Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward

by James Howard Kunstler

Forget the speculation of pundits and media personalities. For anyone asking “Now what?” the answer is out there. You just have to know where to look. 

In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler described the global predicaments that would pitch the USA into political and economic turmoil in the 21st century—the end of affordable oil, climate irregularities, and flagging economic growth, to name a few. Now, he returns with a book that takes an up-close-and-personal approach to how real people are living now—surviving The Long Emergency as it happens. 

Through his popular blog, Clusterf**ck Nation, Kunstler has had the opportunity to connect with people from across the country. They’ve shared their stories with him—sometimes over years of correspondence—and in Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward, he shares them with us, offering an eye-opening and unprecedented look at what’s really going on “out there” in the US—and beyond.

Coming from all walks of life, the individuals you’ll meet in these pages have one thing in common: their stories acutely illustrate the changing realities real people are facing—and coping with—every day. In profiles of their fascinating lives, Kunstler paints vivid, human portraits that offer a “slice of life” from people whose struggles and triumphs all too often go ignored. 

With personal accounts from a Vermont baker, homesteaders, a building contractor in the Baltimore ghetto, a white nationalist, and many more, Living in the Long Emergency is a unique and timely exploration of how the lives of everyday Americans are being transformed, for better and for worse, and what these stories tell us both about the future and about human perseverance. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Social Commentary, Society, Technology, Environment

278 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2020

About the author

James Howard Kunstler (born 1948) is an American author, social critic, and blogger who is perhaps best known for his book The Geography of Nowhere, a history of suburbia and urban development in the United States. He is prominently featured in the peak oil documentary, The End of Suburbia, widely circulated on the internet. In his most recent non-fiction book, The Long Emergency (2005), he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society and force Americans to live in localized, agrarian communities.

Source: Wikipedia

Reviews

[David Wineberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

How will it end?

Living in the Long Emergency is a fat sandwich of a book. The top piece (of the sandwich) is the expected endtimes scenario collection (what with the author being James Howard Kunstler), in which civilization is well on its way out, mostly of its own doing. In this version, the focus is on the electrical grid, where it rightly should be. The middle (filling) is a collection of biographies of fans of James Kunstler’s blog. They all have their issues, from bad luck to incompetence, and are struggling to keep above water. This section seems to have nothing whatever to do with the first section. The bottom piece comes back to endtimes, more focused on incompetent, incapacitated and disgraced government, via selfish, self-serving political parties. It is closer to the top piece than the filling, but makes little sense following them. From this construct it is impossible to draw a conclusion, and fortunately, Kunstler makes no such attempt.

The electric grid is the weakest link in western civilization. It is a totally unthought-out connecting of electrical generators. Together, they are supposed to be able to share, fill in where needed and shut down locally to prevent damage from spreading. History has shown otherwise, as local faults have caused failovers that black out huge sections of the country, sometimes for days. Worse, no one is even pretending the system is being attended to, with upgrades, replacements or new facilities. No one is building nuclear power plants to replace the overage, existing ones, for example. Shortages can therefore be increasingly expected. But worse still is the vulnerability to sabotage. Facilities can be bombed, or more easily fried from the comfort of a laptop half a world away. Unfortunately, on top of all this, the plants are all unique. There are no building or system standards imposed by government. So if a station seizes up, it could take years for new generators to be custom built, shipped in (from overseas since the USA no longer has those facilities or even skills) and installed. If the whole northeast, say, gets fried, the orders for new generators would back up for years. And there would be no electricity in the interim.

This might play into the back to nature and sustainability movements Kunstler looks fondly upon, but it would mean the end of civilization regardless. Organic farming would solve nothing. Man has become so totally dependent on electricity that nothing at all would function without it. Gas could no longer be pumped, not that it could be manufactured or delivered. Credit cards would not work, paychecks would not be deposited, phones could not be charged, natural gas would not flow, nor would water. Trash would not be picked up, streets would be fearfully dark. Elevators? Ha! Facebook? Please. Houses could not be heated, save for cutting, chopping and burning wood, which could not be delivered unless dragged by horses. Food shortages would occur in less than a week as wholesale deliveries would cease, store freezers and coolers would not function, and neither would cashier stations. No one would go to work because there would be no point and no pay. And no way to make the normally 75 minute commute. No one would have access to their money. On the brighter side, Kunstler says economic collapse would forestall collapse from Artificial Intelligence, which Man is hellbent on implementing as soon as possible.

The biggest grid threat would be an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). That would not only seize up every generator, but every electric motor in every appliance from alarm clocks to cars. They would all have to be replaced, a total impossibility without electricity. An enemy capable of exploding a device in the air (delivering the pulse) would be all that is needed to stop the country cold. No invasion necessary, no prisoners of war, no home casualties. That is a very real endtimes scenario, without waiting for the sun to swell or a galaxy to intersect ours, or for global warming to upset everything. We can do this ourselves, right now.

So it is very odd that the next section of the book is about a bunch of people who have long, twisted paths to little or no success in getting their lives on track. They marry and separate, change jobs frequently, move a lot, strike out on their own, start blogs and podcasts, and struggle. They’re all fans of Kunstler’s, and he contacts them and meets them for the first time so he can interview them in person, the old-fashioned way. Tying this back to a world without electricity is not even attempted.

The final section is mostly a rant against the total ineffectiveness of government, consuming itself in pointless politics, and at no point serving the populace it pretends to.

There is talk of techno narcissism, by which we ignore our position and role in the ecological system at our peril. And also the principles of adaptation vs mitigation, in which smarter folks try to fit in rather than carve out a forced compromise with nature, which is mostly what people do. This is because of overinvestment in complexity (via Joseph Tainter) by which Man is evolving to ever more complex states, rather than natural evolution, which tends towards elegant simplicity. Kunstler helpfully lists the endless stupidity of geoengineering, where impossibly expensive geeky solutions to natural phenomena (induced by Man) would make things ever so much worse when they fail. The diminishing returns of this fiendish complexity are a recipe for total collapse in Tainter’s view. Many can see it already, and many more see it coming soon.

These last insights are the best in the book. Had it been organized around them, it would have made a far better impact.

David Wineberg

[Alicia Bayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, that was a long and twisting road. I started this book thinking that had more to do with climate change and a future that was drastically different because of those effects (acidifying oceans, increasing storms and droughts, failing crops, rising temperatures and sea levels, etc.). It is not, although those things are also touched on. It is about a hopeless future created by our rapidly disappearing fossil fuels (and Kunstler does a great job of explaining why alternative energy also needs fossil fuels and cannot support our lifestyle in any way) and our outdated electrical system that could basically topple at any moment, and the massive economic and monetary collapse he sees coming soon. He talks about how dependent we are on fossil fuels and on our cars even though we're precariously close to out of oil, the fracking industry is a hoax of smoke and mirrors that's costing the industry far more than it makes, and there are no viable options for fuel in the near future. Even Amazon.com will soon be dead in the water since trucks have been notoriously impossible to fuel with anything but gasoline. Our nuclear reactors are old and dangerous (and not being replaced or safely retrofitted), and our entire computer-based and electrical-driven society is doomed in the very near future. Oh yeah, and the banks are going to fail, money will be worthless, and almost everybody who doesn't live on farmable land (and know what to do on it) is completely doomed -- although they're sort of still doomed too. Okay then.

From there, he takes us chapter by chapter to meet people who are living nontraditional lives now that would basically serve them fairly well in the future. Some are homesteaders, some are self-employed oddballs. One is a white nationalist who runs a taxi company. It's all somewhat interesting but not completely helpful in terms of learning from them anything that would help you in the future Kunstler says is coming soon. Despite that, I found each of their stories interesting. A common theme was that they were all very self taught in a wide variety of areas and consistently rewrote their own stories to adjust to the trials that life through at them.

And then we get to the third section, when he just goes off the rails for me. It reminded me of when you have a fun uncle you like and then one day you find out he's a Klan member or something. Wow. This guy really dislikes... um, almost everybody. But especially liberals, socialists, the democratic party, people of color (and especially the type of people who use the term people of color), women who don't understand our biological differences from men, LGBTQ people, politicians, college professors, Black Lives Matter folks... It kind of goes on. He really hates "techno-narcissists" -- the people who believe technology is going to save us. But he kind of hates almost everybody. There's a lot about the democratic party's illegal actions and witch-hunt in going after Trump to cover those actions (he doesn't like Trump that much either, though he seems to understand his followers and I think he may have said he voted for him), with a ton about Hilary's emails and a fair amount of swearing, blustering and name calling. It totally took me by surprise, as the rest of the book seemed rather serious and thoughtful if not impassioned.

I'd still recommend the book, just as I'd recommend reading Atlas Shrugged even though I'm on the total opposite side of Rand and her beliefs. It's a good read. It's interesting. I think he's right about a lot of stuff, even though he occasionally turns into some kind of flustered, angry old white man. It's quite a book, with a whole lot to think about even if I disagree with some of his core values.

I read a digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peak Oil happened in 2005, after that it takes more and more money to refine oil from increasing poor product. EROI = Energy Return on Investment. In the 50’s EROI for oil was 100 to 1. Civilization to exist needs energy with at least an EROI 10 to 1. Now we are at 15 to 1. Shale oil has an EROI of 5 to 1. The shale oil and gas boom bought us only about a decade. Yeah, Denmark is doing great stuff with solar and wind but it has natural gas power plants idling for when there’s no rain or wind. Wind farms degrade by one third in ten years. James doubts in a decade whether one will be able to find the rare earth materials to make wind turbines. Stoners on couches have long assumed one could solve the world’s energy needs by throwing up solar panels in Arizona or the Sahara, however such places get too hot and cell performance is impaired by constant sand and dust pounding. If you ramp up solar, you’ll also run out of silver and you’ll drive silver price up by trying.

