The social & economic reshaping to come, according to James Howard Kunstler

Great interview in the Oct. issue of The Sun Magazine with author James Howard Kunstler (his blog: Clusterfuck Nation). Kunstler believes the economic collapse didn’t have a mortgage crisis at its gelatinous core, but rather it was petroleum based. As in an unsustainable way of economic life. Oh, and stop trying to go back to that way of life, he says. An excerpt follows. Partial interview in The Sun here (for the full monty, you’ll have to spring $4.95 for copy — or crouch over it at your favorite book store.)

-Christy

The peak-oil problem means that we can no longer expect to run an economy based on never-ending growth, which means ultimately that we can’t service our debts at any level — personal, corporate, governmental. We’re comprehensively broke. …

The commercial-real-estate sector, which accessorizes the suburban-development pattern by providing strip malls and big-box stores near suburban neighborhoods, is now imploding, as well. Unfortunately in the last several decades we’ve gotten rid of our manufacturing economy and replaced it, not with a postindustrial economy or an information economy or any of these other bullshit economies we think we created, but with a suburban-sprawl-building economy. We built more suburban tract houses, more strip malls, more highways, and more chain stores. That system has now entered a state of terminal decline.