I know people are supposed to find Kunstler to be a kick in the groin, but I find much of his writing strangely hopeful—probably because I’m living a life that is not dependent on oil.

Kunstler is, in general, a bigot against Southerner’s, so it is a grin to me that the real hero of his book, the person who causes all good things to happen, is the brash and pushy Southern religious kook. He cleans the pre-story story with a couple of big bombs and a couple of big epidemics to rather neatly cut the population. But his story neatly incorporates many different perspectives on the new world without machines, and how those different perspectives deal with it. Surprisingly to most people, most of them do figure out how to deal with it.

It also becomes clear what all we’ve lost to industrialization. And I think how we don’t just know instinctively how to get that back. But how humans do drift back to it.

I think people better start imagining what a world without machines might look like for them. And how they’d feed themselves in such a world.