Two-thirds of our electric grid’s energy is dissipated as heat and only one third becomes power. Two thirds of the lines are more than thirty years old. For replacement cost, think one million dollars per mile. Nuclear plants require fossil fuels to service the reactors (and Pierre Chomat told me French uranium mining for Nuclear required multiple coal plants). Good line: “Entropy never sleeps.” There’s a great future in Chestnut flour instead of corn flour (corn degrades soil and is is “hell on a biome”). James wrongly says Scott Nearing died “18 days shy of his 100th Birthday” – I was a photographer at Scott Nearing’s 100th Birthday Party and he died a few weeks later as Wikipedia will confirm.

One interviewed person named Rob said it well, “I noted that Americans were anti-intellectual dilettantes. It’s hard to find someone who’s interesting to talk to. It’s hard to find anyone who reads books.” One third of an ounce of wood alcohol (Methanol) can blind you and 3.4 oz. can kill you. Bad bootleggers used it. Alcohol proof = double the %, so 86 proof is 43% alcohol. James to his credit mentions Albert Bates and gives his bio. James feels that when society resets after the big collapse, the western standard of living will be equivalent to medieval. James sees how the Drawdown Project doesn’t understand how much the scale of human activities has to be reduced and can’t compute to show how shifting to solar would make the world run out of affordable silver. The Drawdown Project thinks planes will still be in the sky in 2040, in fact they laughingly believe there will be two and a half times more flying going on. All those tourists flying around in a collapsed economy. Airplane fuel (not taxed as a favor to capitalism) is basically unleaded kerosene. There will be no electric trucks as Frito-lay and Staples tried to create a fleet and it was 3X the price of regular trucks. Supply chains in our just-in time economy depend almost exclusively on trucks. When the trucks stop, we are three days from anarchy. Supermarkets carry three days of food. Whatever town you live, plan on it having system failure. Polls show politicians are the least trusted of all professional occupations. If that is true, why do Facebook’ers endlessly post photos and deifications of Obama’s family while never posting any photos of MLK or Gandhi or ANY non-political hero of the Left?

If you are planning to eat after the collapse, remember that you may need seven years to get fruit trees fully productive. So, start planting. A good book, but I’d far rather recommend James’s original The Long Emergency and also his great Geography of Nowhere. Those two earlier books of his are total must reads.

[Derek · Rating 1 out of 5]

Part of Kunstler's appeal to me was that he was the only person over 50 who seemed to give a damn about climate change, walkable urban spaces, and the future of our industrial society, simultaneously. He seemed like an interesting man who had his finger on the pulse of society. However, now that I have read this book, I've concluded that this man knows as much about the future as the "Techno-Narcissists" he lampoons throughout. Don't get me wrong, Musk and his ilk certainly deserve the criticism for diverting our attention away from creating walkable urban living to FM Machinery that run on batteries. But that's about his only valid point here. Everything else can be taken with a grain of salt. He seems to base a lot of his conclusions on dogmatic chants of "What cannot go on forever will stop" and "over investment in complexity with diminishing returns". He qualifies the first one with graphs and charts that supposedly show the impending collapse of the industrial age, while the latter he sort of puts out into the ether.

It's easy to dilute yourself into thinking you're seeing patterns that everyone else isn't. That you know what's really going on while all the sheep plug their ears and tune out the truth. But it's a lot more complicated than that. People go about their day doing what they need to do to survive and really couldn't care less about an impending oil collapse. Kunstler seems to think that the unwashed masses are clinging to hope in the form of new technology, when it's far more likely that they just don't give a crap.

Kunstler interviews members of his clique that he met on his blog. He approaches this with the mindset that these people will be leading us, figuratively or literally, in the post industrial age because of their knowledge of how to grow plants in bad conditions. Or something like that. There really isn't a lot tying these interviews together. Something that struck me is that the majority of these people seem to live lonely lives. One man has effectively cut off all communication with his family while choosing to live in the ghettos of Baltimore, others are recently divorced, and one of them is a white nationalist. Personally, I skipped that part. I don't care about the views of someone who openly calls themselves a white nationalist and who sincerely uses terms like "Beta uprising" and "Redpill moment". Maybe Kunstler is just old and doesn't realize that these terms are used by a subclass of unintelligent internet rabble.

The ending is like the beginning, but with more doom and gloom. He predicts the end of society and a return to "Feudal age technology", a claim so laughable that it made me put the book down and take a break. No, we will not return to "feudal age technology", an idea so nebulous that it loses all meaning. Yes we will run out of oil and yes renewables are not the messiah we had hoped for. But he completely dismisses nuclear power as a legitimate source of energy for the future without much elaboration. I'd like to offer an alternative view for the future of energy that he doesn't bring up. As we transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewables, we should start relying on nuclear power as a buffer. Nuclear power absolutely produces waste products and emissions, but that does not mean that we shouldn't at least give it a try. The farther back we push the point of no return, the point at which climate change is irreversible and the end of oil means the end of energy, the more time we have to come up with solutions to other pressing problems.

In short, Kunstler is too old and out of touch to know what's really going on. He also immerses himself in a subculture of lonely weirdos with fringe beliefs and outlooks for no real reason. If you want to read this book, the good part is the first part. The rest can be thrown out.

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the past 2 days I have read both Geography of Nowhere, a brilliant take-down of American suburbia, and Living in the Long Emergency, an unhinged, chaotic screed of hierarchist, racist, transphobic, conspiratorial propaganda, both by the same author. JH Kunstler, what a fraud. Kunstler moving from Saratoga to the outskirts of a minuscule village in nowhere eastern upstate NY to grow peach trees in his backyard while still being able to walk into town is the same maneuver that Thoreau made fleeing Concord for Walden Pond. Truly deranged self-absorption. Transphobes in particular can get fucked. Both my siblings are trans, and my attachment to masculinity can probably best be described as "conveniently apathetic"; i.e., I see no positive in identifying as a man affirmatively other than that I face no cognitive dissonance doing so. If I cared about my gender i would almost certainly identify as NB. But I get by easily enough as a man in day to day life that it doesn't bother me. I'm a gender abolitionist in philosophy and don't see a reason for stereotyping human behavior based on assumptions of genitalia. You can call me he/him or they/them or whatever you want. I truly don't care. Thankfully it doesn't weigh heavily on me, because I have gender privilege, but it does on others, so you should always use the pronouns they ask of you, and use gender neutral pronouns until you know.

[Aaron Monier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was assigned the Long Emergency as required reading for a community college class. This was mid-2000’s and that book really opened my mind and changed the way I view the world around me. It made me change my habits. Reading Living in the Long Emergency during the Covid-19 pandemic situation was a surreal experience. Despite the outlined converging catastrophes we’re facing, Kunstler manages to find optimism. He points out the resiliency of the human spirit despite being propped up on a house of cards.

[Steven Gravatte · Rating 1 out of 5]

The opening section of the book seemed totally disconnected with the rest of it. Lots of people see that change needs to happen for the reasons listed in the section. The next section was billed on the cover as being people who "are showing us the way forward." It instead was a bunch of pretty normal people having normal struggles. Several who rely on the built environment that the opening section rallied needed changing.
The final section sounded like an old man complaining that he doesn't like the way the world is changing and using every big word possible. Much like the guy hanging out at the end of the bar that most people k ow to avoid.
I was very disappointed by the incredibly misleading subtitle.

[Piemaker · Rating 2 out of 5]

While Kunstler's willingness to confront narratives contrary to those of the mainstream expectation of endless progress remains valuable, his complete misunderstanding of Derrida, post-structuralism, and the caricature of 'identity politics' he advances is a significant detraction from the real issues at play in the struggle for the future.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2005, James Howard Kunstler penned The Long Emergency, building on his earlier work as a critic of American urbanism to argue that in addition to being economically ruinous, the suburban experiment has placed the United States in a uniquely bad spot for the converging problems ahead, chiefly peak oil, climate change, and financial upheaval. When the housing bubble burst and Americans continued plowing along, he warned against the dangers of ‘technological narcissism’ and connected the Great Recession with his Long Emergency thinking. In Living in the Long Emergency, Kunstler responds to the apparent rout of peak oil theorists by fracking, and interviews people throughout the United States who have begun changing their lives (as he has) in anticipation of future trouble. Living marks a shift in Kunstler’s writing; Kunstler appears to no longer believe that Americans can respond to the threat as a nation, and has shifted his focus to individuals who are willing and able to adapt at the level of their own lives. As a book, Living in the Long Emergency doesn’t fully live up to its promise, as only a few of the interviewed individuals are overtly planning for collapse. Kunstler nevertheless proves worth the reading, however, especially in his endcap section in which he excoriates both wings of the political elite.

In Too Much Magic, I commented that Kunstler’s works have built one upon another much like a train: the preceding arguments are still there, but they’re followed and strengthened by additional, interconnected concerns. Kunstler’s introduction and ending here continue that trend, though not to the same scale: Kunstler summarizes his preceding arguments and then comments at length on the sad farce that passes for politics these days, as both parties are fully in the grips of unreality. Kunstler used to advocate for change at the national level, urging better uses of capital that would ameliorate the chaos to come — like accepting nuclear energy, for instance, instead of wasting money on short-lived wind farms that can’t support a base load. Now he doesn’t bother, seeing his estranged party (the Democrats) having descended to the level of Jacobins, more interested in destroying those who disagree with them and waging war on the past than preparing intelligently for the future. And Republicans? The portion of their party with energy is moored to the same vision of Happy Motoring that Kunstler condemned decades ago. The United States is a truck hurtling into the abyss with two tweeting, vainglorious idiots fighting for who gets to drive. What interests Kunstler now is people who have bailed from business as usual and started altering their lives in preparation, and it’s these people who he focuses on in the heart of Living. These interviews include an interesting range of individuals, from Alaska to Vermont. Several have created their own homesteads, where they grown much of their own foodstuffs and at the same time create products to sell outside, like liquor or bread. This isn’t a series of interviews with survivalists, though: what unites the guests is their disconnection from mass society, their belief that the future will be worse than the present, and their willingness to find ways to adapt to it. For some, that’s growing their own food; for others, it’s learning practical skills they can sell. A couple of the interviews seem out of place, though they’re no less interesting: a couple of extremely race-conscious men are interviewed, one black and one white. They both comment on the disintegration of culture, on growing consumer-passivity that sets people and their communities up for failure.

Living in the Long Emergency is a minor addition to Kunstler’s line of argument that also examines ways those who follow Kunstler’s arguments are taking them seriously. This includes Kunstler himself, who for the last decade has lived on a farm in upstate New York, keeping chickens a few minutes walk from a small village. There’s not as much of the long emergency adaptation as readers would want, but if you can’t get enough of Kunstler excoriating modernity, it’s here for the reading.

[Stefan Geissberger · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Living in the long Emergency” is the 2019 sequel to Kunstler’s previous Book simply called “The Long Emergency” published in 2006. I have not read the first book but could gather that it predicted coming US economic, ecologic and social crisis’s due to eroding cultural structures, rising inequalities and financial mismanagement. Key was the prediction of the end of cheap Oil and all the follow-up consequences that spell out the end of our modern technological civilisation. Living in the Long emergency appears to double down on Kunstlers assessment with more examples and further facts from the last two decades.

The book is split in three parts. In the first rather short part Kunstler speaks of his previous book, and his failed prediction of the End of oil. He explains the continued extraction of oil in recent years as a result of a “great financial stunt” from Wallstreet and the US government, namely in the near-zero interest policies and oil-price manipulation that enabled oil companies to use oil-shale and oil-sand Extraction. A panicked short-term solution. He concludes that his predicted state of Long emergency is already in full swing. In this section he showcases an understanding of oil industry practices, financial markets and the events that allowed Oil to perpetuate itself still. This section offers insights that hook the reader and motivate to read further on.

The second section of the book is on various biographies and interviews with people he terms “hardy early adapters to the long emergency” and is the weakest in the book. Each section begins with how he contacted that person and expands into prose as we follow Kunstler and his subject into their “living rooms”. A biography of these people follows, their activities, past, worldview and beliefs. The one question that binds them all together is the last one, Kunstler’s “Now what…?” where each of these interviewees musters their own prediction of that the future holds for the US.
The problem with this section is that in the end I ended up bored and scratching my head on what exactly the point was, how these stories are relevant to the other sections of the books, and to the titular Long emergency. The threads are there, but Kunstler fails to connect them to the rest of his book to weave a more complete picture. As it stands, you can skip this entire section and not miss anything.

The third section is a relieving return to form as Kunstler picks up and begins to address Financial, economic and cultural problems of the US and plots potential ideas for moving forward. He sharply critiques “magical Techno-narcissism” rampant in academic and high-class circles that believe that Growth can be sustained with better technology. Kunstler makes it clear that he believes that the era of “happy motoring, Suburbia and consumerism” and the American lifestyle imbued with them is coming to an end. He advocates for a return of local industry, community, self-reliance and scaling down of fragile complexities to more simpler networks to weather the coming years. Sadly He also diverges into wildly irrelevant topics, such as the Political nonsense during the trump election, or his personal Gardening Project in the last chapter, which feels very disjointed.

Overall, I do recommend this book, as it was an enjoyable read and grants a comprehensive insight into a possible future for America. But It has its flaws. I must caution readers to take these gloomy predictions with a healthy pinch of salt. Its entirely embedded in US context and fails to look beyond its borders, and it’s very Cynical regarding nearly everyone and everything regarding technology, society and government.

[Mr Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

LITLE is not a beginner primer, and may be difficult for those who have arrived late to the industrial overshoot party, assuming a certain level of pre-existing cognitive acceptance of the entropic dynamisms it outlines. It will be more comprehensible to those who have been contemplating these exigencies for some time. Moving the mojo of past expositions from the abstract to the emergently adaptive concrete, LITLE may be confronting for some reviewers who might prefer it if decline had remained an abstract futuristic concept. The diverse yet inclusive reverie of interviewees reflects the breadth of Jim’s thought, his readership, and ultimately America itself. Jim’s life has spanned the height of the American Empire, tracking its apotheosis and gradual decline through a succession of disastrous economic, military, political and social setbacks that have seen it arrive into its current Fentanyl and Chipotyl fuelled, post industrial fugue stasis.


There is no mercy here for Corn-Pone secessionists seeking to dial back to 1955, nor philosophically coercive de-constructed P-zombies. Jim’s interviewees are not assured of success and they do not promise a ‘rainbows and unicorns’ solution to our collective predicament. Instead, these intrepid, resilient hard working folks wear their tattoos on the inside as they set about making their new world by hand, with much heart. Pooh-poohed by some crypto-Utopian reviewers, theirs is a story of continuing struggle and adoption of the attitude of personal responsibility, toil and persistence required to navigate the visscitudes of existence in the Long Emergency. For many of these folks, the battle is both a psychological and a physical one, not alleviated by faux collectivist interventions of metastatised bad faith institutions.

Yet there is hope ! In the authors words, the verdict of this essay is “not an invitation to despair and passivity”. We must roll on in a newly energised and independent way, within the constraints of our new parameters. Neither Wild West nor Kanye West, this is instead a North West Passage to a Geography of Somewhere, an unvarnished depiction of the road ahead, a truly critical theory of reality, a roadmap for those ready to get truly Woke, with not so much as a Cheeto to munch on the way. So take your hand off, press your metaphorical cognitive foot to the floor, ten points for every Frankenstein crypto-Gnostic neo-Jacobin you clean up on the way, and motor happily into the unvarnished and unyielding Truth’s of today !

[Shawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have followed the author since the mid-2000's since reading The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere, both of which have influenced my thinking a lot. I also liked the World Made by Hand books. But this sequel to The Long Emergency is a disappointment and really adds nothing to JHK's body of work. I guess I should have known better, when there are blurbs on the back cover saying that this book will tell the reader "what's really going on in this country" (a ridiculous claim about a political book if there ever was one). As others have observed, the beginning and ending chapters provide a serviceable synopsis and update of what The Long Emergency reported on, but the middle chapters, which comprise about half of the book, are just thrown in without much explanation for why they matter. These chapters consist largely of interview transcripts with individuals whose lifestyles the author purportedly finds decisive for reckoning with the times. (Actually, some of them are simply folks who read and comment on his blog.) Although the individuals do have interesting lives and live a tad more independently than average, I'm not sure I learned a squat more about the topic from these chapters. Okay...so there are some people who do permaculture and self-reliance homesteading, etc., but I already knew that. JHK himself does not offer much commentary on what we should learn from these people either.

I do find persuasive much of what JHK argues about energy scarcity, scalable/human-size communities, and the general population's broad denial of what the future of the world will look like, but outside of these subjects, lately he comes across to me as more of an old crank. On issues of race, gender, and sexuality he strikes me as particularly tone-deaf and insensitive in the context of the present. (And the token chapter featuring a black man unfortunately does not help much here.) I think this is not where he is at in his intellectual journey any longer, but I think JHK really shines when he works at unraveling the underlying psychology of the various human problems he tackles - when he takes more of the approach of a philosopher rather than simply the voice of a Fox News commentator.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a follow up to his earlier books, The Long Emergency (2005), and Too Much Magic (2012). The first book looked at Peak Oil and the ramifications of it. The second book was about techno-utopianism (he calls it techno-narcissism) and also the financial shenanigans and pseudo- capitalism that resulted in the 2008 economic meltdown.
This new book is in three parts. The first is a pair of chapters revisiting his earlier predictions and looks again to the future. The second section is the bulk of the book - biographical sketches of people who he sees as living lives that are prepared to face the "long emergency" of resource depletion, economic hardship, and political instability. Or, are emblematic of the sorts of people and ideas that will play a larger role as things begin to unwind. Not all of them are people you'd want to break bread with.
The last section are a series of essays dealing with some of the issues we will be facing.
I have read all of his non-fiction books and four of his novels. I'm a fan boy.
Here is a long quote:
"The sense of gathering crisis persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to carry on "normal" life much further into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the public to process. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposal to do anything about it. Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they dominate the scene on every side. A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that make up the armeture of "normal" life in the USA."

[Howard Thompson · Rating 1 out of 5]

In Geography of Nowhere and Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler was sharp, well informed, insightful and engaging as he took down American suburbanism and our society's reliance on fossil fuel and the dangers and challenges we face as we move into the future. However since then Kunstler has slowly descended into a morass of anger and resentment, misogyny and racism, and extreme politics and conspiracy. His blog and podcast have become a painful trainwreck.

