James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia

[BridgeTroll]

Wow... Lake, Lunican, Stephen... You guys have probably heard of him and may have studied him.  You have to check out this 19:44 minute talk.  Informative, hilarious...

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia.html

[tufsu1]

The guy is always engaging and interesting....unfortunately, he tends to be pretty obnoxious at times as well.

That said, I recommend his book "The Geography of Nowhere" and the follow-up "Return from Nowhere"

[Joe]

Kunstler can be an hilarious writer ... if you happen to also hate whatever he is ranting about. His dogmatic absolutism makes for funny criticism of suburban sprawl and pretentious anti-human "modernist" architecture.

However, I would caution anyone from taking Kunstler too seriously. Ultimately he's probably a detriment to the anti-sprawl cause because he's quite insane. When he sticks to urban design he's fairly well spoken, but he's a ranting lunatic in other areas.

Among other things, he constantly predicts the end of American society (actually it was supposed to happen two years ago, in an oil shortage/market crash that would make out current problems pale in comparison) and a reversion to pioneer level technology. In fact, he has been mostly silent since the oil price crash, since it so directly contradicted his predictions during the bubble. He has a strong elitist, anti-American, anti-capitalism, anti-southern tone to his writings too. In short, he's every awful stereotype of what conservatives think an anti-sprawl activist would be.

[BridgeTroll]

Thanks for the insight.  As a conservative AND a suburbanite I enjoyed his talk on the subject.  In this particular case I happen to agree with him!