James Howard Kunstler — American Author born on October 19, 1948,

James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger. He is best known for his books The Geography of Nowhere, a history of American suburbia and urban development, The Long Emergency and most recently, Too Much Magic. In The Long Emergency, he argues that declining oil production is likely to result in the end of industrialized society as we know it and force Americans to live in smaller-scale, localized, agrarian communities. Starting with World Made by Hand in 2008, Kunstler has written a series of science fiction novels conjecturing such a culture in the future... (wikipedia)

I do all I can to maintain good health. I eat mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say. I get a lot of exercise. I lead a purposeful daily life. I stay current with the dentist. I made the formative decision of where to live over thirty years ago when I settled in a 'main street' small town in upstate New York.
History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.
Neurologically, people have a need to feel oriented, to know where they are, not just in terms of a compass and not just in terms of geography, but in terms of their culture and history. To be informed about where they're coming from and to have some glimpse towards a hopeful future.
Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information.
Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth - on the quality and the character of it - and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland.