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

Narrated by: David de Vries

Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2020 James Howard Kunstler (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

A lot to think about excellent book

This book has told me where I plan to travel this spring and summer. I will be moving in the next six months that is for sure

if it's 2020 or later, you need to read this book.

For just a moment, suspend your hope or your firm belief that things in the Western world will return to normal.
Listen with an open mind, at the possible ways things may very well play out.
And prepare yourself and your family once finished.

A funny Thing Happened On the Way to the American Dream

Reality caught up with the “cliche.” Now what? If what we are truly experiencing is actually a nightmare, we need to wake up! Mr Kuntsler has a mind like no others. He conveys the hard realities of our Long Emergency straight from the hip. You may not agree with all of what he writes, but lose your chains of illusion and consider what is obvious. None of us will make it out alive. So, make your voices heard and your actions productive.

With respect

Interesting people treated with respect, large ideas handled concisely, hope for man in the future.

Must listen

Be prepared! The long emergency is coming whether we want it to or not.
Do it

I will buy the hard copy to study and savor.

The book prepared a bed of hot coals for my imagination to take flame. Like Yogi Berra’s statement about predictions, we can only guess the general azimuth of our culture’s future. This book gives us a north to set our compasses.
Part 1 was a summary of the original book. But a good concise description of our predicament. We may be able to extend this lifestyle a while but this will decay as more people drop out of this modern life.
Part 2 was a great look at Americans adjusting to these changing times. These dropouts can be the seed of a new America.
In Part 3 Jim hit it out of the park. He amalgamated the thoughts and concerns I’ve had since the early 1970s.
I’m a 65 year old retiring mining / civil engineer. I understand resource depletion. The strength of our society will dictate the velocity of the decline.
My retirement may be easy or not. But we oldsters can spend the time to prepare our people to meet the future head on.
The reader was good but I wish Jim would read the audiobook. His pacing and intonation would be perfect.

Lucid description of how our society truly is...

I’ve been observing how obnoxious people of this Empire have been turning these last thirty years or so and wanting to be associated with it less and less. Things seem to go sideways toward the end of the 80s as I remember it.
I had not run across Kunstler before about five days ago when he was interviewed by Chris Martenson on PeakProsperity. I liked what I heard, so I acquired this book and thoroughly enjoyed every last minute of it. In fact, I like it so much, I’m going to need to get a physical copy of it so that when our star flares us into the Bronze Age, I’ll have something to remind me how things used to be. Not even kidding.
Kunstler’s explanation of Shale Oil is illuminating and coupled with all the financial shenanigans those Central Banksters and Generic Banksters have been doing to the financial system, on top of the concept that it’s Capitalism for you and me, but Socialism for Corporations, this way of life clearly can’t stagger around for too terribly much longer.
Chapter 15 is about the most excellent breakdown of how this society has been turned on its non-binary, gender-fluid ear. I’m not going to comment on what I think about that whole concept...
Chapter 14, though, was well worth the price of admission - despite all the information I amass, I’ve never been able to organize all the steaming piles of feces our “leadership” have produced regarding Russiagate into anything approaching sensical. Thank you, Mr. Kunstler.
Part II is validating since I’m embarking on my own adventure outside of the life I’ve lived for fifty+ years. Knowing there are other responsible adults still existing in this country gives me courage to soldier on.

worth my time

it was interesting to see the state of things through Howard Kunstler's eyes. I do champion the Green New Deal, but also have slowly come to understand that the answer is less and less switching from gas guzzling cars to lithium and precious metal guzzling electronics to more and more belt tightening and cutting back. Really I'm coming to believe that the best thing we could do for the coming "Great Emergency" which I call the current Climate Crisis is to spend that money bringing back trains big time: trains locally, trains long distance passenger, trains for transport of goods. The pandemic should have taught us, except that it was kept out of mainstream media, that trains saved the day for transporting our food and goods that we require to buy. I heard some mention of it, but didn't really get it until we took that vacation to see our grandchildren after 2 years of quarantine. Crossing rural New Mexico we saw thousands of cars waiting for engineers to drive them filled with goods to their destinations. I knew this was so because I had caught some wind of it on radio news, but there's nothing like seeing to believe. I hear rural Nevada is the same, filled with train loads of cars and engines just waiting for personnel. Trains are far more efficient for transporting everything, but we chose roads with the interstates in the '50s, and that changed everything. Looks like we'll pay for that until we fix it. And if we don't fix it, if we insist on opening up mining for precious minerals and getting everybody into an electric car, we will just suffer more as Kunstler correctly points out.

I found it amusing that Kunstler was fascinated by only people who became back to the landers not in the hippie sense of the word. Heaven forbid you should emulate Helen and Scott Nearing, who had the money to to buy nice big property with all the amenities, and then fail until they could succeed at what they were doing. It became even more amusing at the end of the book when I discovered that's exactly what Howard Kunstler had done! Lower middle class hippies like me, struggle at holding down a job and learning how to garden at the same time, know it will cost me more than the food I buy at the grocery store for numerous years before it pays off. And still I honor the Nearings, who knew that sanity lay in that direction before it was common knowledge that the Climate Crisis could kill us all. And however he came to the conclusion, I applaud Howard for doing the same.

The chapter on the Jacobins and the DNC's seditious behavior was fascinating, and the best part of the book for me. Because that is where in the book I learned something. I don't doubt it is all true. Except for the fact Marie Antoinette never did say "let them eat cake". As a Social Democrat, I would suggest that taxing the rich now is a better proposition than a French style Revolution later. Because as the French proved, you can't keep the middle class down forever. We are paying the social safety net for the poor AND for the uber rich to become increasingly rich hiding their money to not be taxed. We desperately need that money to get people out of their cars, stop the land rape of mining, clean up the waters and land, and pay for the many climate crises headed our way for the next several generations, or until the end of humanity on Earth; or life on earth. This is the fate 98% of the scientists on the planet are telling us.

I followed Kunstler in his early days as a lawyer, and didn't know his politics before reading this book. It was great to see how a republican comes to some of the same conclusions that I, a leftist have. And it was good to listen to the other side of the political field, because in this divided political land to find the truth we all must listen to the other side. We just have to find a way to do it without being bombarded by Fox Snooze! Kunstler has always been a free thinker. I recommend this book to hear the other side come to a few of our Green conclusions.

great as aways

It is too bad this book would not be required reading in schools. I would love to here the debates in the classrooms

Food for thought

Useful information and presented well. We are all fumbling along with the realization that things are not quite right. Mr Kunstler gives voice and lends certainty that we are not crazy. We are truly in the throws of a long emergency as we go from crisis to crisis. He highlights several lives who have chosen alternative lifestyles in response to this growing reality as a way of providing some possible solutions to redirect personal lives towards more simple living. I myself have been on this journey and found the book reassuring. (I own and operate a sheep farm.) I do like how he laid out the book in digestible sections without meandering. I feel that this book provides interesting insight. I do not agree with it all, but arguments are compelling. At least it will make you pay more attention to what is going on. Side Note...I too grew up in the Washington DC suburb of Dale City in a military family as one of the documented individuals. Found that interesting.