In Living in the Long Emergency, he seems to be trying to recapture the Kunstler of old, the witty and curmudgeonly social critic, revisiting the subjects he explored so ably 20 and 30 years ago. Alas, he doesn't cover much new ground here. His recommendations are at best common knowledge and at worst ravings of an uninformed luddite. He rails on tech bros and their techo-topia dreams, but that is an easy target. Much of the book involves a number of interviews with people that can best be described and wingnuts, and not the lovable kind. They are often a bit of Walden Pond with a generous helping of unhinged white nationalist and some would be alpha male, incel, redpill mixed in. I mean the term "beta uprising" is mentioned unironically. These characters clearly reflect Kunstler own dark and misanthropic worldview these days, but these people cannot really be described as experts in exploring a future that we all might be able to relate to.

I think Kunstler has gone too far off the deep end to really be a productive voice regarding these serious societal issues. This book had me missing the old JHK, but he is clearly long gone.

[Barbara Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I confess to reading JHK's bi-weekly blog religiously. I think he's on to something even more dystopian than we're living in October 2021. He's right about the grid, big oil, the burbs, the now very empty big towers in big cities, and all else. We were just heading into covid when he wrote this book and when you throw that load of governmental incompetence and a busted up system we call healthcare in the US on the fire, we're even further into the long emergency than when he published the book.

This is defnitely not a "how to" book since the middle section is an account of interesting people but hardly representative of most of us stuck in unsatisfying jobs, dependent on oil, electric, etc. to survive. Not everyone can have a garden/farmette to sustain themselves when the real emergency picks up the pace. I found the Geography of Nowhere and The World Made By Hand better books but I have to hand it to JHK - he doesn't fool around, making the state of things more palatable. He's simply prescient and sharing what feels to me as a well-researched and perceptive book. You won't find validation of his premise on MSM or most FB or Youtube shows - because they're shows, click bait/money makers and not actual news. That's why I look forward to Monday and Friday when as we call him at our house "jimmy" has his say. His titles are five star - including picking "Cluster..." early on. It sure is Jimmy.

[Matthew Stienberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting examination of the many problems with our overly complex and interdependent economic systems. A just expose on why the JIT (Just In Time) systems which power much of our consumer lives are very fragile, and a somewhat byzantine look at the problems with the less and less profitable oil industry.

The second part of the book is a look at what the author calls "early innovators" who are trying to live a different life in a world which is almost alien to the one they grew up in and the one they were promised. It was an almost amusing section because you didn't find one story where someone hadn't undergone a divorce, to the point that part of the title could quite literally have had 'and been divorced' added in. Many of these innovators were interesting, some for obvious reasons like practicing sustainable living, to the less obvious like podcasters and an interview with a white nationalist who doesn't seem to do much but run a cab company.

The books third part breaks the flow from going on a skeptical run on climate sciences (and its solutions) to upbraiding the banks and oil industries as unsustainable to a legitimately weird rant on a grab bag of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2016 election as the Democrats plotting against Donald Trump and identity politics.

A strange, but legitimately intriguing book.

[Cierra · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some somewhat interesting points made in this book although I found a majority of it to be rather boring. No real solutions to these increasingly problematic world issues which made it very much a depressing read. Realistic but depressing nonetheless. The big thing that irritated me though was the chapter from a White Nationalist’s point of view. The author claimed that he included the unpopular point of view to be fair in a sense and at the end of the chapter says that he understands that most readers probably found that specific chapter “unappetizing” but “at least we know [Rob’s] point of view.” The dude is a White Nationalist. It’s already clear as f*ck what his point of view is. I understand the author spoke to him about other things but his identity in the book was broadcasted as a WN. So, that part irritated me because it was ignorant to include and gave this person a platform to spread their hate. Doesn’t matter if he’s not as flamboyant about his views as his counterparts. Hate is still hate. Like they’re not loud about it already. Overall, dud of a read, depressing, and then the White Nationalist part just did it for me.

[Richard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was hoping to find some answers in this book, or at least some thought provoking insights. Instead, I was bitterly disappointed. Rather than "showing us the way forward", Kunstler doles out information that could easily be classified as common knowledge. Not satisfied with boring the reader into stupefaction with that, he conducts long interviews with his devotees, whom I assume are the people he thinks are going to "show us the way forward". Unfortunately, although most of them seem to be very nice people, they are generally a collection of loopy wingnuts whose method of living is certainly not a model for the future of humanity.
I admire Kunstler and his ilk for taking the time and making the effort to see civilization for what it is, recognizing it's short comings, and working towards it's improvement. In that regard, perhaps this book is a useful tool that may prompt it's readers to think, which seems to be a lost art in our society. Just be sure to read this book with the understanding that it will provide no realistic answers, or direction.

