James Howard Kunstler (born 1948) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere (1994), a history of American suburbia and urban development, and the more recent The Long Emergency (2005), where he argues that declining oil production is likely to
result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force
Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian (or
semi-agrarian) communities. He has written a science fiction novel conjecturing such a culture in the future, World Made by Hand in 2008. He also gives lectures on topics related to suburbia, urban
development, and the challenges of what he calls "the global oil
predicament" and a resultant change in the "American Way of Life." He is also a leading proponent of the movement known as "New Urbanism."
