KunstlerCast - Conversations: Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century

Richard Fossey is the author of Student Loan Catastrophe: Postcards from the Rubble , published in September, 2017. He's the Paul Burdin Endowed Professor of Education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He received his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and his doctorate in education policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research concentrates on the student l...

     Neil Howe is a renowned author and speaker on economic, demographic, and social change in America. He is the nation's leading authority on social generations—who they are, what motivates them, and how they will shape America's future. Howe is the originator of the term "Millennial Generation" and has written over a dozen books on generations and generational research, a field of research he si...

 Richard Heinberg published his excellent and influential book, The Party's Over , the same year as The Long Emergency and we met many times since then on the conference circuit. Richard is Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute. He's the author of 13 award-winning books, including six on the subject of fossil fuel depletion. He has written for Nature , The Wall Street Journal , Reuters , and...

John Michael Greer is a widely read author and blogger whose work focuses on the overlaps between ecology, spirituality, and the future of industrial society. He published the Archdruid Report blog for many years, focusing on many themes that overlapped my own in The Long Emergency and Too Much Magic . He has moved on to a new blog, Ecosophia , which explores spiritual and intellectual repercussio...

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior adviser to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and serves as the executive director of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, an...

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and senior adviser to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and serves as the executive director of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, an...

 In this bonus episode, James Howard Kunstler reunites with former KunstlerCast host/producer Duncan Crary for a behind-the-scenes discussion of JHK's personal connection to the wildly popular S-Town podcast, a This American Life spinoff program. Back around 2010-2013, John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series began an email correspondence with JHK. John B was a real person,...

Our pal and frequent guest, Dave Collum, suggested we have a chat with his pal Tony Greer, an independent global market analyst with 25 years of trading experience in and around Wall Street. He graduated from Cornell University in 1990 and spent the first ten years of his career trading currencies, commodities, and precious metals at UBS and Goldman Sachs.  In February of 2000, he left Goldman Sac...

I'll be chatting with Rocky Rawlins who is the man behind The SurvivorLibrary.com , a phenomenal website that contains scans in pdf-file form of hundreds of books on basic technology and the skills for applying them, mostly dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. It's hard to overstate the scope of this vast trove of practical knowledge — everything from bee-keeping to wagon and coach-bu...

[embed]http://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_289.mp3[/embed]   Today I'm yakking with return guest David Collum, the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University, who has become a popular presence on the internet commenting on the financial system and the related predicaments of our time. He's also been involved in the campus culture wars and is not too shy to talk ab...

This episode's featured interview is with transportation expert and urbanist Taras Grescoe, author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile. Taras writes: "In the 20th century, our greatest cities were almost ruined by the automobile. Only a global revolution in transportation can bring them back from the brink." He consults on these matters and reports from cities aroun...

    It's a pleasure to welcome back Piero San Giorgio who came on the podcast some time ago to talk about his previous excellent book Survive the Economic Collapse, a Practical Guide.       Today I'm catching up with Piero on Skype at his home in Switzerland to talk about his new book, Women on the Verge of A Societal Breakdown — Preserving Hard-won Victories During an Age of Uncertainty . The boo...

It's a pleasure to welcome back Jasun Horsley, who presides over the blog Auticulture and The Liminalist podcast . Jasun is a UK ex-pat now living in rural British Columbia, Canada. He describes himself as a "high-functioning Aspergian" and his work often takes readers and listeners to the further outposts of culture where neuroscience and the occult shake hands with politics and show biz. Jasun i...

Today I'm chewing the gristle of finance with Byron King. Byron is a geologist who currently writes a newsletter, in association with economist Jim Rickards, entitled Rickards Gold Speculator with Byron King.  It's published by Agora Financial, of Baltimore, www.agorafinancial.com.  Over the course of his career, Byron worked in the oil industry, and has had extensive experience with other natural...

Today I'm yakking with Kate Wagner, the antic voice behind the marvelous website Welcome to MacMansion Hell , a humorous and opinionated blog that aims to educate the general public about architecture, design, and urbanism by making examples of America's most despised architectural style. She is currently a master's student in Acoustics as part of a joint venture program between Johns Hopkins Univ...

283  Today I'm chatting with David Collum of Cornell University. Dave is Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Chair of Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. He's better known in the blogosphere as a witty and dauntless forecaster of finance and politics, and it's always good to check in with him during times of turmoil The Jonathan Haidt lecture at Duke, Oct, 201...

Dmitry Orlov is back to talk about his new book, "Shrinking the Technosphere," which can be ordered at his website: cluborlov.com . Dmitry is the author previously of "Reinventing Collapse," "Communities That Abide." "The Five Stages of Collapse," and several books of essays. The video trailer for his new book can be viewed by clicking THIS . Dmitry is a leading voice in the effort to think clearl...

Independent researcher Steve St. Angelo started to invest in precious metals in 2002.  Later on in 2008, he began researching areas of the gold and silver market that, curiously, the majority of the precious metal analyst community have left unexplored. These areas include how energy and the falling EROI – Energy Returned On Invested – stand to impact the mining industry, precious metals, paper as...

Dmitry Orlov, the author of "Reinventing Collapse" and many other books, has become a publisher lately and, in his capacity as publisher and publicist, Dmitry and I will be chatting about the new book he just brought out, 150 Strong; A Pathway to a Different Future by Rob O'Grady. 150 Strong is a valuable handbook for understanding the proper scale to successfully manage human affairs in the polit...

Kirk Bostrom is the Managing Partner and Chief Portfolio Manager of Strategic Preservation Partners LP, located in Silicon Valley. Kirk began his career as a teenage "runner" on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade and has spent over 30 years in the securities investment realm. He was named repeatedly as one of the top-performing investment advisors in the nation as a member of the Chairman's C...

#278 Alice J. Friedemann is the author of "When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the future of transportation."  She is also the creator of the excellent website: http://energyskeptic.com/. Ms. Friedemann is perhaps best known for "Peak Soil," edited by David Pimentel at Cornell, Tad Patzek at U.C. Berkeley, and Walter Youngquist (author of "Geodestinies"). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area....

Steve Ludlum is a native mid-westerner who has spent most of his 65 years on the East Coast. Steve is a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer who has also been at various times an amateur naturalist, artist, designer and writer. He currently studies economic issues, resource- and energy depletion, monetary policy and the cause-and-effect relationship with American-style culture. His excellent and or...

“Christopher Cornelius” is the nom de guerre of a black American international humanitarian aid worker who has put years of service in some of the world’s most dangerous places: Pakistan, Afghanistan, West Africa, Kenya, the Balkens, Cambodia, Sudan,and others. We have that “conversation about race” that the US race commentary pundits have been promising for years — but never actually ventured to...

#275 Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 37 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector. Berman has published more than 100 articles on oil and gas plays and trends. He has been interviewed about oil and gas topics on CBS, CNBC, CNN, CBC, Platt’s Energy Week, B...

Bill Kauffman is a founder and contributor to the Front Porch Republic website. He’s also the author of Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette ; Ain’t My America ; and the recent collection of essays, Poetry night at the Ballpark . He also wrote the screenplay for the 2013 motion picture Copperhead , about community strife on the home front during the Civil War. He’s a supporter and defender of the A...