In Too Much Magic, the followup to his 2005 The Long Emergency (and a pair of post-apocalyptic novels), James Howard Kunstler takes Americans to task for "ongoing fantasies about a technological rescue from the very predicaments already spawned by the misuse of technology." He methodically skewers what he asserts is the misguided thinking of people like Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) who reassure us we can craft benign, inexpensive fixes that will permit us to continue to live in the way we do today.
One of Kunstler's chief villains is suburban sprawl, built on cheap gasoline and (in the case of the Sun Belt) cheap air conditioning. When those common features of modern life disappear, he predicts, whole swaths of the country will revert to a pastoral past.
Kunstler also colorfully expresses his lack of confidence in the nation's political and business leadership. He's equally critical of Democratic policies ("a complete merging of corporate rapine with government assistance") and Republican ideology's "persistent ethnocentrism, xenophobia, institutionalized ignorance, paranoia and parochialism."
Kunstler doesn't paint a clear picture of how we might face the looming deprivations beyond inevitable conflict over dwindling resources and the struggle to develop small-scale, locally oriented ways of coping with our diminished circumstances. Unlike many futurists, however, he doesn't lodge his predictions in some far-off time. According to Too Much Magic, we're already in the midst of the collapse he confidently predicts, and if it plays out as quickly and dramatically as he describes, it will not be pleasant. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer