"Why Poughkeepsie is a great place to wait for the end of the world"

Why Poughkeepsie is a great place to wait for the end of the world | Grist

Kunstler -- clearly an incurable contrarian -- likes Poughkeepsie. He lives in the Hudson Valley himself, in a far cuter but similarly sized town, and he predicts that such neither-village-nor-city places will one day be just right. "We'll see people moving to places that are scaled appropriately to our energy diet," he said -- towns small enough to walk across, but big enough to pool their resources for, say, a hydropower plant. And with good farmland on one side and a great big river on the other, Poughkeepsie is ideally placed for local food production and carbon-free transportation. "Towns like Poughkeepsie are at their nadir now," he conceded, "but they have a lot of virtues that are going to become apparent in the years ahead."

I don't necessarily buy Kunstler's vision of the future, but years of covering climate change have given me the chance to contemplate a lot of grim scenarios.