Author James Howard Kunstler may be best known for The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, a harrowing look at our possible post-oil future. In Kunstler’s estimation, nearly all of the advancements of the twentieth century and onward have depended directly, or indirectly, on access to cheap, plentiful oil. Once such oil reserves run dry, or become too expensive to process, many of the things necessary for the continuation of modern life as we know it will disappear: convenient transportation, modern medicine and the easy fruits of factory farming to name a few.
While Kunstler’s predictions may be controversial, his skill as a novelist is without question. Readers wondering what daily life in the world of The Long Emergency might look like received an answer with the 2009 publication of the novel World Made By Hand. The first entry in a projected four book series, World Made by Hand carried readers to the town of Union Grove, New York, a small township whose citizens struggled to survive the hardships of a post-oil future, largely by re-learning the skills of the pioneer past. In contrast to much of the post-apocalyptic or dystopic literature of the last few decades, Kunstler’s book focused as much on the things we might gain as it did the things we might lose through the death of modernity. Readers, myself included, found themselves envious of the sense of community and connection with the natural world enjoyed by the people of Union Grove, even as we were thankful not to endure their commensurate hardships.
The Witch of Hebron, the second volume in the World Made by Hand series, will be released next week. While The Witch of Hebron takes place in Union Grove, and involves many of the same characters from World Made by Hand, it is better described as a companion volume rather than a direct sequel, as it can be easily read and enjoyed on its own merits. Kunstler has planned for each book to represent a season in Union Grove, and as the first volume took place in the summer, the events of The Witch of Hebron take place in autumn, around Halloween.
As Halloween draws near for the residents of Union Grove, a crime committed by Jasper Copeland, the eleven year-old son of the town’s doctor, sets off a chain of events that leave the town in turmoil and tensions rising between the residents and the nearby New Faith church, regarded by many as a sinister cult. When Jasper takes to the open road to flee justice, he crosses paths with Billy Bones, a bandit whose superficial charm and eccentricities only thinly mask his sociopathic tendencies. Again, Kunstler succeeds in transporting readers to a smaller world of quiet pleasures, grueling hardship and rough justice, one that they will hold in equal parts pity and envy.
I recently spoke with Kunstler about The Witch of Hebron and his predictions about the future of our society. Special thanks to readers of Reddit’s “Collapse” forum for contributing some of the questions in this interview.
I’ve noticed that a degree of supernaturalism has been slowly making its ways into your World Made by Hand novels. While elements like clairvoyance were present in World Made by Hand, they play a larger role in The Witch of Hebron. Was the decision to bring these to the forefront made in light of The Witch of Hebron taking place around Halloween, or will the people of Union Grove continue to find their world becoming a more magical place? I ask because I recall one character remarking to another that their old world is being replaced by “something else.”
There is explicitly a battle of worldviews going on between the “regular” people of Union Grove and the New Faith cult that has arrived from outside and settled in. The regular townfolk are left with the bitter residue of the Enlightenment and all its baggage — science, empiricism,etc, which has failed them! The New Faithers have a worldview that is more… medieval, shall we say, which admits elements of the supernatural and the re-enchantment of the world. Understand, the basic reality of the world is not at issue per se, but the way it is perceived by the members of each group. As for specific “powers,” it should be clear that the “Queen Bee” — Mary Beth Ivanhoe — is an epileptic clairvoyant (as a result of injuries sustained in a car crash years earlier) and that Brother Jobe is a hypnotist (a motif in American lit that, by the way, goes back to the 1790s and Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland, or the Transformation).
I understand that you intend on writing a couple of other books in the World Made by Hand series, and each will represent a season. While this definitely excites me – I’m already wanting to read more – I can’t help but to feel that the world you’ve described has more than a few stories left to tell…at least more than two. Could you see maybe expanding this beyond Union Grove? I’d also love to see a prequel novel recounting the last days of the old world.
Yes, I intended from the start to complete a four-season “cycle” of this tale. Winter is next, starting with Christmas and the return, from years of wandering America, of Robert Earle’s lost son Daniel…. His tale within the tale will expand the horizon of the story beyond Washington County New York.
Much of the action in The Witch of Hebron is centered on an eleven year-old boy, Jasper Copeland, and the misadventures that befall him in his flight from Union Grove after committing a crime. Why did you choose to make him eleven? I heard you say that this was a special time in a boy’s life – a difficult time, I think – in a recent interview. Could you elaborate on this?
