these matters and reports from cities around world from, Paris, to Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bogota, Vancouver, Phoenix. Taras Grescoe lives in Montreal. It’s a pleasure to welcome him to the podcast.
This episode also features a mini-yak with my old podcast sidekick Duncan Crary. Duncan has been working tirelessly, and making great strides, in promoting an urban Renaissance in the small upstate city of Troy, N.Y., where he lives. This March 30 & 31, 2017 he will be offering a New Urbanist-themed two-day class on “The Art of Small City PR & Spectacle,” at a school in Manhattan. For more information, visit his website: DuncanCrary.com
It’s a pleasure to welcome back Piero San Giorgio who came on the podcast some time ago to talk about his previous excellent book Survive the Economic Collapse, a Practical Guide.
Today I’m catching up with Piero on Skype at his home in Switzerland to talk about his new book, Women on the Verge of A Societal Breakdown — Preserving Hard-won Victories During an Age of Uncertainty. The book's published by the Club Orlov Press — and yes, that’s our chum Dmitry Orlov, author many splendid books on the subject of how we’re going to greet the future. You can find it on Amazon.
Yeah, i can hear some of you muttering — the effrontery! Two dudes talking about women! Well, There’s no against it, at least not yet, and we’re gonna give it a shot. Let us know if you think it was a fair discussion.
It’s a pleasure to welcome back Jasun Horsley, who presides over the blog Auticulture and The Liminalist podcast. Jasun is a UK ex-pat now living in rural British Columbia, Canada. He describes himself as a “high-functioning Aspergian” and his work often takes readers and listeners to the further outposts of culture where neuroscience and the occult shake hands with politics and show biz. Jasun is a hard-working professional intellectual who brings an original worldview to the events of the day. We recorded two podcasts in this session: the one in which I interview him for my podcast and one in which he interviews me for his podcast, the Liminalist (click here).
Today I’m chewing the gristle of finance with Byron King. Byron is a geologist who currently writes a newsletter, in association with economist Jim Rickards, entitled Rickards Gold Speculator with Byron King. It's published by Agora Financial, of Baltimore, www.agorafinancial.com. Over the course of his career, Byron worked in the oil industry, and has had extensive experience with other natural resource sectors. He also served for over 30 years, active and reserve, in the US Navy. He holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard and the US Naval War College.
Today I’m yakking with Kate Wagner, the antic voice behind the marvelous website Welcome to MacMansion Hell, a humorous and opinionated blog that aims to educate the general public about architecture, design, and urbanism by making examples of America’s most despised architectural style. She is currently a master’s student in Acoustics as part of a joint venture program between Johns Hopkins University and Peabody Conservatory. Merry Christmas everybody!