[George · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as The Long Emergency. Most of it consists of profiles/vignettes of people (who happen to be fans of Kunstler's blog) across the US living various unusual or non-traditional lifestyles in preparation for the collapse of industrial society that Kunstler predicted in his first book. I didn't find their stories interesting.

Other than that, Kunstler revisits the predictions he made in 2005, but he barely adds anything new, which feels like a huge missed opportunity given how much has happened and changed (or failed to change) in the last 17 years. Then in the final section Kunstler pontificates a bit on the state of American politics, but the problem is he wrote it all in 2019/2020 juuuuust before covid arrived, and practically all of it is already out-of-date or irrelevant.

The Long Emergency was a very thought-provoking read that I highly recommend, but I don't recommend its sequel at all.

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program in exchange for an honest review.

This book isn't quite what I expected. I was not aware of the author's previous book that is referenced in the introduction, so this book was the only context I had. This book isn't just about individuals, it's about larger problems of climate change and oil consumption.

I was surprised how much this book humanized the people interviewed. There are lots of details about their lives and relationships and their thoughts that paint a picture of their lives. This book also doesn't give a lot of answers. It's mostly focusing on giving context for issues with the last chapter looking at what possibilities are in the future.

It's not the book I was expecting. There are interesting insights into why we face these problems, but not a lot of problem solving.

[Linda Bond · Rating 5 out of 5]

While many of us are pacing the floor, worried about the coming disasters brought about by global climate change, some people are already living with and responding to their fears, finding ways to adapt their lives and survive. To bring us their stories, Kunstler travels across the country, interviewing disparate people. These are real people, living real lives, who are coming up with some fairly shocking answers to help themselves make sense of the changes occurring all around them. In order to do justice to his work, be prepared to set aside your prejudices, withstand your tendency to laugh at these people’s ideas, and listen to what they have to say. We might just learn something about what drives us as human beings and how we can learn to get along with each other. Wow! What an eye-opener!

I met this book at Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, WA.

[Clark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many of the other reviewers, I found Part 1 and Part 3 of the book compelling but the vast middle felt like filler. I didn't really like any of the "early adapters" mentioned in the title really showed any way forward nor was there much affirmative action on their parts. Mostly they were victims of circumstances or external forces largely out of their control. I am glad that they are finding ways to survive but didn't find any knowledge that I really felt like could be widely extrapolated to the greater whole. I just had very different expectations for the book than what it actually was...

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This glass half empty book looks at current social, political, and environmental challenges in the 2020's. If you are always on the sunny side of life, the information presented may block the sun or at least bring a cloud overhead. If you are pessimistic, the books supports what you have always believed. If you are neither, the book present ideas and situations that challenge you to see how your actions fit into the scheme of life and may lead to some middle ground between despair and unrelenting hope.

[Kelly Knapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a timely sequel to The Long Emergency.
Even a year ago, most people would see the author as a pessimist, expecting the end of the world as we know it. But the past 3 months has opened new journeys in America and the World as a whole, making this book an essential look into the future. I don't agree with everything the author predicts or thinks needs to change to prevent TEOTWAWKI, but there is plenty here that could be initiated to make our world a better place.

[Florence Millo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this book. I was very much looking forward to reading about how people were preparing for the long emergency: gardening, of course, but also the husbandry of animals, sewing, weaving, canning and preserving, use of hand tools, arts, community. I doubt if any of the people in the book could survive a serious long emergency; they seem to be barely surviving today. Anyway, I agree with his premise of the long emergency but got nothing really useful from it.

[Edie Hanafin Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a depressing, scary book, but one that sheds some interesting light on humanity's potential future. The author argues that renewables won't solve all our problems, nor can they because they are incapable of doing so. What about fuels for trucks which are the backbone of our economy? He believes that instead, we should focus on our lifestyles of being smaller and more self-sufficient. It's a good read with plenty of thought-provoking capability.

[Tim Good · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a big fan of JHK's first book on this topic The Long Emergency. Read that book first.
I loved the updates and where he went wrong in the first part and the third part of where he looks at the world now. The stories in the middle were good stories, but not what I was hoping from this book.

Overall a good book.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

early adapter

Not sure what the point of the book was other than providing several vignettes to provide an azimuth check to a course set down in a previous book. Early adapters seem to be the theme. A take away to ponder: “In the American future as I conceive it, everyday life will revolve around food production and the trades that support it.”

[Stacy Elenbaas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good book. I was hoping the author would give different examples of how people are making changes, but the examples are more uncommon type people in some extreme situations. I wanted the author to offer some doable solutions for the everyday solution. Not as helpful as I was hoping.

[Alice Chau-Ginguene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting update on the previous book Long Emergency. Quite a subjective analysis on what is happening to the industrial civilisation as we know it. Some parts are difficult to read, regardless of what side of the politics you are on, but truly thought provoking.