To me, eleven years old is a critical point in a person’s development, the age at which elements of adult personae really emerge — a sense of morality that goes beyond mere rational thinking, a blossoming sense of empathy, and of course the very first stirrings of pubescent sexual awakening. The major question in the novel is whether Jasper has been permanently wrenched out of his childhood, or will it be redeemed for him.
While on the road, Jasper soon makes the acquaintance of a very dangerous man: Billy Bones. He was such a well-defined character to me – an archetypal highywayman of the sort that we haven’t seen in many, many years. Were there some historical or mythical characters that you based him on? It seemed like you took characters like Robin Hood and Billy the Kid and showed what they might be like were we to see them free of their glamour.
Billy Bones constructed himself emergently as I wrote, a true original who birthed himself on the page. I’ve actually never encountered anyone quite like him, He is absolutely a creature of his time and place, a charming psychopath.
Speaking of influences, I was wondering if you might could tell us about some of your own favorite authors. Who has influenced your fiction the most?
The writers who influenced most are Washington Irving, for his scene-setting grace, the now somewhat forgotten (though still-living) Thomas McGuane, who I first encountered in college, and whose compositional gifts astounded me, and (perhaps oddly) Samuel Beckett, in whose work I was absolutely immersed as a college theater student, and who probably had the greatest influence on the way I compose dialogue
Reading your novels, I find myself in some ways envious of the sense of community enjoyed by the residents of Union Grove, yet I remain aware of – and wary of – the incredible loss of life that our world would experience following a collapse of our oil-based infrastructure. On the whole, would you imagine that we’d gain or lose more in such a world?
It’s part of the tension of the story that we are constantly having to measure what’s been gained against what’s been lost. The losses are perhaps more obvious: comfort, certainty, and the whole prosthetic nimbus of technology that we are so used to. The gains are perhaps more subtle: making your own music, enjoying the sounds, scents, and sensations of nature much more directly, the blessed absence of cars and other motor-driven annoyances, unmediated relations with family, friends, and community members, a reconnection with the elemental ceremonies of birth, death, the harvest, the coming of spring, etc.
The Witch of Hebron ends with some speculation as to how Billy Bones would be remembered and later mythologized by the people of the region. I’d like to ask how you think that the people of our age – the pre-Long Emergency world – might be remembered. What fables and myths do you imagine might arise about us?
Ha! I’m convinced that the further we move away from this exuberant age (now dissolving) the more magical it will seem. Within as few as a hundred years, so much may be lost or forgotten that we will marvel at the ruins of “modernity” — the crumbling freeway ramps and soaring condo towers, etc — and wonder how human beings were able to make these things. I believe that to some extent people of today will be vilified, too, as having caused so much destruction. Perhaps a few more centuries on, the people of our times will seem like a race of giants. There will surely be no end of stories spun about them verging into mythology — probably very few stories derived from the ephemeral literature and cinema of today, most of which will probably be lost forever.
Both World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron take place in the world of the Long Emergency, which you’ve written about in the non-fiction title of the same name. Could you very briefly explain what the Long Emergency is for our readers?
The Long Emergency is the culminating crisis of modernity, growing out of the limits to growth, resource scarcity, and the collapse of the complex systems that keep us going — everything ranging from industrialized farming to oil-based transportation to electronic communication. It can also be described as the crisis of over-investments in complexity — resolving in a traumatic wave of sudden de-complexifying.
Authors like Norman Cohn have observed that popular belief in the end of all things – or the end of the world as we currently know it – tend to be cyclical, and certainly we’ve seen our share of dire predictions that have failed to come to pass. What makes you think that the Long Emergency is imminent? What about alternative fuels like hydrogen?
Well everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s the fundamental condition of things and the source of the tragic sense of life. Even the most primitive homo sapiens were able to mark the cyclical nature of things, too, and perhaps our beginnings-middles-and-ends take the form of a spiral. I dunno….These are just my own musings…. I don’t think this Long Emergency is the end of the human project, or necessarily of some sort of advanced civilization. I do think it will be a pronounced “time out” after a very exuberant (and destructive) period of cultural evolution that the world badly needs a rest from. As to technological rescue remedies — e.g. hydrogen — I am convinced that we will be disappointed by what they can do for us — especially since our basic wish is that we will be able to find some other way (besides fossil fuels) to run WalMart, DisneyWorld, Suburbia, and all the other trappings of contemporary life. I don’t think we will, and I think it will become apparent sooner rather than later, and when it does the public will be very upset to find out.
Peak oil, of course, is only one part of the decline and eventual collapse posited in The Long Emergency. There are financial and geo-political factors as well. Have you seen anything in the last few years that you’d describe as signs of the future you’ve predicted?
Right now I think many of us who followed the oil story for a decade or more are kind of surprised to see how quickly and how badly the financial system has been damaged. Right now there’s kind of a race on to see whether the crisis of capital or the crisis of energy resources will put us out of business. Remember, too, they are mutually reinforcing systems, so any additional problems we develop with capital and its markets will affect our ability to offset the inevitable depletions of oil and vice-versa. Quite a spectacle! Especially as the problems turn political and society starts boiling.
What steps are you taking to restructure your own life to prepare for the long emergency? Likewise, how do you counsel your closest friends and family to prepare?
I have no debt. I am renting the place I live. I collect hand tools. I have the NY State handgun permit. I have some food stored. But I’m almost 62 years old. I’ve outlived Babe Ruth, Mozart, and Abe Lincoln. The human story will not hinge on how much further I get along here.
How will traditional communities already living off the grid (like the Amish or the Mennonites) fare in a post carbon world? Will they have a role to play if the transition is difficult, as it will likely be? Would Brother Jobe and his fellows be an example of how such groups might respond to such a world?
One would have to imagine that traditionalist groups like the Amish are self-evidently better-prepared to live without a lot of modern conveniences that we “regular” folk take for granted. The question is whether they will be overwhelmed by the other desperate people who, for one reason or another, can’t make it anymore. In the fictional World made By Hand and its sequels, everybody’s living the Amish life — minus the theology or ideology — because there’s no other way of getting anything done. Brother Jobe’s New Faith outfit is distinguished by it rigorous organizational nature. The roles in that micro-society are very well defined and the duties and obligations are taken seriously. Whatever else he is or isn’t, Bro Jobe is an effective leader of men. If you read closely, though, you begin to see that the religious element is the least important part of their shtick.
You’ve written about sprawl in the past. What about our current cities and communities? High population density is an asset for walkable communities but can become a liability once petrochemical agriculture is no longer feasible. What would be the conclusion for urban planning? Would you encourage or discourage the creation of small and dense units of living? Is it really too late to worry about this kind of thing?
I depart from conventional thinking about what’s in store for our living places. Obviously the suburbs are going to get into trouble; they’ll lose value in terms of usefulness and money. But i don’t think everyone will rush to the city. Our cities will have equally severe problems because they have achieved a giantism of scale that is unsuited to the energy realities of the future. I believe our cities will contract severely. The ones composed mostly of “sprawl” — Houston, Atlanta, etc — will fail the most spectacularly, as will the few cities that are over-burdened with skyscrapers (which have no future as building forms). I think the action will shift to the smaller cities and towns, especially those with meaningful ties to productive agriculture. Quite a few places with severe liabilities — Phoenix, Tuscon, Las Vegas, perhaps LA — are basically toast. Since the reform of farming is so imperative –as industrial ag fails — I imagine a lot more people will be involved in it and will be occupying the rural landscape in ways that are currently unknown to us. We can confidently expect that food production will require more human attention in the years ahead, to say the least. “Urban planning” as we know it is a figment of modernity — at least as it is practiced today, mostly stupidly, as an admixture of statistical analysis and traffic engineering. We’re done with that. We’re done with cars, too (though we don’t know it yet). The next thing will be the fine-grained in-filling and re-building of our urban centers on a fine-grained lot-by-lot basis. Much of what we consider excellent urbanism is just common sense minus the car, and common sense will reestablish itself as we will be compelled to follow the model of the walkable community. The process of re-scaling (mainly down-sizing) our big cities around their old cores and waterfronts (if climate change does not drown them) is going to be arduous and painful. The outcome may resolve more quickly in the smaller-scaled places, especially the ones along inland waterways, which is why I favor them. Scores of small cities and good small towns are lying out there waiting to be re-populated and re-activated. I must add that I have no faith whatsoever in the fantasy (as described for instance by The New Yorker magazine writer David Owen) that we will come to live in “green” skyscraper communities. Mr. Owen is a very nice guy — I’ve had drinks with him — but I do not subscribe to this vision for a New York Moment.
Finally, I wanted to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed the Kunstlercast, and particularly your readings from your novels. Is there any possibility of seeing your fiction adapted for television or theater in the near future?
Thanks, dude! My agent, Adam Chromy, is sedulously plowing the furrows of Hollywood. We got close to a cable TV series deal last year, but were beat out by another “dystopian” story that — guess what? — featured zombies! What a dumb-sh*t culture we are.
