Dallas Hansen on Kunstler Lecture
Saturday's paper featured an editorial by Dallas Hansen called "Big Box Culture Doomed to Fail":
Author James Howard Kunstler was in town Wednesday to give a talk promoting his new book, The Long Emergency. For those of you who have never read him, Kunstler believes we are now at the peak of the oil supply curve and that the subsequent and imminent drop in oil production will force us to change how we live. Soon, he predicts, automobile-dependent, suburban big-box culture will be economically unfeasible for most, forcing a return to cities and towns built upon traditional, pre-modernist planning principles. When you look, he says, at the history of human civilization as a whole, the era of freeways and strip malls, giant parking lots and tract housing subdivisions will be seen as a 60-year anomaly.