James Howard Kunstler Quotes

The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.

There's an absolute surety to the hands-on conservation lifestyle of hunting, fishing and trapping where you know you're going to consume today.

What I miss is being close to nature - collecting your own water and generating your own electricity, catching your own food. I still dream of doing that with my own family, even if it's just for a year-long experiment, I would love to have tried that.

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military- industrial civilization will soon collapse.

I'm convinced that the catastrophes of the next two decades will be so vast as to bring about a world where life, if it survives, will be far simpler - and the technologies, too. Then we will have come full circle to something like life on the savanna.

I've always wanted to make a big apocalypse movie. I love 28 Weeks Later, I think it's great but Cell is totally different. It's about people's dependence on technology, the collapse of society and watching everything fall apart. That's something I've always wanted to do, which I believe it can!

Bigger things than the State will fall, all religion will fall.

I haven't lived in Sweden since I was a teenager. We lived in southern Sweden, about two hours north of Copenhagen, where my family's home base has been since 1970. Our parents bought a schoolhouse in preparation for self-sufficient living. They wanted to create a place to do all the things they believed in.

Some would call me an environmentalist. I don't know why. I reuse the water that falls in my backyard in the winter. I reuse the trash and clippings I produce for mulch. I reuse the rain that falls on my roof, and I reuse the sun that shines on my house for energy. I guess you could call me a strategic opportunist as much as an environmentalist.

I'm focusing on cultivating my land. I have vegetables and fruit trees; I want to get some chickens and solar and really get off the grid and focus on just, really, being a mother.

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.

No civilization on the brink of collapse has ever changed fast enough to avert collapse.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

The individuals of the Hottentot Nation, in the same manner as the other inhabitants, should be subject to proper regularity in regard to their places of abode and occupations…they should be encouraged to work rather than to leading an indolent life.

Well, this is the end of Western civilization.

Going underground is no answer. What kind of world would they come up to? What would they use for air? What would they use for food? ... What would they use for people?

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'

In order to survive in a very small tribe, you needed to know how to do lots of things for yourself: how to make your tools, how to get food, and how to make your clothes - things most of us today don't need to know. The only thing I need to survive is to know history.

My parents were/are straight-edge hippies. Mom roamed around gardening so we would have fresh food, and Dad was on wood-chopping duty to heat our passive solar home that they figured out how to design and build together. I was the kid with green peppers in my lunch, and I liked them!

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.

This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.

Life on a small farm might seem primitive, but by living such a life we become able to discover the Great Path. I believe that one who deeply respects his neighborhood and everyday world in which he lives will be shown the greatest of all worlds.

My grandpa taught me how to live off the land.

The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.

I understand it's seductive to use green technologies, for people who want to believe it. But it is a hoax in the sense that it's nothing more than another of the never-ending issues, political issues by the left, by the Democrat Party, to advance their ultimate agenda of bigger and bigger government and more and more control.