C-Realm Podcast 554 - History is a Prankster with James Howard Kunstler

Originally released March 24, 2020, C-Realm Podcast episode 554 features a conversation with James Howard Kunstler, recorded just as the COVID-19 pandemic was overturning ordinary life in the United States.The ostensible occasion was the publication of Kunstler’s new book, Living in the Long Emergency, his follow-up to 2005’s The Long Emergency. The book looks back at the predictions and assumptions of the Peak Oil era and profiles people Kunstler sees as adapting to a future of economic contraction and institutional instability. KMO is among the people profiled in the book.But the timing made it impossible to talk about the book in isolation. The conversation took place during the first weeks of the COVID shutdowns, when an abstract discussion about disruption, fragility, and “the long emergency” had suddenly acquired a very immediate context.The title comes from Kunstler’s observation that history is a prankster: events rarely unfold in the form we expect, even when some of the underlying stresses are real.I’m revisiting this and other older C-Realm conversations as part of Getting Over Collapse, a project in which I’m going back through the Peak Oil and collapse worldview that strongly influenced the C-Realm Podcast, reconsidering what we thought we knew, what held up, what didn’t, and how my own thinking changed.More about the project:https://c-realm.org/#goc