James Howard Kunstler on the Colbert Report Promoting a Vision of Post Peak Oil America.

James Howard Kunstler’s books include The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (a book featured here on our reading list).

Kunstler paints a hard picture of the sustainability of our current supply chains, consumption patterns, food systems, and suburban landscape. In Kunstler’s view modern civilization as we know it is in for hard times as the choices we have made bear consequence in the coming century.

That’s not to say Kunstler can’t get down in the trenches and yuk it up with Steven Colbert while promoting his new book, World Made by Hand: A Novel.  This is Kunstler’s 10th novel and revolves around the ideas he posits in his non-fiction work of a world unraveled and on the downslope of Peak Oil – Especially in The Long Emergency.

All pretty sobering, but, of course, when watching Steven Colbert we’re not supposed to look too hard. It’s okay – if not essential – to laugh…

Here’s a more substantive discussion of Kunstler’s ideas in this presentation at a TED conference in Monterey, California.