Nature and Society
April - May 2008 edition

Book review:
World Made by Hand
James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press, February 2008.

What does the future hold? How will my family be living 20 years from now, when the effects of climate change are an everyday reality, when oil supplies have dwindled, when antibiotics may have lost their effectiveness, and even when nuclear weapons may have been used on our cities and when pandemics may have decimated the population?

One man who has thought much about these questions is Jim Kunstler, whose The Long Emergency (2006) explained better than any other book the breadth and depth of the implications of peak oil. In this novel he switches from the societal and economic trauma of the years immediately following the oil peak to the personal and individual lives of people a decade on from that trauma. The setting is rural upstate New York in the 2020s. The US and state governments have ceased to be effective, encephalitis and flu epidemics have swept through the population and fuel oil disappeared a decade before the novel opens. Many men are infertile, possibly due to “the bomb.” Children and the very old are few. Kunstler inserts us into the minds of the main characters, so we begin to see this changed - and changing - world through the eyes of the narrator and others.

There are no consumer goods in 2025 and people make do with items traded by horse and cart or by boat. These goods are largely scavenged or leftovers from today’s consumer society. Buildings have been plundered and garbage dumps are being mined. Also missing are antibiotics and anaesthetics and the story reminds us that, whatever our view of civilization and modernity, anaesthetic dentistry is one of civilization’s unalloyed benefits. By focusing on anaesthetic dentistry, Kunstler does not need to mention hospital services or pharmaceuticals; throughout the book he uses an unexpected example of the changes people face and the reader easily fills in the blanks with what might, at first glance, have been more likely examples.

The narrator, who was once an IT salesman, has come to see the natural world in a far more engaged way than he once did: he sees not a fish, but a trout (of a particular age and as a particular dish); not a bird, but an osprey; not a stream, but ripples and flows that have meaning. As people’s engagement with nature has increased, and also been transformed, so too their moral code is adjusting to the new times: people remember the old mores but necessity and convenience are subtly forging a new pragmatic moral code. Social fundamentals are changing in 2025 – this is not a static world.

In Kunstler’s small town, the previously unnoticed unraveling of community spirit is reversed by the arrival of a migrating Christian cult who, fleeing the anarchy elsewhere, bring both security and organised rejuvenation. Other Christian evangelicals are in the background dominating the airwaves before the power failures put an end to radio transmissions and the few remaining intermittent newspapers.

It’s far from bucolic bliss in Union Grove; many cannot adjust to the new necessities and mental instability is common. But more insidiously, gangs of various sorts play a large, but not quite dominant role. Hostage and ransom rackets are a feature of city life. Vigilance, courage, trusted neighbours and the willingness of individuals to meet force with force themselves, are needed when there are no police, courts or jails and a shortage of ammunition has ruled out many firearms. Conflicts grow easily when the institutions of law and order are diminished and individuals do not feel constrained by them or by convention.

The drug trade has fallen away as imports disappear and the raw materials for methedrine are no longer manufactured. Marijuana grows prolifically in the wild and home made beer and wine is popular. Alcohol is drunk, traded, used as fuel and as an antiseptic. Opium is cultivated for its use as an anaesthetic while those inclined to addictive behaviour have been weeded out by natural selection.

Infrastructure that relies on fuel or electricity is no longer operating. Without electricity, buildings that are more than a few stories high or rely on air conditioning are vacant. Even a town’s gravity fed water supply fails when maintenance is no longer possible, cement is scarce and trade skills were lost in the pandemics. Rivers are becoming the thoroughfares as the pot-holed roads deteriorate.

Rumours mix with truth. The postal service no longer operates and news is spasmodic and unreliable so that even major national and international events become known only months after they have occurred, through a process of Chinese whispers. “Who really knows any more?” the narrator asks.

The US dollar is worth only a small fraction of its 2008 value, so gold, silver and bartering are also used for transactions; but the real change is that there are far fewer transactions anyway, so money appears to be less important in Kunstler’s 2025 than it is today. All food is local and community townsfolk produce or forage most of their own. If Kunstler is right, most of the “survivalists” today with their “stocking up” are locked into thing-centric thinking when more complex, subtle and long-term preparation is required: real physical health, having the qualities that make one welcome as a community member, the ability to take and hold a leadership role, genuine kindness under stress, craft and music-making skills, stoicism and practical knowledge of the natural world are what will serve people and communities far better in 2025 than “guns and ammo”.

In Kunstler’s world, people gather into communities which are far more cohesive than the loose, porous neighbourhoods of today. There is Union Grove, a small town struggling to be reborn as a community, there is a “trailer park” of petty criminals and there is a large farm that is becoming a feudal fiefdom under its benevolent dictator landowner. And there is the aforementioned Christian cult, out to evangelise, but also trying to be a good neighbour now that it has chosen to settle in Union Grove.

This post-peak oil world is also afflicted by climate change, but climate change is not Kunstler’s forte and it shows, not only in the way that he drops it into the plot when he remembers, but also by the limited range of manifestations of climate change that he mentions. So, as you read through World Made by Hand, you have to insert your own climate change phenomena as you go. 2025 may not be as comfortable as Jim Kunstler imagines.

Some parts of World Made by Hand are incredible (deliberately so), others relevant only to the USA; but it is a testament to Kunstler’s craft that he has given even the most thoughtful futurists new things to think about and new ways to think about them.

Of course this is a novel – one person’s imagining of the future. But a novel, to succeed, has to represent a plausible system; it cannot be a narrow reductionist analysis. And there lies its power. Since writing The Long Emergency Kunstler has been on speaking tours and written his weekly blog. He has received thousands of comments on his work and has been paying attention to these and to emerging events.

You don’t have to live in the USA or to agree with everything the author proposes to get a lot of ideas from World Made by Hand, ideas that can be used as a springboard to your own thinking about the future and your part in it.

Keith Thomas