What he hates most of all is our dependence on cars. And “It was an artificial way of life in an inorganic community that pretended above all other virtues to be natural” (920).

Rather, it was strictly a place of habitation and pleasure”(700). And that “The people who lived there would not draw their livelihoods from it, either from farming or business. Kunstler argues “America reinvented (Eden)… called it Suburbia, and put it up for sale” (600). It reminded me of this thoughtful post about how cultivating our anti-consumerist image just enhances our materialism. How can loving the idea of “the country” ruin the the country? This was something I had truly never thought of. I was feeling quite smug while reading most it, thinking yes, I hate the suburbs, I live in the country, until I got to that last part. Also he blames the ideal of “country living”, which made people flee the cities for the country, which they then ruined by turning it into the suburbs. There is a lot about the American emphasis on freedom and individual, which led people to neglect public spaces in favor of their own homes. He also blames modernist architecture, which is indeed awful. I have read some of his other books such as “The Long Emergency” where he talks about peak oil and global warming, but this one is more about our public spaces and how they have been ruined by cars and suburban sprawl. Not politically and spiritually, just visually….ugly. In his 1993 book “The Geography of Nowhere”, James Howard Kunstler explores how America became so ugly.

The geography of nowhere