Look who I found while doing something else

Over at Daily Kos, I've been engaging on a long-term project to "highlight the research stories from the public universities in each of the states having elections and caucuses during the week (or in the upcoming weeks if there is no primary or caucus that week)."* Among the states having elections and caucuses coming up are ten states participating in Super Tuesday, and I included stories from eight on them in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Massive March Storms edition). One of those states is Vermont. It just so happens that I ran across a familiar name while searching through the University of Vermont's press releases.

University of Vermont: Kunstler Headlines 'Vermont's Energy Future' Lecture Series
By University Communications
February 23, 2012

James Howard Kunstler has no love for flashy, contemporary architecture. "These redundant monumental gestures are the last gasps of the cheap energy fiesta," he writes on his "Eyesore of the Month" page of his website, which regularly skewers images of skyscrapers, poor urban planning and futuristic buildings. "The closer we get to the end, the more soulless they get."

Kunstler is author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, and The Long Emergency, among other books, which critique and offer solutions to America's "tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside," symbols of disregard, he says, for an impending energy crisis.

In the keynote address of a spring semester lecture series on "Vermont's Energy Future," co-sponsored by the Center for Research on Vermont and the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, Kunstler will speak on "The End of Cheap Energy," Wednesday, March 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Davis Center's Silver Maple Ballroom.

In this lecture, Kunstler will lay out a vision of a world dependent on cheap energy and approaching a devastating turning point that will return the nation to a place where community matters, where neighbors gather and people build places they value.

I filed the above under "Energy" but I could just as easily have filed it under "Science, Space, Environment, Health, and Energy Policy," "Science Writing and Reporting," or "Non-Science Research." In any event, it's a small world!

*I have a bunch of stories from Michigan among all the rest of the sustainability news from all the other primary and caucus states so far. I've been saving them for a slow day. The problem is that slow days in the politics of sustainability have been rare lately. I'll see about getting around to posting them soon.