Muslims know, or should know, about the interrelated-ness of existence. People with a modicum of intelligence, while not making an obvious display of religious inspiration, often pointedly describe knots in our existential realities. Muslim activists who interact with non-Muslims on the basis of common ground can often shift the level of the discourse by reference to appropriate aspects of the Qur'anic worldview. For example, by the free choice to live within the boundaries outlined by a sacred law such as the islamic shari'ah one not only tempers tendencies towards an uprooted and fragmented way of doing things but, even more so, one is practically 'driven' to maintain social harmony and equity among the various shareholders on Planet Earth.

An Interview with James Howard Kunstler by William Upski Wimsatt

Adbusters No.29 Spring 2000. (www.adbusters.org)

 In The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler observes that the building of suburbia as a replacement for towns and cities was a self-destructive act, "The living arrangement Americans now think of as normal is bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. The physical setting itself - the cartoon landscape of car-clogged highways, strip malls, tract houses, franchise fry pits, parking lots, junked cities, and ravaged countryside - is not merely a symptom of our troubled culture but in many ways a primary cause of our troubles."

Wimsatt:  How did you get from fishing, painting, riding motorcycles and working for Rolling Stone into the technicalities of urban planning? How did you even start to become aware of what was going on?

Kunstler:  I guess it started when I was teenager. My parents were divorced. My Mom lived in Manhattan and my Dad lived on Long Island. This was in the '60s and you could see the juggernaut of suburban sprawl gobble up Long Island - this beautiful corner of the US. During my childhood it completely disappeared. Then when I went to college upstate, I saw the juggernaut was starting to reach into the provinces with strip malls and sub-divisions. After that, I was a newspaper reporter in Albany and the newspaper office was located in this enormous mall that was killing downtown Albany and Schenectady and the activity in those cities. That was in 1973, the year of the Arab oil embargo. I was dependent on my car as a reporter and it made quite an impression on me.

Kunstler:  I began to realize that there was a whole body of knowledge called civic design that was making a reconnection with a whole body of historical knowledge that has been thrown away in the 20th century about the way to assemble a human habitat that was politically equitable, socially and spiritually satisfying, and equal to our aspirations as humans. They rejected a culture of quantification for a culture of quality and character.

Wimsatt:  Who were the main people?

Kunstler:  The most influential were Andres Duany and Elizabeth Platter-Zyberk. The circle began to coagulate into an organization: the Congress for the New Urbanism. They began to develop a comprehensive, coherent point of view about what was going on in the country and what needed to be done about it. This group of people enabled me to find a gateway into understanding a bunch of rather complicated issues. Issues that are still baffling and bewildering to most ordinary Americans.

Wimsatt:  Like what?

Kunstler:  A great deal of stuff in our everyday world is the way it is because it has been designed by bean counters...traffic engineers, people who are very narrow, empirically driven. A traffic engineer operates from the standpoint of making cars happy. The New Urbanists decided that wasn't good enough. We needed a better set of standards. One thing they asserted was that it was better to put the place we call home near the place we call work and the place we call shopping and the place we call entertainment like in a small town - and that the whole regime of mandatory commuting was insane.

Wimsatt:  What has been the response among urban planners?

Kunstler:  Predictably, a certain number have gotten excited about the prospect of doing things better. A certain number are the classic old guard that refuse to let go of a dying worldview. And there are people in the middle who are susceptible to having their minds changed. Even the traffic engineers and developers have to live in the same shitty environment as everyone else. Many had no idea there was something better but many of them realize the current way is a costly and toxic program. There are very few people in the United States who don't realize auto use is out of hand to some extent. Even the people who love suburbia complain about traffic. They just think we need to build more highways and parking lots.

Kunstler:  We've had only one way of evaluating the cost of cars to society and that is to quantify air pollution. We count up the number of carbon particles per cubic foot and that becomes our sole measure of the harm caused by cars. Unfortunately, there are many repercussions that are extremely difficult to quantify. How do you quantify the social damage to a child who has to be chauffeured around for her entire childhood, who never learns to navigate her everyday world by herself? A 14-year-old girl who has never had to get home from the library by herself. The damage to millions of children over the last 40 years, in essence to their personal sovereignty.

Wimsatt:  How are you saying this damage is manifest later in life?

Kunstler:  One of the clearest ways is the decay of the common good. The idea of extreme individualism. The idea that the only thing that matters is your personal interest. You don't have responsibility to the public interest. We live in a childish way with no regard for future generations, which means we disrespect the present - not to mention the past. This shows up in some interesting ways. One is manifest in local political debates. People who call themselves conservatives are opposed to building small towns in the American tradition. I was giving a slide show in a small town in Northern Michigan. The 70-year-old county commissioner stood up and said people had the God-given right to live on two acres as the zoning specified in the town. I said that there was another, older model in their own town and that their best residential street in town was actually an example of it. This guy said to me: "Some people don't want to live in a goshdarn commune." I said: "If you think the best street in your town is a commune, you're a disgrace to conservative ideology. You don't even recognize your own best traditions." I told him he was a dangerous radical.

Wimsatt:  What about other reactions?

Kunstler:  Now that I've been on the circuit for a while, the old guard is starting to attack me. Alex Gavin, an old academic fossil from Yale, gave me a bad review in the New York Times. He said something like [whiny voice]: "Mr. Kunstler thinks we have a problem with cars in America. A lot of Americans would disagree with that." That's like saying: "Mr. Kunstler thinks we have a problem with heroin in America. A lot of heroin addicts would disagree with that."

Kunstler:  I tell people we have become a civilization of clowns. Some people are offended by that, but just as many people realize that it might be true. As a civilization, we're no more special in the eyes of God than the Romans or the Spanish in the 15th Century or the British in the 18th Century or the Aztecs or any other once-great civilization. This idea that Americans in the 20th century are the apex of human development is very childish. We're a childish and wicked people who deserve to be punished.

Wimsatt:  And how do you picture that happening?

Kunstler:  By losing some of the goodies we believe we are entitled to. Like the right to eat a fatty diet with no consequences, the idea that we have no responsibility to our fellow man. That represents behavior we will pay a price for. We will pay a price for our excessive love of cars with global warming. We're already paying a price for suburbia in the loss of community and civic life. Unfortunately there hasn't yet been an economic or political crisis that has forced us to re-examine the way of life we've chosen but I believe there will be one with the next 25 years.

Wimsatt:  What's your basis for saying this?

Kunstler:  Economist Lester Thurow's new book says a lot of the same things. The growing disparity between the rich and the poor is going to severely challenge our democratic institutions because people will lose faith in them and their ability to mitigate the economic distortions of a free-for-all market economy. We've already entered a period of cultural meltdown. I think that's reflected in the sadism and brutality of our pop culture. But I do foresee the possibility of a cultural transformation. Sooner or later we are going to enter a more culturally rigorous phase of history in which our standards and expectations will be raised in everything from art to personal behavior. There are cycles of order and disorder in human events and sooner or later our age of disorder will come to an end and a new consensus will form out of the accelerating chaos of the present day.

- Excerpted from No More Prisons (Subway and Elevated/Soft Skull Press) by William Upski Wimsatt.