James Kunstler Intro

Welcome to the Marlboro College Graduate Center.

I’m Ralph Meima, director of the Marlboro College Graduate Center’s new MBA program.

We recently launched an MBA program here for managers and entrepreneurs who want to ‘manage for sustainability’. As we plunge ahead with our plan, we’re figuring out what this means – for businesses, society, communities, justice, the environment, energy, food, water, and more. A basic assumption underlying our efforts is this: whatever sustainability is or does or becomes, it isn’t what most management has achieved, with exhausted resources, damaged habitats, climate change, degraded human environments, skewed power and wealth, and other ‘regrettable externalities’ as the result.

Here, in our little corner of Brattleboro, Vermont, we’re trying to address this.

Many of us struggling with how to bring enterprise into alignment with sustainability have read books and articles by James Howard Kunstler, and been strongly influenced.

Two of my favorites are: The Long Emergency (2005), and, quite recently, his lovely, plain-spoken, heart-wrenching novel, World Made By Hand. ________ is going to talk about these. Both tackle the question of our extreme fossil-fuel dependency, and how things may change as this dependency becomes unaffordable…

… [I say this the day after the price of a barrel of crude oil topped $139 on the NYMEX, and as I adjust to the realization that a single tank-full of No.2 heating oil may well cost $1500 this coming winter…]

Yesterday, I did a Google search for “James Howard Kunstler” and got 200,000 hits. This reflects the length and depth of his background as a writer and commentator. Before he became a key figure in the increasingly vigorous Peak Oil debate, he was well-known for his critique of our peculiarly American pursuit of suburban sprawl and high-energy, automobile dependent living.

His observations and ideas can be found with titles like:
The Geography of Nowhere
Home from Nowhere
The City in Mind

James Kunstler is known for his colorful, biting, blunt and almost Twainian wit. The Web is full of quotes attributed to him.

Some quotes I liked were:

What's bad about sprawl is not its uniformity, but that it is so uniformly bad.

or

It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots. It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution warehouses. It matters that the best hotel in town looks like a minimum security prison. To live and work and walk among such surroundings is a form of spiritual degradation. It's hard to feel good about yourself when so much of what you see on a typical day is so unrelentingly drab.

Or a final one that brings us right here….

..there's a reason that Elm Street and Main Street resonate in our cultural memory. It's not because we're sentimental saps. It's because this pattern of human ecology produced places that worked wonderfully well, and which people deeply loved.

= = =

Here, in the center of this old 19th-century Vermont milltown, a few blocks from our own Main Street and Elm Street, and Flat, and Bridge, and Canal Streets…

beside our railroad track,
overlooking our river,
surrounded by our blossoming Farmer’s Market and CSA’s and Food Co-op and cheese factory and fair trade and organic food product companies,
and sawmills and drying kilns and precision maching companies,
and forests and sugarbushes and pastures,
and local breweries,
and arts and dance and music,
and heifers!

… we’ve invited James Howard Kunstler to share his thoughts with us because they resonnate with many of our biggest questions these days….

Er… here’s a final anecdote to emphasize how very curious folks here are about what you have to say:

Sme time ago, I mentioned to a few people in town that we were thinking about inviting Mr. Kunstler to speak. Among the expressions of interest there were a number of influential burghers who reacted with comments like, “Well, he’s rather harsh,” and “What a sarcastic son-of-a-gun” and “Um, he’s a bit of a curmudgeon, you sure you want to do that?”

And I said, “So, you’ll be coming, then…”

And they said, “Well, yes.”

Please welcome James Howard Kunstler!