Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation [Anglais] [Relié]

Kunstler's latest book is more like a collection of essays than a coherent book. Essentially what he is doing here is bringing his earlier book "The Long Emergency" up to date, and providing responses to his critics. If you are new to Peak Oil, this is not a great book for you. Start with The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century first when exploring Kunstler as an author. I would also suggest Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update before trying to read Kunstler.

However, Kunstler remains a fine writer. Some of the chapters are worth the price of the book by themselves. I especially liked the chapter where he takes on both the Democratic and Republican parties, pointing out how both have gone completely wrong in different ways. Chapter Seven on fracking, shale oil, and shale gas is the best treatment I have seen on this subject.

Overall, Kunstler's point is not that different from that made in Limits to Growth's 30-year update. The collapse will not come because America completely runs out of oil, or coal, or natural gas. Rather, when problems come swiftly and in multiples--like energy shortages, climate change, out-of-control banks, lack of capital, pollution, budget deficits, deteriorating roads, corrupt politics, agricultural problems--a society eventually runs out of ability to cope.

Other reviewers have mentioned the sense of frustration that pervades Kunstler's work. I don't mind this because it matches how I feel myself. The U.S. seems just as clueless today about the cause of its difficulties as it was seven years ago. My husband is an intelligent man with a college education, but he is still convinced that technology can solve any problem, including energy. I don't know what to say other than "well, give it another seven years, and see what things are like then." I think that's likely to be Kunstler's vindication, too.

For twenty years, James Kunstler has been arguing that post-WWII suburban sprawl has not only destroyed the character of American life (1994's "The Geography of Nowhere") but has tied us to a cheap oil-based economy that will ultimately lead to civilizational collapse ("The Long Emergency" in 2005). This new book updates this thesis by arguing that the 2008 economic collapse has only hastened our decline and our faith in technological fixes will not rescue us. As with all of his nonfiction books (I haven't read his novels), Kunstler writes in an angry, impassioned style that both carries you along while confronting you with unpleasant facts and inconvenient truths - such as the diminishing returns in shale oil extraction.

Although his larger argument about our increasing unsustainable mode of suburban living is frighteningly convincing, "Too Much Magic" is far less focused than his other works. He goes after a range of disparate subjects whose relevance isn't always made clear. It's nice to know that he doesn't think much of Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" but he hasn't given us a sense of how influential or widespread this book's ideas are (and I suspect not as much as he thinks), so it comes off as little more than score-settling. Similarly, Kunstler provides a cogent rundown of the financial chicanery that led to the 2008 economic meltdown but doesn't really connect this to his broader argument on diminishing fossil fuels. He asserts that the meltdown was due in part to our reaching peak oil but the connection isn't made particularly clear. You sense he's trying hard to graft on an environmental cause so that the collapse fits better within his thesis but reporters like Matt Taibbi, Michael Lewis, Nomi Prins and others have established that it was due to bad debt and market-rigging, not a decline in oil production.

Ultimately, I think "Too Much Magic" tries to do too much and doesn't do a lot of it particularly well. He laments the mediocrity and venality of our current political class, body-piercing, infantile boys who wear their jeans too low, multiculturalism, the moon landing (what was that about?) and popular culture, but these seem to be mere bursts of exasperation. Both "The Geography of Nowhere" and "The Long Emergency" were passionately informed books and at its best, in the chapters on suburbia and on alternative energies, this new work certainly adds to them. But Kunstler's evident and justifiable anger here risks making him sound like a crank. Those unfamiliar with Kunstler should start with the two earlier works; those who are familiar with his arguments will find this an interesting hodge-podge that at its best conveys where he thinks we're at now.

It is difficult to write a balanced review of a book that says almost exactly what I've been thinking for the last twenty years or so, which indeed I might have written myself if I had the background knowledge and literary skill of Kunstler. Sadly, I have never encountered his novels, but from the brief references he has made to them in this non-fiction discussion, I think I would have enjoyed them.

Kunstler is, of course, a true prophet - one who sees things as they are, states reality honestly and in unequivocal terms, and projects logically to the most probable outcomes if current trends continue. He does so in a writing style that contains just enough humor to somewhat defuse the painfulness of the truth he states so unflinchingly.

The basic premise, which is unavoidable to anyone with even a modicum of scientific understanding, is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is real, and technology does not replace energy, indeed demands ever-increasing energy input to function. The real issue is of course related directly to the ubiquity of the internal combustion engine, exacerbated by the suburbanization of our culture. Anyone who wants a clear and cogent discussion of the circumstances surrounding the fact that globally we have encountered "peak oil", and the connection between this and the current economic crisis, definitely needs to read Kunstler's book.

I have seen what the author describes clearly in my own personal life. When I was a child growing up, my parents didn't own a car; as artists, they had a minimal lifestyle, used public transportation or walked. Going to graduate school, it soon became obvious that my own family life would essentially be impossible without a vehicle, and from one we went to two - though we never quite got to the point where each of our five kids had their own car while still living in our household. Now, in retirement, we're facing the possibility that we can no longer afford two cars, yet it is obvious that there are no really viable alternatives on the horizon.

Kunstler's conversation with Google executives, described in the first chapter, is a delicious irony. Is it really possible that these ultra-intellectual computer nerds actually don't realize that you need electricity to run technology, and that electricity has to be generated? Apparently so; and though I am perfectly willing to enjoy the benefits of the Internet while it continues to exist, I am not about to throw away all my paper books in favor of e-books. It might be salutary for every American to spend a few weeks in a place like the Dominican Republic, where my husband has visited regularly in the past two decades, to see what life is really like with sporadic and unreliable electrical service.

In any event, this book is honest, perceptive, frightening and yet profoundly entertaining as well. It will be useless, of course, for humans who are determined to imitate other members of the animal kingdom like ostriches, opossums or turtles, and hide defensively from reality which may very well plow them under while they are doing so.